Didymus

It's a piece of a larger puzzle. The absence of archeological evidence becomes significant when you contrast it to Lukan claims of miracles, mass conversion and persecution in Jerusalem. It has to be understood in the light of all the evidence of Diaspora origins and lack of evidence for a large Christian community in Jerusalem, like the fact that the books of the NT and the writings of the church fathers were written in the Diaspora for an audience of Greek-speaking gentiles, the geographical and historical errors in the gospels, the almost universal rejection of the Christian message by Jews, etc.

Didymus

andrewcriddle

Do you accept the references in the Tosefta to disputes with minim about Jesus ben Pantera as evidence of 2nd century Jewish Christianity in Palestine ?

Andrew Criddle

Didymus

Seems like it would be evidence of just the opposite. The farfetched ben Pantera legend of Jesus as the son of a Roman soldier and a hairdresser certainly doesn't square with the NT. If anything, that fable suggests that Palestinian Jews were unaware of what Christians actually believed, even as late as the end of the 2nd century (when the Tosefta was published in Tiberias.)

Can you recommend some good references on this question?

Didymus

andrewcriddle

If you're interested you maybe should try and get access to Neusner's English translation of the Tosefta where one can find the rather small number of pasages relevant to Jewish Christianity in their original context.


There is an intersting though somewhat dated discussion in the first part of the Jewish Scholar Joseph Klausner's Jesus of Nazareth (or via: amazon.co.uk)

Other writers are Goldstein Jesus in the Jewish Tradition and (though very dated) Herford Christianity in Talmud and Midrash.

(The tradition about Jesus as the illegitimate son of Miriam the hairdresser seems rather late and to involve the confusion of Ben Stada and Jesus in later Talmudic sources.

In the early sources Jesus ben Pantere/Pandere occurs but this is not expanded into an explicit claim of Jesus' illegitimacy. Although Celsus' evidence seems to that this is what is involved)

Andrew Criddle