Apikorus

Apparently Rabbi Yechiel wasn't too proud of this tradition when he defended the Talmud from extermination in 1240. To say that he was anxious would be an understatement.

B. Sanh. 43a refers to someone named Yeshu who practiced sorcery, had disciples, and enticed Israel to apostasy is executed on the eve of Passover. Even the very skeptical Hyam Maccoby agrees this refers to the Christian Jesus. The name Yeshu itself is anomalous without the final ayin, and thus draws suspicion.

Ecrasez L'infame

This is a genuine question, not a trick or anything. How do we all know that Malchus here means government (or whatever), and isn't someone's name? I recall from John 18:10 that the high priest's servant is Malchus, so it seems it was a name in use.

Thanks

Robert

noah

It really doesn't matter what the GT says or how it uses or translates the word malchus. The GT is not a Jewish document. It's a Greek text and who knows what the transliteration was (using a chet and a samech, you could have it mean someone who would give pity to another, or drop the samech and insert a tav, and you have the description of a sailor.

John is the only one that even mentions this person of all of the "gospels". You'd think Peter would have noted him. John Gill in his commentary notes of a Syrian by that sounding name who was an enemy of Christianity.

Steven Avery

Apikorus, I just want to compliment you for an insightful and balanced description of the views and material here ( Maccaby, Gil Student, Hereford, Talmud, disputations, your own) with which I largely agree. (Do you have to change your position if we agree?) Also as I have discussed, Professor Schiffman has mentioned the Talmud anomalies, in response to attempts to counterpose the Talmud against the Gospels. Gil Student is perhaps the most excellent of the rabbinically-oriented writers, on the web and email forums, even if he is taking an essentially untenable position in this 'Jesus in the Talmud' debate.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

Apikorus

Robert, I pointed out above that the exact same construction, karov lemalkhut, is used elsewhere in the Talmud (B. Bava Qamma 83a and B. Sotah 49b) where in context it is absolutely clear that it means "associated with the government."

Thank you, Steven. I do believe that a more sensible and nuanced understanding of the Talmud is achieved by adopting a more realistic sociohistorical perspective. The same can be said, of course, regarding the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and indeed any ancient literature.

The traditional Jewish view has been to deny that Jesus is mentioned in the Talmud, at least when challenged by Christians. The agenda of the medieval rabbinic disputants such as Yechiel and Nachmanides was to defend the Talmud against charges of anti-Christian writings. These were serious charges, and in Yechiel's case he was defending the Talmud from extermination. It seems to me that the agenda of some modern Jewish sources is simply to deny or question the historicity of Jesus. Some (like R. Gil Student, if I read him correctly) are more driven by the same impulse as the medieval rabbis, to prove that the Talmud is not vulgar or anti-Christian. Indeed, it only takes about 0.2 seconds to google up a bunch of antisemitic links which demonize the Talmud.

While their readings are equally tendentious, I have more sympathy for the exegetical gyrations of my medieval ancestors than those of my modern cousins, since the former were under extreme duress.

As I stated earlier in this thread, I find that many "historical Jesus" scholars who adduce the Talmud do so without any broad understanding of the rabbinic literature, its modes of discourse, its unique language, rhetorical structures, etc. Like ynquirer, many of them read the Talmud from the standpoint of the New Testament, with predictable results.

ynquirer

Not from the empty set, certainly. The word MLKWT is used several times in at least three books of the Tanakh, always with the meaning of a royal quality: 1 Chr 29:25, Esth 1:7, 9, 11, 19, 6:8, 8:15, Dan 6:7. Noteworthy is Dan 6:7 – within the ‘Aramaic section’, 2:4-7:28 – in which it means “kingdom,� in the sense of “the realm organized as a Monarchy.�

Nevertheless, it is true that the phrase –QRWB- LMLKWT, of which I’ve found three occurrences in your link while none in the Tanakh, of unequivocal translation into English in B. Sotah 49b, supplies strong evidence in favour of the theory that the same phrase in B. Sanh. 43a also means “associated with the government� rather than “close to the royalty.�

My apologies for having overlooked the point the first time you mentioned it in reference to B. Bava Qamma 83a.

One must not overrate the significance of the point, though, since the notion that Yeshu was associated with the government was introduced by Ulla no sooner that 300 CE, as a possible explanation of a forty-day delay in Yeshu’s execution. It leaves untouched the problem of interpreting the omission of the stoning as a matter of fact in B. Sanh. 43a.

Apikorus

Well of course we know what the word malkut means in the Hebrew Bible. It also has a special place in the qabbalistic literature as well. But there is no need to go beyond the Talmud -- the word appears many more times therein. What is at issue, though, is the meaning of the construction karov lemalkut, and that, as I have shown, means "associated with the government" in Talmudic parlance.

In English, for example, the word "point" can have many meanings, but "beside the point" specifically carries the connotation of irrelevance. Similarly, "weather" has many potential meanings, but "under the weather" specifically connotes a state of illness.

