Jesus in the Talmud

122 Chapter 9expect to be supported in this endeavor by the Persian government. 102Hence, it should not come as a surprise that we find the most graphicpolemic against Jesus in the Babylonian Talmud (and not in Palestiniansources). 103 There, in the Bavli, a conflict emerges that is not a conflict anymore between Jews and Jewish Christians or Christian Jews (i.e., Christianityin the making), but between Jews and Christians in the very process ofdefining themselves (i.e., the Christian Church). The polemic that theBavli shares with us is scanty and has unfortunately been tampered with byChristian censors, but it nevertheless allows us a glimpse of a very vivid andfierce conflict between two competing “religions” under the suspicious eyeof the Sasanian authorities.The New TestamentAnother striking result of our inquiry was that the rabbinic sources (again,particularly the Bavli) do not refer to some vague ideas about Jesus andChristianity but that they reveal knowledge—more often than not a preciseknowledge—of the New Testament. In other words, they respond to aliterary source, not to some vague or lost oral traditions. We cannot reconstructwhat the New Testament looked like that the rabbis had in front ofthem and we even cannot be sure, of course, that they did have access tothe New Testament at all. But still, the sometimes quite specific referencespresented in our sources make it much more feasible that they indeedhad some version of the New Testament available.What kind of New Testament might this have been? We do know thatthe “Harmony” of the four Gospels (Diatessaron) composed by Tatianin the second century C.E. became the authoritative New Testament textof the Syrian Church until it was replaced (in the fifth century) by theSyrian translation of the four separate Gospels (the New TestamentPeshitta). 104 The Diatessaron provides a continuous narrative of the NewTestament message, composed almost exclusively from the three synopticGospels and from John; its original language most likely was Syriac (andnot Greek). In presenting his continuous narrative, instead of four differentversions, Tatian could not leave the structure of the four Gospels un-