Jesus in the Talmud

Notes to Chapter 4 159t Hul); QohR: “He told me something (lit. a certain word) in the name of Soand-So”(however, some manuscripts and printed editions of QohR read “in thename of Jesus ben Pandera”: see Maier, Jesus von Nazareth, p. 296, n. 305, andthe chart below, pp. 137f.).10. Mss. Munich 95 and Paris Suppl. Heb. 1337; Ms. JTS Rab. 15: “thustaught him Jesus his Master.”11. Reading qubbtzsah instead of qibbatzsah.12. The money, in the Hebrew plural.13. QohR has only “heresy.”14. QohR: “prostitution” (zenut).15. On Eliezer b. Hyrkanos, see Jacob Neusner, Eliezer Ben Hyrkanus: TheTradition and the Man, 2 vols., Leiden: Brill, 1973. For Neusner’s analysis of ourstory see vol. 1, pp. 400–403, and vol. 2, pp. 366f.; Neusner is certain that Eliezer“cannot have been a min,” although “it seems difficult to say whether the accountbefore us reports something which actually happened” (vol. 2, p. 367).16. In all the three versions; only t Hullin leaves out “idle.”17. This is Neusner’s translation in The Tosefta Translated from the Hebrew,Fifth Division: Qodoshim (The Order of Holy Things), New York: Ktav, 1979,p. 74, and, almost identical, in Eliezer Ben Hyrkanus, vol. 1, p. 400; see also SaulLieberman, “Roman Legal Institutions in Early Rabbinics and in the Acta Martyrorum,”JQR, n.s., 35, 1944/45, pp. 20f.18. The version in QohR does not help, either, because it reads: “Is it possiblethat these rabbinic schools (yeshivot hallalu) should err in such matters?”(Lieberman, p. 20, n. 129, finds in QohR the corrupt word šyšyšbwt, which heemends to she-śevot, but the emendation she-yeshivot, as in fact the printed editionreads, is much more plausible). It is, of course, possible that R. Eliezer’s colleaguesbribed the governor and that he uses R. Eliezer’s grey hair = old age andsign of wisdom as an “excuse” for his acquittal, but such an explanation is notvery convincing. Richard Kalmin (in a written remark on my manuscript) andone of the anonymous readers draw my attention to the fact that the missing letterin šhsybw[t] is not so strange for the Tosefta or for Hebrew manuscripts altogether.This is certainly correct, but still, why no indication of an abbreviation(šhsybw> ) and why such a crucial letter in a crucial phrase? Also, the “grey hair”is clearly influenced by the translation of zaqen as “old man,” but this is notimperative. As Solomon Zeitlin reminds us (“Jesus in the Early Tannaitic Literature,”in Abhandlungen zur Erinnerung an Hirsch Perez Chajes, Wien: Alexander