Apikorus

Yet there is no discussion of the alleged trial of Yeshu himself -- only the notice about his being paraded, his stoning, and his hanging in accordance with mishnaic law.

Of course the plight of Yeshu is the reason for the remarks against the five disciples. Here's what is going on in the Talmudic account: The rabbis in Babylonia understood that there was a Jew named Yeshu who lived in Palestine hundreds of years earlier. He was known for his teachings, which lay outside the rabbinic sphere, and he attracted disciples. A few names of these disciples were known. Eventually Yeshu was executed. The rabbis might also have known that during their own time some Jews and many Gentiles venerated Yeshu. At any rate, the rabbis introduced defamatory material into the Talmud to emphasize that Yeshu's teachings were indeed aberrant. They made up a fate for his disciples as well, which served as a warning against following aberrant preachers like Yeshu.

No, the Talmud is not a witness to the NT. It is at best a witness to some refracted Christian traditions which eventually filtered to the rabbis of Babylonia. In no way is the Talmud a witness to the text of the NT itself.

To make it more clear, the Talmud is as good a witness to the NT as Manetho is to the Hebrew Bible:

Moses, a son of the tribe of Levi, educated in Egypt and initiated at Heliopolis, became a High Priest of the Brotherhood under the reign of Pharaoh Amenhotep (Akhnaton). He was elected by the Hebrews as their chief and he adapted to the ideas of his people the science and philosophy which he had obtained in the Egyptian mysteries; proofs of this are to be found in the symbols, in the Initiations, and in his precepts and commandments....The dogma of an 'only god' which he taught was the Egyptian Brotherhood interpretation and teaching of the Pharaoh who established the first monotheistic religion known to man.

Manetho on Moses is comparable to the Talmud on Jesus; "serious disagreements" abound in both cases. Both are removed in time by approximately the same interval from their ultimate sources (Manetho 3rd c. BCE; Elohistic source ~9th c. BCE(?) / Stammaim 7th c. CE ; NT gospels 1st c. CE). Neither is of much use for historical documentation of their respective sources.

ynquirer

May you admit a minor correction: “only notice about his being parade as a stoned-to-be convict, and his hanging in accordance with the mishnaic law.�

But yes, there is no discussion of the trial of Yeshu himself. This is the reason why I say that the case against Yeshu is incomplete, and there is no record of it, properly speaking.

That’s what I said. I guess we agree.

Again, this is basically correct.

This is interesting. A few names of the disciples were known? I couldn’t be more in agreement, but the question is: How were the names of the disciples known? Through Christian sources? This is unlikely. Modern scholarship meets difficulty to ascribe the names to known Christians within a hundred years from Jesus’ death; some scholars think they have found those five disciples, still the issue is disputable. Furthermore, more than five names of Christians must have been known to the writers of B. Sanh. 43a if through Christian sources; however, they chose those five. Why? I’d say that those ones were written down in extant records.

Aside from general reasons concerning the behavior of supreme courts as a rule, there are also particular reasons in this case. You evidenced that parading the convict to ask for arguments to spare his/her life was a type of right of appeal. I agree. Despite the atrocity of stoning adulterers and blasphemers, and like punishments, the Jewish law as of two thousand years ago displays an unusual respect for human life and individual rights. Such, for instance, the prohibition to try more than one capital case on a day – a guarantee than every case would receive the appropriate attention from the court. There are other significant examples. This is what makes me think that the Sanhedrin kept records of the people whom they had put to death.

In reference to this, may you take notice of the paradox involved in the account of Matthai’s case. After he was brought to the court, he quoted Ps 42:3 as defense. He was replied, quoting Ps 41:6, that he should die and his name perish. His name, however, did not perish. Why? Because the Sanhedrin had it recorded.

I wouldn’t call it defamatory. Either Jesus was the Son of God, as claimed by Christians, or he was a great blasphemer and an advocate of idolatry – nothing less than the worship of a purportedly divine person called the Son of Man. Provided that the court that tried the disciples was bound to deny Jesus’ being the Son of God, it was actually compelled to declare him an idolater and etc.

