Jesus in the Talmud

Jesus in the Talmud 97reached them through some hidden channels; rather, as I could show indetail, it is the New Testament (almost exclusively the four Gospels) as weknow it or in a form similar to the one we have today. Hence, the rabbinicstories in most cases are a retelling of the New Testament narrative, a literaryanswer to a literary text. 3 Let us now summarize the major motifsthat appear in the rabbinic sources and that the rabbis obviously regardedas representative of the Christian sect and its founder Jesus.SexThe most prominent characteristic that dominates quite a number of therabbinic stories is sex, more precisely sexual promiscuity. Sexual promiscuityis already presented as the foundation story of the Christian sect: itshero is the son of a certain Miriam and her lover Pandera—a mamzer,born out of wedlock (because his mother was married to a certain Stadaor Pappos b. Yehuda). The legal status of the bastard is defined in theBible as such: “No bastard (mamzer) shall be admitted into the congregationof the Lord; even to the tenth generation shall he not be admittedinto the congregation of the Lord” (Deut. 23:3), a fate that he shares withthe eunuchs and the Ammonites and Moabites: he is excluded from thecongregation of Israel for the foreseeable future. 4 His adulterous motherdeserves—according to biblical and rabbinical law—the death penalty ofstoning or strangulation, as the Bible decrees for our case, the adultery betweena married woman and her lover: “If a man is found lying with anotherman’s wife, both of them shall die, the man who lay with thewoman as well as the woman; so you shall purge the evil from Israel”(Deut. 22:22). 5 Hence, under strict application of biblical law, Jesus’mother should have been stoned. The Talmud does not seem to be interestedin her subsequent fate, but her son does fall under the other provisionof the Mishna (idolatry) and will indeed be stoned. So in a highlyironical sense, Jesus’ birth from an adulterous mother points to his own violentdeath.As we have seen, this story of the adulterous mother and her bastard sonis the perfect counternarrative to the New Testament’s claim that Jesus was