Jesus in the Talmud

144 Appendixtext to the Middle Ages. Instead of a two-tiered transmission history ofthe Bavli stories (Jesus, at first an integral part of the Talmud narratives,was later gradually removed, due to the involvement of Christian censorship),he suggests a three-tiered transmission history: (1) an originalstage, Talmud stories without any reference to Jesus; (2) gradual andlate intrusion of Jesus into the stories as part of the textual history of theBavli before the implementation of censorship but not as part of the“original” Bavli text; (3) removal of the Jesus passages by Christian censorship.31This reconstruction of the Bavli’s textual history is hard to comprehend.Maier starts from oversimplified assumptions when he seems tosuggest that there is no manuscript evidence for Jesus at all for the timebefore the implementation of Christian censorship (there is) and thatthe majority of the manuscripts that were exposed to the censorshipdeleted Jesus (they do not). The textual tradition of the Bavli is far morecomplex than Maier wants to admit. True, we do not have much manuscriptevidence for the pre-censorship period, but we do have some.More important: To take it for granted that all the pre-censorship manuscriptsdid not contain Jesus 32 is a much bolder claim than to concludefrom the manuscript evidence we possess (and some of which does goback to the pre-censorship period) that the lost earlier manuscripts alsoincluded Jesus. The latter assumption proposes an essentially unbrokentext history with regard to Jesus that starts within the earlier stages of theBavli transmission, whereas Maier’s reconstruction presupposes a majorbreak in the early Middle Ages, when some later editors suddenly felt freeto sneak Jesus into the Talmud—only to be repudiated, almost simultaneously,by their Christian censors. This does not make much sense. I thereforepropose to hold on to the traditional view that the Bavli’s manuscripttransmission, so far as we can presently reconstruct it, reflects the Bavli’sdiscussion with the founder of Christianity.