From the moment that the Sanhedrin convicted the disciples and sentenced them to death, the precedent was laid down that bound the court to give equal treatment to equal offence.

I strongly disagree. Manetho is hardly a witness to the Hebrew Bible because of the unlikelihood of using any source different from the Hebrew Bible itself. Josephus used Philo’s account plus – in all likelihood – the testimony of survivors that could still remember some details of Pilate’s first crisis in Judea. The Talmud used Christian sources plus the rabbinic oral tradition – which in the case of Tractate Sanhedrin probably included records of the Jewish supreme court.

Apikorus

The Talmud records that a herald paraded Yeshu about and exclaimed that he was to be stoned, exactly as mishnaic law describes. The law says that a seducer is to be hung after he is stoned. Thus, to say that he was hung in this context is to say that he was also stoned, unless one wishes to pursue the possibility that the law was not followed. This strikes me as unreasonable since no exception is mentioned. Indeed, the gemara in question illustrates the application of this very law in the mishnah.

It is bizarre that you should so tenaciously hold to the utterly baseless possibility that the Talmud implies that Yeshu was hung alive. No such provision exists in rabbinic law, and no notice of any exception is made. A better case can be made that this entire pericope refers to some Yeshu other than Jesus.

Probably not through Christian sources directly. We do know from rather early on that Jewish scholars were engaged in debate with their Christian counterparts. So once upon a time, a rabbi who argued with a Christian in Palestine visited Babylonia, and described his encounter. Or he sent a letter describing the same. The tradition then percolated somewhat in Babylonia. There's absolutely no way of reliably dating any of this.

They may well have done so, however there is no indication in B. Sanh. 43a that the Talmud is quoting from court records. There is no description of the evidence brought against Yeshu. No description of the rabbis who argued his case. No description of the events leading up to his trial. No description of the witnesses against him. No record of the vote. This is not the way "court records" are applied.

So what? By the way, an even better example is Deut 25:19, where Yahweh instructs the Israelites to "blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven -- you shall not forget."

This sounds like the facile argument of C. S. Lewis ("Lord, liar, or lunatic?"). What seems more likely (and nuanced) is that the gospel hagiographies of Jesus aren't entirely historical. Jesus himself was an itinerant Jewish preacher of the early first century CE -- this much I accept. The miracles stories, I presume, are hyperbolic, or outright fabrications. (Indeed scholars recognize that the gospel authors borrowed material from the LXX of the Elijah/Elisha cycles in that context. See Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions.) I also tend to think that the historical Jesus did not arrogate divine status. At any rate, the Talmudic material itself is manifestly negative.

Similarly, the authors of the Talmud were not writing with a copy of the New Testament in front of them. To bear textual witness to a document means to have been copied from said document. The Talmud may be a witness to Christian tradition or lore, but most decidedly (and obviously) not to the text of the NT itself.

There is no evidence of the use of "Christian sources". Indeed, the details such as Jesus' stoning, the five (not twelve) disciples, the fate of the disciples, etc. are all at variance with the NT. And as for the "records of the Jewish supreme court" once again this has not been demonstrated in the smallest way in this case.

The difference, of course, is that Josephus was writing 50 years after the events described (in the case of Pilate), and was intimately familiar with the historical and social context of first century CE Palestine from his own experience. We have no way to date the passage in B. Sanh. 43a, and it could have been written as much as 600 years after the events it describes, by Babylonian authors who had no such intimate knowledge of first century Palestine. The various Talmudic references to Yeshu can't even properly situate him in the correct era.

ynquirer

It is you who tenaciously holds to an inexact reading of the gemara according to which Yeshu is said to have been stoned and then hanged. My correction is a pure depiction of what the gemara says, that is, that Yeshu was paraded for forty days and then hanged.

A man called “Yeshu the Nazarene�? Nonsense.

This is what I called “oral tradition.� Yet a qualification is expedient. Ulla (c. 300 CE) is said to have added a remark on Yeshu’s trial. You contend that there is no guarantee that the remark is actually Ulla’s, but you don’t offer any specific evidence thereof; only general opinions on the unreliability of the Talmud, which I deem insufficient against the evidence provided by the name being there. Al least, you ought to offer a reasonable explanation of someone’s interest to craft a false quotation of Ulla, oughtn’t you?

