ynquirer

Sorry, Apikorus. I'd just posted when realized that you had done so almost at the same time.

However, I think that my post is accurate reply to your last but one.

Regards,

Apikorus

ynquirer, I believe you are grasping at straws.

Your criticism that I "fail to abide by (my) own rule" is empty. First of all, it is not a rule but rather a maxim. Second, it is due to Jacob Neusner, not me. Third, and to the point, when I say "presumably stoned" that does not mean "definitely stoned," now does it?

Regarding Shimon ben Shitah, what "law" did he break? The gemara seems to record that the Sages had a different opinion regarding multiple judgments.

As Asha'man points out, the gemara explicitly says that Yeshu was paraded forth with an announcement that he was to be stoned. One would think that had he not been stoned, this exception would have been mentioned. The fact the he was reported to have been hung serves to emphasize the serious nature of his crimes.

ynquirer

Whether a rule or a maxim, I was ready to agree it was a wise one, whoever issued.

“Presumably stoned, not definitely stoned� means, to my fairest understanding, that there is at least light evidence in favour of the theory that Yeshu was stoned and I don’t think like that.

The mishnayot:
1) “he goes forth to be stoned�
2) “and a herald precedes him [crying]: so and so, the son of so and so, is going forth to be stoned because he committed such and such offence�
3) “Whoever knows anything in his favour, let him come and state it.�

The gemara:
1) “Yeshu was hanged.�
2) “a herald went forth and cried, ‘He is going forth to be stoned because he was practised sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy�
3) “Anyone who can say anything in his favour, let him come forward and plead on his behalf�
4) “since nothing was brought in his favour he was hanged on the eve of the Passover.�

Your argument that “B. Sanh. 43a is saying that yeshu was hung because his crimes of sorcery and "leading Israel away from God" were tantamount to blasphemy and/or idolatry� and “the blasphemer and idolater must be hung in addition to being stoned� – is not compelling.

If the intention was to point at the nature of the crime, once to mention “hanged� – especially for the first time – would be enough. The second “hanged� would thus be totally unnecessary, while “stoned� was necessary right there. For after “since nothing was brought forward in his favour� what follows is the execution of the convict, that is, stoning, and not abruptly the exhibition of his corpse, that is, hanging.

I don’t agree either. The gemara records a dissension as to whether women are to be hanged likewise men, which dissension takes place between one R. Eliezer, who is not a Sage, and the Sages. R. Eliezer cites the authority of one Shimon ben Shitah, who hanged women. The Sages reply that Shimon ben Shitah was hardly an authority, since he also tried and had eighty women executed on the same day, while the law was not to try more than one capital case on a day, such a law being entirely similar to the law that commanded the hanged body not to remain there overnight but be buried on the same day.

Apikorus

The evidence that Yeshu was stoned is in the gemara itself, as Asha'man admonished you:

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 prescribes stoning, followed by hanging for blasphemers and idolaters. The fact that the hanging is mentioned twice makes perfect sense. Were he not first stoned, such an exception would demand comment.

I don't think you are reading the gemara sensibly. At any rate, it seems we are at an impass.

ynquirer

Believing that actual trials always abode by the Mishnah necessitates of blinder a faith than the Talmud itself justifies – provided that some judges, like Shimon ben Shitah, adjudicated in infringement of the law by both hanging women and adjudging more than one capital case on a day.

Could you be as kind as to tell me why?

Not if the exception was the outcome of one infringement of the law, like those recorded as committed by Shimon ben Shitah. If one such infringement would have been committed by the Sanhedrin instead of an individual judge, the natural attitude of the writers would be to conceal the infringement behind circumventing, utterly cryptic statements like “since nothing was brought in his favour he was hanged on the eve of the Passover.� From this, everyone may infer that since nothing was brought in his favour Yeshu was put to death, and that hanging was the way to accomplish that.

Perhaps you are right and I am not reading the gemara sensibly. Yet, the argument that announcement by a herald must be construed as being of the quality of a prophetic utterance sounds like one of last resort. For one thing is that the Talmud say that Yeshu was to be stoned – which it never says – and quite another that a man – any man – is said by the Talmud to have said that Yeshu was to be stoned. The latter only implies that a formal requirement was fulfilled, without implying anything at all about the fulfilment of other formal requirements, such like stoning.

Apikorus

Again, it is not clear that Shimon b. Shitah "broke the law." What is recorded in the Talmud is a difference of opinion (as is often the case). You are apparently hung up on this ben Shitah case and it strikes me that you are seizing upon it because you are unfamiliar with the Talmud in general. Indeed, the Talmud is replete with other examples in which an authority X did Y which was held to by improper by Z. The Talmud is a vast colloquy recording hundreds -- thousands -- of these differences of opinion.

This is a common problem, incidentally, with historical Jesus scholars who adduce the rabbinic literature. Generally they have virtually no familiarity with rabbinics at all. They study only the passages in the Talmud relevant to their purposes -- those which contain possible reference to Jesus -- yet they have no global understanding of the Talmud, its various modes of discourse, its terminology, literary devices, etc.

The reason that the hanging is mentioned twice is as follows. The first mention is the executive summary: Yeshu was hanged on the eve of pesach. Then comes the story itself, after which the hanging is again mentioned. By emphasizing the hanging, the gemara emphasizes the seriousness of Yeshu's crimes. From a literary point of view, the double reference to the hanging frames the entire story. It is followed by a postscript containing Ulla's question.

Again, I don't believe that any of this is necessarily historical. It is from a literary perspective that I conclude that gemara implies that Yeshu was stoned, then hung. Inasmuch as the gemara clarifies and illustrates the mishnah, it is obligatory that significant deviations from mishnaic practice be explained.

ynquirer

Apikorus

Thank you so much, to begin with, for education on the Talmud.

