Book Review: “Jesus in the Talmud”

 

Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. 201 + Index.

This book, sent to me by a reader of Orthodox Tradition, was difficult to review. The work of a notable Jewish scholar at Princeton, it is a comprehensive and well-documented study of Christ as He appears in the Talmud, the principal sourcebook of Rabbinical Judaism. While the scholarship was impeccable and a pleasure to read, the unavoidable citations from Talmudic references to Christ, some noxiously anti-Christian, were as personally odious to me as are the contemptible anti-Semitic ideas that abound in the historical witness and the contemporary media—indeed, from the popular press to the Internet—and in widely distributed hate literature of extremist Christian and Islamic provenance.

Revolting though some of the more offensive Talmudic references to Christ may be, the book affords one a framework in which better to understand these portrayals of Christ. Professor Shafer first establishes that references to Christ in the Talmud (and especially in the Babylonian Talmud) are sparse: “a proverbial drop in the yam ha-talmud (‘the ocean of the Talmud’).” Nonetheless, he asserts, they play a vital role in the confrontation of Rabbinical Judaism with Christianity itself. He also acknowledges that the polemical medieval treatise, Toledot Yeshu, or “History of Jesus,” which provoked anti-Jewish Christian sentiments in Spain, especially, may reflect more of the thinking of the Rabbis of late antiquity than has heretofore been admitted.

In essence, in a piece of scholarship that must be read carefully to be appreciated (and this book is accessible to anyone, and not just specialists), the author contrasts the Greek New Testament—in which he confesses to having significant (and undoubtedly less traditional) advice from Princeton’s New Testamental experts, Professors John Gager and Elaine Pagels—with the Talmud (again, drawing heavily on the Babylonian Talmud, which was compiled from earlier oral sources around 500 A.D.), using that term very loosely to encompass the foundational sources of Rabbinical Judaism in general.

In this contrast, he argues not for the usual polemical disconnect between the New Testamental account of Jesus (and Mary and His family) and occasional, largely adventitious Rabbinical references to Christ, but for a deliberate and polemical parodying of the Gospel narrative by Rabbinical scholars, in late antiquity, who had reasonable familiarity with the New Testament and its content (though somewhat differently in Babylonia than in the Palestine). The Talmudic picture of the New Testament narrative, and thus the life of Christ and His family, Professor Shafer argues, was designed to counter, answer, and address, in a carefully crafted literary response, the New Testamental witness.

I will illustrate this approach by recounting the Talmudic version of the Crucifixion of Christ, to which the reader who sent me this book for review quite appropriately directed my attention. The primary source for the author’s discussion of the death of Christ is the Bavli (i.e., the Babylonian Talmud). As he points out, the event is discussed in the context of Halakha, or Jewish law. Christ is described as an individual close to the Roman government (a collaborator), a sorcerer, and a blasphemer who claimed to be the Son of God, thus enticing others into idolatry. On this account, He was subject to stoning and hanging (i.e., the displaying of the corpse by tying it to a tree). According to this narrative, Christ was put to death in conformity with the dictates of Jewish law.

Professor Shafer notes that the Talmudic interpreters were certainly aware that Christ was put to death by Roman soldiers by crucifixion and that He was not stoned and hanged. But they held to their narrative, since it underscored, by contrast to Pilate’s depiction of Him as a pretender to political kingship or sovereignty over the Jews, Christ’s crime of blasphemy (in claiming to be the Son of God) and sorcery (claiming power to destroy the Temple). As a blasphemer and heretic, Christ was treated according to Halakha, a rather direct literary challenge to the New Testamental narrative of His betrayal by His own people.

Does this notion of a Talmudic counter-narrative actually hold water? Indeed, it does. The uncensored manuscripts of the Bavli in fact repeat elements from the Gospel narratives: They say that Christ was hanged on the eve of the Jewish Passover; His corpse was not allowed to hang overnight (before the Sabbath); and He was “close” to the Roman rulers. This latter charge, an obvious attempt to respond to the Gospel accounts of Pilate’s efforts to save Jesus the innocent victim from execution, attests most clearly to Rabbinical familiarity with New Testamental texts and Christian accounts that, according to prevailing scholarship, were supposedly hardly given notice in Rabbinical Judaism.

The importance of Professor’s Shafer’s insights, which are perfectly illustrated by his discussion of the Crucifixion story—one morsel of the rich feast of examples of deliberate parallelism that he cites throughout his book—is that they suggest, if I may take his position a bit beyond what he asserts, that the Talmudic treatments of Jesus are not nasty anti-Christian screeds, but attempts to contradict the New Testamental depiction of the person of Christ in a direct defense of Judaism. They are not simply apologetic in nature, but didactic and interpretive.

In much the same way, many of the early Patristic responses to Judaism, and especially in confronting the Judaizers, were also not a manifestation of raw anti-Semitic rancor, but a conscious attempt to discredit and dismiss the opposing messages of Judaism, to the end of protecting the new practices of the Christian Church. One might, of course, argue that polemical self-protection is also a form of bigotry. If I do not wholly dismiss that thought, I nevertheless consider purposive polemics a matter of thought more than emotion, and thus more likely to succumb to reasonable discourse and yield to mutual understanding.

- Archbishop Chrysostomos [of Etna]

 

Source: Orthodox Tradition, Vol. XXVIII (2011), No. 1, pp. 25-27.

 

PDF of Jesus in the Talmud:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MS9X4i0OkT9WGAHFIRwPDzTuISgPofK8/view?usp=sharing