I’ve recurrently said – and I’m afraid this is not the last time I shall do it – that Yeshu’s case is incomplete in the gemara. Conversely, you say nothing of the disciples’ cases, which are complete: defendant’s argument, reply of the accusation, and precedent. The cases of the disciples are those that are recorded.

Yeshu’s case is a(n incompletely) reconstructed one so as to provide the disciples’ with precedent.

Unfortunately, this is irrelevant to the issue we’re discussing. It is clear that the Sanhedrin, in reconstructing Yeshu’s precedent, deemed the miracles either real or at least credible enough for the people to believe them to be real. This is the reason why they felt the necessity to explain away the wonders by ascribing them to sorcery.

I wouldn’t be that sure. The account of the Talmud is a thorough rebuttal of the gospels. In the first place, Yeshu the Nazarene is convicted of sorcery and idolatry, not blasphemy. Secondly, he is not tried overnight and executed the following day but after a forty-day delay. Thirdly, he is put to death by the Jews, not the Romans. Fourthly, he is (paraded to be) stoned and hanged, not crucified. Should the writers of the Talmud not have the NT in front of them, one would say that they replicated it in the negative extremely well.

Likewise Josephus’ images or even busts of Tiberius, demonstrations of the Jewish people in Cesarea, and six-day solution of the crisis are at variance with Philo’s inscriptions of two names, embassy and letter by Herod’s four sons, and several-week solution of the crisis.

Two hundred and fifty years at longest, while we wait for concrete evidence to dismiss Ulla’s remark as a witness for a terminus ante quem, if you don’t mind.

He hardly had a personal acquaintance with Pilate’s prefecture. He at best banked on the testimony of old people that had weak remembrances of the crisis. (This is the reason why he dared to mystify a story of high politics so as to transform it into an epic narrative is which the people’s actuation was paramount.)

The difference is that no one remembered Pilate’s prefecture very well, while the Rabbis transmitting the oral tradition were scholars well trained in remembering minute details and conveying them to the next generation the most faithfully.

Apikorus

No, I never said that. What I said was that the gemara strongly implies he was first stoned, and the evidence for this is overwhelming. Incidentally, the gemara does not say that this Yeshu was hung from a tree. But similarly we can infer this from the mishnaic laws on hanging in pereq 7 of M. Sanh.

Where is the reference to "Yeshu the Nazarene" in B. Sanh. 43a? Within the Talmud, the are 14 Hillels, 61 Elazars, and 71 Hunas. So it is quite possible there were two or three Yeshus. Is the Yeshu of our gemara the same as the Yeshu in B. Sanh. 107b who lived during the time of Alexander Yannai? We really should be speaking of "a person named Yeshu" in all these instances. Is he the same as ben Stada and ben Pandira from B. Sanh. 67a? The rabbinic view is that there were two yeshus.

In fact, we can turn your argument on its ear. According to B. Sanh. 107b, Yeshu HaNotzri practiced magic during the reign of Yannai (103 - 76 BCE). Perhaps, then, the figure of Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament is based on this Yeshu HaNotzri who lived a century before the notional career of Jesus.

Jesus was one of several such magicians of that era, from the rabbinic point of view.

I've already done so. Perhaps the Stammaim sought to further denigrate Yeshu by placing the question regarding his defense on the lips of a minor figure like Ulla. One can concoct any number of reasons.

If by "incomplete" you mean there are no records of his actions, none of his accusers, none of his judges, none of the details of his alleged trial, etc. then I agree.

Surely a "thorough rebuttal" would at least get some details correct. There are numerous passages alleged to refer to Jesus in the Talmud (see here), and none of them contains any details which corroborate anything in the New Testament.

You are arguing that the Talmud is a witness to the New Testament because of all the things it gets wrong?! This reminds me of an old joke. A petty criminal is on trial for stealing a watch. The prosecutor says in his opening statement, "your honor, and ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I can produce five witnesses who saw this man steal the watch." Whereupon the accused bolts out of his seat and interjects, "and I can produce five hundred witnesses who didn't see me steal the watch!"