That’s is now clear to me. My point, however, does not preclude the double reference to the hanging, but rather that the hanging is mentioned twice while the stoning is mentioned none at two passages as critical as the executive summary and the conclusion of the story. The whole execution of Yeshu so appears framed upon the theme of hanging rather than the theme of stoning or even stoning plus hanging – if the writer wished to emphasize the seriousness of the crime. All the more so as stone, stoning and stoned are fairly popular words throughout the Talmud – there are dozens of occurrences thereof – and I have so far been unable to find just one instance in which the convict is not explicitly said to “go forth to be stoned,� “be conducted to the stoning place,� or straightforwardly “be stoned,� instead of just being announced so by a herald – a mere man – that is liable to every type of error (he can deceive, he can be deceived, plans may change, and etc).

Moreover, the omission of the stoning is hardly understandable on literary grounds as the mention of it would render an awkward statement (“since nothing was brought in his favour he was hanged�) an all too natural one (“since nothing was brought in his favour he was stoned and hanged�).

The omission of the stoning in the framing of the story is all the more noteworthy as the Torah specifically stipulates stoning, not hanging, as the appropriate penalty for a series of crimes, including idolatry.

This is very interesting, indeed, and a critical issue for our discussion. It seems to me, though, that explanation is obligatory only when significant deviations from mishnaic practice are notorious. Such is the case of the forty-day delay in executing the sentence: it wasn’t customary and even against the Torah in a case of idolatry. This is the reason why Ullah’s remark is right there. He explains away the odd delay on account of the closeness of Yeshu to the royalty.

But it further seems to me that explanation is not obligatory whenever deviations are not outstanding but keep concealed, instead, by a careful writing, which deviations can be disclosed only by diving into inconsistencies and oddities that have been worked out so as to render explanation seemingly unnecessary.

As I said in a previous post in this same thread, I think that the strongest evidence of the historicity of Yeshu’s story as well as of his being the same person as Jesus of Nazareth rests with the naming of five disciples that have been identified by Klausner, Herford and others as being disciples of Jesus – whether of the first or subsequent generations. In reference to this, a few remarks seem only too convenient.

On the one hand, the notion that the Talmud says that there were only five disciples of Jesus while the gospels say they were twelve is naïve. Actually, the gospels say that there were more than twelve disciples. Critics surely point at the twelve apostles? If room is left for the second and subsequent generations, a century after Jesus’ death there might have been hundreds, perhaps thousands of disciples.

On the other hand, Tractate Sanhedrin is a collection of judicial processes tried before the Great Sanhedrin in office of the Jewish supreme court. Accordingly, Tractate Sanhedrin has records of only five Christian to have been tried before the supreme court – perhaps more of them were so tried but records thereof were inexistent at the time of writing the baraitah. Not even need the five to have been tried at the same time; B. Sanh. 43a just says that they were tried in the same manner, that is, the charges were the same, the defendants mentioned the scriptures to plead not-guilty, and the court issued a decision of the same description – by deploying the precedent of Yeshu’s case.

ynquirer

noah

I think I’ve addressed most of the issues you’ve arisen. There still are two issues that remain unaddressed, though. In the first place, Yeshu’s closeness either to the royalty or to the government; secondly, the theory that Yeshu lived a hundred years before Jesus the Nazarene. Both your points stand or fall down together.

As far as I know, the sole attempt to find a real – not only linguistic – connection between Yeshu and “the government� is to have Yeshu live more than a hundred years before Jesus and be a disciple of R. Joshua b. Perahiah. Perachiah and Shimon b. Shetah were the leading Pharisees in the early first century BCE.

In 93 BCE Alexander Jannaeus, aka John Hyrcanus, king of Israel (104 to 78 BCE) and a partisan of the Sadducees, started a persecution of the Pharisees. Shimon b. Shetah was brother to Salome Alexandra, the King’s daughter-in-law. The Pharisee was protected by her sister while his associate Joshua b. Perahiah, who lacked Shetah’s connection to the government, fled to Alexandria, Egypt with a disciple of him that is unnamed in any censured version of the Talmud. Now, there is a theory according to which this unknown disciple is the same Yeshu whose execution is narrated in B. Sanh. 43a. The ratio decidendi for such a connection is an anonymous remark in B. Sotah 47a that this disciple “practiced magic and led Israel astray� – roughly the same charges of which Yeshu was convicted.

The connection is deceptive because of the following reason. The theory mistakes Perahiah’s disciple for Shimon b. Shetah. It is the latter one that was close to “the government� – his sister was the King’s daughter-in-law. Yet, neither Perahiah nor his disciple was any close to “the government,� and accordingly he had to join his teacher in escaping from Judea.

If the connection fails, because Perahiah’s disciple, aka pseudo-Yeshu, was not any close to either the government or the royalty, what is then the default hypothesis? IMHO it is assuming that Yeshu = Jesus the Nazarene, and Malkut = King David’s bloodline.

Apikorus

ynquirer, it is highly unlikely that Yeshu was punished by hanging, because there is no provision in Jewish law for such a form of capital punishment. If you read on in Mishnah Sanhedrin you'll learn that there were four mechanisms of capital punishment: (1) stoning, (2) burning, (3) decapitation, and (4) strangulation (which is not hanging -- read the delightful description of strangulation in pereq 7 of Mishnah Sanhedrin).

Hanging was only done after stoning, as the Mishnah makes clear, and only for certain crimes, as the Mishnah again makes clear.

ynquirer

I know that, Apikorus. This is the reason why I think that, should the theory that the Talmud's Yeshu was hanged alive prevail, it would provide strong support to the gospels’ testimony that Yeshu/Jesus has hanged from a cross by the Romans, not the Jews.