Apparently you yourself felt that the issue was important enough to highlight in your opening post:This is utter nonsense, from start to finish.

noah

So? Doesn't mean it's JC. Yeshu and Jesus are two different names. Yeshu was a common name. So was Jesus. Could be literally thousands of people.
Most problematic for you, however, is the fact that this Yeshu lived 100 years or so before Jesus.

Again, where's the evidence it was JC? Others could be said to have practiced sorcery. Besides, nowhere in the New Testament was Jesus charged with sorcery

Please note that this Yeshu, not Jesus, had five disciples while JC had at least twelve. Appollonius had disciples. Since your criteria is that the name or the details does not have to match, why not claim this is Appollonius?
The big problem for you here of course, is that Sanhedrin 43a says that the five disciples were brought to trial. Is there any such claim in the GT? If so please show me where.

One more problem for you. The Synoptic Gospels have Jesus being executed on Passover itself and not the eve of Passover.

Unimpressive. He is just as liable to error as anyone. On what basis does Maccoby make this claim?

Nowhere in the GT is Jesus charged with leading Israel astray.

This is symptomatic of your entire argument. You think you have found something suspicious which might imply that this Yeshu is Jesus.
Nothing hard. No facts. No support for your assertion from the text itself.
In fact, I'd like to know why you are even insisting that this one text refers to the historical Jesus. Why not any text? Seriously. Since your only criteria, your only "proof", seems to be assumption based on possible implication regardless of the social and historical record and the actual content of the text itself, why do you not make the same argument in reference to the Bhagavad Ghita, specifically Chapter 10? Or let's roll out the Appollonius of Tyana bio and just call him the historical Jesus.
This blind insistence that Yeshu is the historical Jesus makes me wonder whether there is an ideology behind your position. Are you from the Jews for Jesus crowd?

Apikorus

Yeshu is an artificial name apparently derived from Yeshua, the Hebrew equivalent of Jesus. I know of no other instances of Yeshu outside the excerpts from the Talmud etc. which allegedly refer to Jesus. It is absolutely clear that the Toldot Yeshu is a derogatory retelling of the life of the Christian Jesus. Of this there can be no doubt, as this paragraph amply demonstrates:

He gathered about himself three hundred and ten young men of Israel and accused those who spoke ill of his birth of being people who desired greatness and power for themselves. Yeshu proclaimed, "I am the Messiah; and concerning me Isaiah prophesied and said, 'Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.'" He quoted other messianic texts, insisting, "David my ancestor prophesied concerning me: 'The Lord said to me, thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee.'"

(I suspect this paragraph itself is a later interpolation; the rabbis added a bit more flesh to the story as time went by. Most scholars suspect that it was originally composed in the 6th - 7th centuries CE, but all surviving versions contain medieval accretions. )

It also is quite clear that the Yeshu from Toldot Yeshu is the same Yeshu as in the Talmud, as TY reuses much of the Talmudic material regarding Yeshu, but also regarding ben Stada = ben Pandera. Note that Toldot Yeshu is also set in the time of Alexander Jannaeus (103 - 76 BCE).

The fact that Toldot Yeshu is set a century before the Christian Jesus is hardly fatal to the Yeshu = Jesus identification. The rabbis were not concerned with historical accuracy; anyone trying to use the Talmud as an historical document is in for a good deal of frustration. Again, the rabbis were largely responding to Christian claims. I very much doubt that the memory of Jesus survived among the Jews. The Jesus story was transmitted by Christian tradents; subsequent Jewish-Christian interaction in Palestine resulted in parts of the Jesus story filtering through to the writers of the Bavli.

Well, we can't ask Maccoby because he died in 2004. But his qualifications as a scholar mean that he has more credibility than just "anyone."

It isn't "blind insistence." It is the considered opinion of dozens of scholars of unimpeachable competence and authority. Even the Jewish Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Hebraica, both written by Jewish scholars, identify Yeshu with Jesus.

LOL! No. I'm from the "Jews for reading their own literature without a huge f'ing chip on their shoulder" crowd.

ynquirer

Nonsense? Well, it seems that the author of Toldot Yeshu, who according to you drew extensively on the Talmud, didn’t thought so. To be sure, Toldot Yeshu says that Joseph, the betrothed husband of Yeshu’s mother, belonged in the Davidic lineage. And, on that account, it is also reasonable to assume that Ulla’s remark in B. Sanh. 43a includes the phrase karov lemalkhut as meaning “close to the kingship.�

Therefore, we have two contradictory evidences. On the one hand, linguistic evidence, supplied by B. Sotah 49b and other Talmudic texts, in which karov lemalkhut means “associated with the government�; this is internal evidence. On the other, there is also external evidence, as provided by Toldot Yeshu, in which people writing closer to Yeshu’s time than we are made no mention of any association of Yeshu with the government while a relationship with kingship was expressly avowed.

NT scholarship would say that external evidence outdoes internal evidence, but, alas, nothing that NT scholarship says is any useful to understand the Talmud – Apikorus dixit. What does Jewish textual criticism say as regard conflictive external and internal evidence?