As a matter of fact, I do mind. What we have in the gemara is someone writing about Ulla, not the writings of Ulla. You do appreciate the difference, no?

Which would still mean that he was recording first-hand accounts, which is quite a bit better than what we have to work with in the gemara.

Both statements here are completely unjustified. There is abundant evidence that the Jewish sages simply made up details, and that they retrojected rabbinic themes into earlier periods about which they wrote. You are advocating a precritical view of the Talmud which is at least 50 years old: Jewish tradition claims to be very accurate therefore it is very accurate. Indeed, Jewish tradition claims that the Oral Law was passed down from God to Moses at Sinai, and that many of the details of this law, right down to the need to properly wash your lettuce to make sure you don't have bugs in it during pesach, were passed down to...the rabbis (surprise!). Caveat lector!

No Robots

The most important statement about Jesus in the Talmud is Abodah Zarah 17a
(warning: this link is to an antisemitic website that has posted most of the Talmud to further its ends. If anyone has a more wholesome online source, please let us know.)

Jesus is quoted in this passage as something of a spiritual teacher.

ynquirer

Overwhelming? I don’t think evidence for your presumption is overwhelming. It would be overwhelming if only they say “he was stoned.� But they never say this.

The writers of the Talmud, according to you, imply he was stoned. As you very well know, quite differently from formal speech – say, maths – in ordinary speech implication never is exact but the byproduct of interpretation. Thus, you interpret that stoning is implied. And I appreciate your effort to make me understand your interpretation. Yet what I see watertight clear is a statement, “since nothing was brought in his favour he was hung,� which is awkward to say the least.

It is clear from the Rabbinic tradition that B. Sanh. 43a refers to Jesus the Nazarene. (See below for further details.)

In plain text, there is only B. Sanh. 43a. Bracketed mentions there are a few more.

Well, no. Actually the “Yeshu� in B. Sanh. 107b is one of those bracketed [Yeshus] I referred to above.

Still more important. The Yeshu of our gemara is said to be close to the government, while the [Yeshu] of B. Sanh. 107b is persecuted by the government and has to escape from Judea together with his teacher Yehoshua ben Perachiah. At the same time, Shimon ben Shetah, who was close to the government – he was a brother of Salome Alexandra, Alexander Yannai’s daughter-in-law – was spared from exile. Read the story.

The bracketed [Yeshu] in B. Sanh. 107b is a later addition to the story of ben Shetah and ben Perachiah under the persecution of the Pharisees by the Sadducee King Alexander Yannai in the early first century BCE. The story is told, without even mentioning the name “Yeshu,� in B. Sot 47a, which renders the purported [Yeshu] a mere “disciple.�

Bracketed [Yeshus] – in fact all the mentions to Yeshu but those in B. Sanh. 43a – are seriously suspect of being later corruptions.

I don’t think he is. I am not the least interested in either ben Stada or ben Pandira. Are you?

There is no Yeshu ha-Notzri in B. Sanh. 107b exception to be made in uncensored editions of the Talmud. I’m not such an expert on the Talmud as you seem to be, but I at least know that uncensored editions are in all likelihood the produce of mediaeval reediting so as to deflect potential anti-Semitic uses of the Talmud against the Jewish communities in Europe. As B. Sanh. 43a was potentially useful for anti-Semitic purposes, the story in B. Sot 47a, which speaks of two leading Pharisees, namely, ben Shetah and ben Perachiah, and an unknown disciple of the latter one, all of them persecuted by Alexander Yannai the Sadducee king, was rendered in B. Sanh 107b the story of ben Shetah, ben Perachiah and one Yeshu the Nazarene. The forgery is as obvious as to need no more effort than have a look at both texts.

Then what?

