Jesus in the Talmud

Jesus in the Talmud 113Jesus is punished by forever sitting in hell in the excrement of his followers,who believe that through eating his flesh and drinking his blood, theywill live forever. This presents, as we have seen, a satirical inversion of Jesus’promise to his disciples that he is the bread of life and that whoevereats his flesh and drinks his blood will earn eternal life. Already in theNew Testament the Jews expressed their disbelief in such a bizarre claim;now, in the Talmud, this disbelief materializes itself in a bizarre story unequaledin the Greco-Roman literature.Palestinian versus Babylonian SourcesLet us now have a closer look at the rabbinic sources that offer us theirview about Jesus and Christianity, more specifically, at the relationshipbetween the Palestinian and Babylonian sources. Here the distribution isquite revealing: the texts that most graphically and bluntly refer to Jesus’life and fate are preserved only in the Bavli. This applies to• Jesus the bastard, son of a whore: although Ben Stada/Satra does appearin Palestinian sources (Tosefta, Yerushalmi)—not by accident assomeone who imports sorcery from Egypt (Yerushalmi)—the identificationwith the bastard (Jesus), and accordingly the counternarrativeto the New Testament birth story, is reserved for the Bavli• Jesus the bad son/disciple, guilty of sexual promiscuity• Jesus the frivolous disciple who practices magic and becomes anidolater (the Yerushalmi parallel leaves out any reference to Jesus)• the graphic and detailed description of Jesus’ execution• Jesus’ disciples (as codes for his own destiny)• Jesus’ punishment in hellThis is an impressive list, which, most conspicuously, includes the twomajor counternarratives about the cornerstones of Jesus’ life in the New