Jesus in the Talmud

Jesus’ Family 19he [Jesus] came from a Jewish village and from a poor countrywoman who earned her living by spinning. He [the Jew] says that shewas driven out by her husband, who was a carpenter by trade, as shewas convicted of adultery. Then he says that after she had been drivenout by her husband and while she was wandering about in a disgracefulway she secretly gave birth to Jesus. And he says that because he[Jesus] was poor he hired himself out as a workman in Egypt, andthere tried his hand at certain magical powers on which the Egyptianspride themselves; he returned full of conceit, because of thesepowers, and on account of them gave himself the title of God. 26In another quotation Celsus repeats these allegations put into the mouthof a Jew and even communicates the name of Jesus’ father:Let us return, however, to the words put into the mouth of the Jew,where the mother of Jesus is described as having been turned out bythe carpenter who was betrothed to her, as she had been convictedof adultery and had a child by a certain soldier named Panthera(Panthēra). 27This story has much in common with the short discourse in the Talmud:the hero is the son of an adulteress, he returned from Egypt with magicalpowers and, most important, the name of his mother’s lover (his father)was Panthera. The only difference between the versions in the Talmudand in Celsus is the fact that Celsus makes it explicit that the child, bornfrom the poor Jewish adulteress and the soldier Panthera, was the very Jesuswhom the Christians regard as the founder of their faith, whereas theTalmud keeps silent about the proper name of the child. 28 But this doesnot pose a real problem because the Talmud, as we have seen, is not concernedabout the identity of the child but about the strange phenomenonof two different names used for his father. Moreover, several rabbinicsources do mention Jesus as the son of Pandera, 29 and it can be safely assumed,therefore, that the Talmud presupposes the knowledge of thisidentity. The punch line of this attribution, of course, is the fact that Jesus,through his father Panthera/Pandera, becomes not only a bastard buteven the son of a non-Jew. 30