The quotation rather seems to be authentic. Explaining away the odd forty-day delay in Yeshu’s execution – which might be argued to be against the Torah, as evidenced in the first part of Ulla’s commentary – on account of his closeness to the royalty (or “the government,� if you wish) is a display of pragmatism. Ulla, on the other hand, was known to be a staunch pragmatist. Once he was traveling between Palestine and Babylon his group was assaulted by bandits. The chief wounded one of Ulla’s fellow travelers and asked him about his opinion. Ulla answered: “Great.� The bandit killed the wounded traveler. The story was thoroughly discussed among the Rabbis, since Ulla seemed to have encouraged the bandit to commit murder. But the final analysis was that Ulla was under the supreme obligation to try to keep alive.

The commentary is probably authentic.

You here miss two important details, which allow one to say that, though incomplete, Yeshu’s case is there, namely, the charges – sorcery and idolatry – and the sentence. That’s is enough to make a precedent in case new charges of sorcery and idolatry apply.

You are the third participant in this thread that links to that article. I hope all of you will have a new reading of it after checking that the author’s main source is an uncensored edition of the Talmud. (See above.)

Well, enough is enough for the time being.

Apikorus

Yes, and even explicit statements must be interpreted (e.g. they could intentionally be false). You yourself engage in interpretation of B. Sanh. 43a. For starters, you interpret it as referring to the Christian Jesus, when all we know is that it refers to someone named Yeshu. The gemara also never mentions that Yeshu was Jewish, but you might infer this nonetheless.

The overwhelming evidence that this gemara implies that Yeshu was stoned:

• The text explicitly states, But for forty days before that a herald went in front of him (crying), "Yeshu is to be stoned because he practiced sorcery and seduced Israel and lead them away from God."
• The Mishnah describes in detail the procedure in dealing with seducers. First they are stoned, and afterward they are hung.
• In general the gemara illustrates and expounds upon the mishnah. In this case, the procedure of announcing the stoning described in the case of Yeshu is in accordance with what is described in M. Sanh. 6:1. The fact that the stoning of Yeshu was announced 40 days in advance is exceptional, and as such it is noted explicitly in the gemara.
• The gemara explicitly states that Yeshu was hung, again in accordance with mishnaic law. There is no provision for live hanging within mishnaic law. The only possibilities are: stoning, burning, strangulation, and decapitation.
• No exception is noted in the gemara to the application of mishnaic law vis-a-vis stoning. As a rule, all such exceptions are noted, along with their corresponding exigent circumstances. This is why this very gemara explicitly states the exception to the immediacy of the herald's announcement.
• T. Sanh. 10:11, Y. Sanh. 7:16, and B. Sanh. 67a all state that the deceiver ben Stada was stoned.

There is no problem with the gemara's failure to mention that the stoning had taken place. This is only troubling to those with little familiarity with the rhetorical structures of the Talmud as a whole, and who anachronistically read the Talmud from the perspective of modern legal documents.


Ah, you are "interpreting" again. If we stick to the text itself, all we know is that this gemara refers to someone named Yeshu who was executed for sorcery. (Of course, I do think it refers to Jesus, but that is another story.)

This sounds like nonsense. You are saying that in an uncensored text the rabbis inserted references to Yeshu in an effort to avoid antisemitism? The pericope in B. Sanh. 107b concludes with:

Yeshu haNotsri practiced magic and led astray and deceived Israel.

This is a strange way of deflecting Christian antisemitism!

No, I fully apprehend these "details." Indeed, they are completely consonant with my position that this gemara is a late response to a gauzy understanding of Christian tradition.

Here's what I think. While some scholars like R. T. Herford have perhaps been too eager to find Jesus in the Talmud, I suspect that various characters named and unnamed therein do represent Jesus, or some composite character involving Jesus. These references are, alas, all undatable and they might well be made up out of whole cloth by various Talmudic redactors, responding to a late, refracted image of Christianity which filtered to them in sixth or even seventh century Sassanian Iran. It is not even necessary -- and here is where traditional Jewish defenders of the Talmud, from Nachmanides to Rabbi Gil Student, often trip up -- for the various references to Yeshu, ben Stada, ben Pandira, etc. to all be consistent in terms of names, time and location. The basics are these: a long time ago there lived a man named Yeshu whose aberrant teachings led many astray. A character like this might turn up in several different settings.

