Jesus in the Talmud

114 Chapter 9Testament—his birth and his Passion. No doubt, therefore, that the gist ofthe rabbinic Jesus narrative is preserved in the Babylonian Talmud. Wecan even go a step further: it is Rav Hisda, the Babylonian amora of thethird generation (d. beginning of the fourth century C.E.), who transmitsthe traditions about both Jesus’ adulterous mother and the bad son/discipleas well as adds, in the Eliezer b. Hyrkanos story, the instruction tokeep away four cubits from the prostitute. Rav Hisda taught at the academyof Sura, and it may well be that this academy was a “center” of theBabylonian Jesus tradition (which by no means, however, was restricted toSura since the rabbis of Pumbeditha take part in the discussion about Jesus’mother and her husband/lover).By contrast, a very different picture emerges from the Palestiniansources. There, Jesus is not addressed directly; the main focus is put onthe healing powers of his disciples (most prominently the enigmatic Jacobof Kefar Sekhaniah/Sama) and hence the heretical character of the sectfounded by him. The Palestinian texts center around magic: the power inherentin magic, how it works, and the authority connected to it. On thisbackground, R. Eliezer is portrayed as someone who sets up his magicalauthority against the authority of his fellow rabbis and who accordinglyneeds to be eliminated. The charges brought against him by the Romangovernment seem to refer to orgiastic rites that are well known from paganand Christian sources.Hence, the Palestinian sources are aimed at the origin of the Christiansect, emerging out of the common ground of Judaism—they reveal thethreat that the Palestinian rabbis must have felt, their fear, but also themechanisms of their defense. As such, they reflect the “simultaneous rabbinicattraction to and repulsion from Christianity,” 67 they describe thevery beginning of the “parting of the ways”—a parting, however, thatshould take several more generations. But it needs to be emphasized thatthis “snapshot” is frozen, as it were, predominantly in Palestinian sources.There, the new sect seems to have been caught in the process of takingshape as a movement against the rabbis, the rabbinic form of Judaism,against rabbinic authority, a movement moreover that came under thesuspicion of Christian libertinage.In sum, whereas the Palestinian rabbis’ (few) statements reveal a relativecloseness to the emerging Christian sect, to its very origin and “local