Jesus in the Talmud

Jesus in the Talmud 121by God or a human being, we do not know because it [his corpse] was notseen and not known in the place.” 99 Similarly, the corpse of the monk MarGiwargis is displayed for three days and three nights on the cross, guardedby many soldiers, “lest the Christians come and secretly take away his pureand holy body.” 100 This is not just an imitatio Christi but moreover an inversionof the Matthew narrative: what Matthew puts into the mouth ofthe Jews—the fear that Jesus’ disciples or someone else might steal hisbody in order to claim that he was resurrected—is now adopted by theChristians and turned positively. Yes, the martyrologies argue, the corpsesof the deceased martyrs are indeed secretly taken away, however by usChristians, in order not to fake but to facilitate resurrection (the case ofJoseph is particularly revealing because the text bluntly hints at the possibilitythat he was immediately resurrected). So, in an ironic sense, theJews finally prove to be right: even though the early Christians maintainthat they did not steal the body of Jesus because he was (allegedly) resurrected,their Sasanian brethren admittedly do have the habit of stealingthe bodies of their martyrs—to make precisely the same claim: that theyare resurrected.Since these and similar patterns appear in many of the martyrologies,101 it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Sasanian Jews must havebeen aware of them. To be sure, such patterns are—to different degrees—literary devices that belong to the genre of these particular martyrologiesand not necessarily historical facts. Clearly, not all of the martyrs died ona Friday, but the pattern of the imitatio Christi is too prominent to be simplydisregarded as fiction (let alone that nothing speaks against the possibilitythat the/some Sasanian Jews could and indeed read the Acts of theMartyrs, which after all was written in Syriac, an East Aramaic dialect veryclose to Babylonian Aramaic). And that the Christians were very eager totake away (and hide) the corpses of the martyrs to indicate their resurrectionis an element of the martyrologies that even factually makes a lot ofsense.In sum, the increasingly precarious status of the Christians in the SasanianEmpire, with the waves of persecutions breaking out under Shapur IIand continuing under some of his successors, makes it highly likely that acultural climate could develop in which the Jews felt not only free but evenencouraged to express their anti-Christian sentiments—and that they could