Your approach to the Talmud is a precritical one. You might consider the views of an expert such as Jacob Neusner (in Rabbinic Literature and the New Testament, ch. 3):

Ample evidence in virtually every document of rabbinic literature sustains the proposition that it was quite common for sages to make up sayings and stories and attribute the sayings to, or tell the stories about, other prior authorities. Considerations of historical fact did not impede the search for religious truth: the norms of belief and behavior. That is why, if all we want are historical facts, we cannot believe everything we read except as evidence of what was in the mind of the person who wrote up the passage: opinion held at the time of the closure of a document. That is the sole given, the datum we do not have to demonstrate. Using sayings and stories in rabbinic literature as though anyone in that time and place subjected himself to the disciplines of contemporary historical method is worse than anachronism; it is an accusation that "our sages of blessed memory" cared mostly about preserving and handing on information. That is not what their literature proposed to transmit; that is not what they wished to accomplish.

Your anachronistic, precritical reading of the Talmud extends to matters of Jewish history. For example, you naively assume that because the Sanhedrin was the "Supreme Court" of Israel that detailed court records were kept. This is, after all, what one would expect based on a modern 21st century understanding of the law and legal systems. However, this is a bad assumption when applied to the rabbis. You may search the entire Mishnah and nowhere will you find it stated that the decision of a court must be rendered in writing. Court decisions were delivered verbally (M. Sanh. 3:7). It may have been that decisions were later documented, but there is zero evidence that this was required or even customary. Indeed, an apparently early rule from the Tosefta (T. B. Metzia 1:12) suggests that the opposite was true:

A judge is believed when he says "I have ruled in favor of this one; I have ruled against that one." When is that? Only if the litigants are standing before him. But if they are no longer standing before him, he is not believed.

If there were detailed court records, as you naively assume, there would be no question regarding the judge's decision -- he could simply consult the written documentation of the trial. But this passage states that a judge's recollection of his own ruling is not to be believed after the trial.

Now there are some (presumably later) Amoraic sources which refer to written documentation. But these all invoke special cases, such as when one of the two parties in a civil case demands a written record in the case of a non-unanimous decision (B. Sanh. 30a).

Moreover -- and this is astonishing -- you are assuming that detailed legal records of early first century CE cases were kept at a time when the Mishnah itself was not codified (ca. 200 CE (?) for the Mishnah).

Talmudic legal scholars generally acknowledge that there was a great deal of secrecy to rabbinic judicial decisions. For example, there is no requirement for judges to state reasons for their decisions. This is remarkable given the level of detail in the Mishnah and the Tosefta regarding the various stages of the trial itself. Furthermore, M. Sanh. 3:7 admonishes dissenting judges not to reveal or discuss their opinions after the decision is rendered. There are many possible reasons for this secrecy. From the Talmud itself (B. Sanh. 31a; B. Shab. 153b; B. Sanh. 21b) it appears that the rabbis were concerned that revealing the court's inner deliberations and reasoning could be used to exploit the legal system, thereby compromising its purpose and effectiveness. Moreover, for the rabbis to record detailed evidence, testimony, and judicial deliberations would have made them beholden to their own precendent, and thus would have compromised their authority. Similar concerns probably lay behind the prohibition of documenting the Oral Law prior to the time of Yehuda haNasi.

So I think your presumption that B. Sanh. 43a is reflecting "incomplete" information from detailed court records of the trials of Yeshu and his five (!) disciples is nothing more than a fantasy.

Jayhawker Soule

Apikorus, is there no bases the the claim noted at wikipedia that

Apikorus

CA, my suggestion to ynquirer was not a serious one -- it was just meant to serve as a warning of the type of mischief one can engage in if one credulously accepts the Talmudic reports as historical.

As for the etymology of yeshu, I don't know and I don't think there is any scholarly agreement. I am of course familiar with the acronym interpretation, but there may be other reasons. The Hebrew name yeshua has the same shoresh (three letter root) as "salvation" and perhaps the rabbis were aware of Christian claims regarding the Jesus' salvific nature and purpose. Hence they might have left off the final ayin because they didn't want to implicitly endorse Christian dogma. But this is just a guess off the top of my head and now I must go to a dentist appointment.