Jesus in the Talmud

8 Introductionrefer to Jesus, and I will justify this claim in the book. Here I substantiallydisagree with Maier who vehemently denies the possibility that there areauthentic tannaitic Jesus passages and even declares the amoraic passagesas all belonging to the post-talmudic rather than to the talmudic period. 24However, we need to make here an important qualification. The factthat I accept most of the relevant sources as referring to Jesus (and hisfamily, particularly his mother), does not, by any means, assume the historicityof these sources. As I see it, Maier’s most fateful mistake is theway he poses the problem of the historicity of his texts. He takes it forgranted that in having purged the bulk of rabbinic literature from Jesusand in allowing for “authentic” Jesus passages to appear only in the verylate talmudic and preferably the post-talmudic sources, he has solved thehistoricity problem once and forever: the few authentic passages, he maintains,are all very late and hence do not contribute anything to the historicalJesus. For what he is concerned about, almost obsessed with, is the historicalJesus. This is why he is so fond of the distinction, in (mostly) Jewishauthors, between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of the faith (following,of course, the differentiation being made in critical New Testament scholarship).The historical Jesus does not appear in our rabbinic sources; theydo not provide any reliable evidence of him, let alone historical “facts”that deviate from the New Testament and therefore must be taken seriously.According to Maier, that’s the end of the story: since the rabbinicliterature is meaningless in our quest for the historical Jesus, it is altogetherworthless for serious scholarly attention with regard to our subjectmatter.I agree that much of our Jesus material is relatively late; in fact, I willargue that the most explicit Jesus passages (those passages that deal withhim as a person) appear only in the Babylonian Talmud and can be dated,at the earliest, to the late third–early fourth century C.E. Yet I strongly disagreewith Maier that this is the end of the story. On the contrary, I willclaim that it is only here that our real inquiry begins. I propose that these(mainly) Babylonian stories about Jesus and his family are deliberate andhighly sophisticated counternarratives to the stories about Jesus’ life anddeath in the Gospels—narratives that presuppose a detailed knowledge ofthe New Testament, in particular of the Gospel of John, presumablythrough the Diatessaron and/or the Peshitta, the New Testament of the