Jesus in the Talmud

24 Chapter 1claim of Jesus’ followers as the new salt of the earth: these Christians, itargues, maintain that the salt of the old covenant has become insipid, andhence useless, and that its taste was restored by the people of the newcovenant—through the afterbirth of a mule! But we all know that there isno such thing as the afterbirth of a mule because the mule does not givebirth, as much as we know that salt does not lose its taste.On this background, the miraculous offspring of the mule in the firststory (and the afterbirth in the second one) gets an even more significantmeaning. It can well be understood as a parody of Jesus’ miraculous birthfrom a virgin: an offspring from a virgin is as likely as an offspring from amule. 47 The Christians’ claim of Jesus’ birth from a virgin and without afather belongs to the category of fiction stories, fairy tales just for fun.Moreover, this is the punch line of the second story: Jesus’ followers, whoclaim to be the new salt of the earth, are nothing but the afterbirth of thatimagined offspring of the mule, a fiction of a fiction. Read this way, ourtwo little Bavli stories become indeed much more than an amusing exchangebetween the rabbis and the Greek Sages; rather, they offer anotherbiting ridicule of one of the cornerstones of Christian theology.