Jesus in the Talmud

Bavli Manuscripts and Censorship 143deleted name of Jesus. A similar picture emerges from the story aboutJesus’ disciples (chapter 7): Munich has larger parts of the story erased,Vilna leaves the whole passage out, whereas Barco tries to mend the interventionof the censorship. With regard to Jesus’ punishment in hell(chapter 8), all the manuscripts have Jesus/Jesus the Nazarene (includingMunich 95), as opposed to the printed editions, which simply leave thename out (Soncino) or prefer the reading “sinners of Israel” (Vilna).(3) From this it can be concluded that the unabashed “Jesus/Jesus theNazarene” tradition is absent in the Palestinian sources and unique to theBabylonian Talmud. Instead, the Palestinian sources refer to Jesus as “Jesusson of Pandera/Jesus Pandera/son of Pandera” (and this rather infrequentlyas well as indirectly: only in the story about R. Eliezer and in the two healingstories). In the only passage in which the Bavli mentions the “son ofStada/Stara” and the “son of Pandera,” it takes up Palestinian nomenclatureand discusses it in the typical Babylonian way. In other words, themanuscript evidence supports the claim that it is the Bavli, and solely theBavli, that takes the liberty of discussing Jesus and his fate freely and unimpededby the exertion of Christian power.To be sure, however, the manuscript evidence of the Bavli does not leadus back in time any closer to the historical origin of our narratives. Theearliest available manuscript was written, as we have seen, in the secondhalf of the twelfth century. The question arises, therefore, whether the uncensoredmanuscripts reflect, not an urtext of the Bavli (any attempts to reconstructsuch an urtext are as impossible as they are fruitless because suchan ideal construct never existed), but an early form of the text of our narratives,as close as possible to the time of their origin or at least to the timewhen the Talmud was regarded as a more or less finally edited work(around the eighth century). One major result of our survey of the talmudicmanuscripts was the finding that the Jesus passages abound in the manuscriptsnot only before the implementation of Christian censorship buteven thereafter. This evidence strongly suggests that indeed Jesus ofNazareth is the original hero of our Bavli stories and that the availablemanuscripts do reflect the earliest possible form of our stories.This rather natural conclusion was contested by Maier, in his zeal tocleanse the “original” Bavli stories of any reference to Jesus and to postponethe (sometimes indisputable) intrusion of Jesus into the Talmud