September 5: Jewish views / Talmud on the young Jesus / Birth narrative

David Vishanoff

Tuesday, July 21st, 2015

Assignment

1) First, for an overview of the kinds of things Jews have said about Jesus, read Gregory Barker & Stephen Gregg, Jesus Beyond Christianity: The Classic Texts, pp. 9-74.

2) Then, for a closer look at what one Jewish text has to say about Jesus, read Peter Schafer, Jesus in the Talmud, pp. 1-40. As you read, focus on these things. (You don’t have to answer these in writing; just be prepared to address them in class.)

• Make a list of the main images of Jesus that the Talmud presents: illegitimate child, bad student, etc.
• Are any of these images still around today in any form?
• How does the Talmud construct its images of Jesus? Does it tell stories, make theological arguments, present historical evidence, or…?
• Do these images of Jesus have some objective basis in prior texts, traditions, or historical evidence? Or are they strictly fictitious, polemical attacks? Or do they seem like reasonable interpretations of Jesus when seen from the perspective of the Rabbis?

3) Next, take a first experimental stab at writing your own Gospel:

• Settle on a tentative plan for what you want your gospel to be. (If you want to see last year’s gospels for inspiration, you can find them at http://jesusfall2016.vishanoff.com/. They are not all equally well developed, of course, but the variety of approaches might spark your thinking.)
• Identify at least one promising source for your background research.
• Post a first draft a birth narrative, or something that will take its place in your gospel if you will not have a birth narrative, or if you aren’t writing a narrative at all.
• Use the Comments feature to explain the choices you made in writing that birth narrative.

Here are some step by step instructions for creating your narrative on the web site:

• Log in using your OU 4×4 and the password “listening”. (The login link is under Users in the Navigation sidebar on the left.)
• Once logged in you will be able to see a toolbar at the top of the page; follow the link there to the WordPress dashboard, the “back end” where you will create your gospel pages.
• First go to Users/Your Profile, click on generate password, type in the password you want to use, check the “confirm use of weak password” box if necessary, and click Update Profile.
• To create a new section of your gospel go to Pages/Add New, type or paste in your writing, under Discussion check “Allow comments,” and under Page Attributes set Parent to the name of your gospel (near the bottom of the dropdown list, e.g. “The Gospel according to Zachary”) and set Order to 1 (if this is your first page; you must control the order in which pages appear in your gospel by numbering them sequentially). If you can’t find one of these options, click on the “screen options” tab near the upper right corner, and make sure the “discussion” and “page attribute” boxes are checked.
• Click Publish, then use the toolbar at the top to go back to the “front end” of the site, verify that your new page appears where it should under Student Gospels.
• To add a comment, select a phrase or paragraph in your text and then type in the comment window on the right.

Please be prepared to explain what you’ve written to the rest of us in class.

4) Finally, read the drafts others have posted so far in their “gospels,” and post a few comments, suggestions, or questions.

Notes from class

We were convinced by most if not all of Schafer’s discoveries of hints and allusions to Jesus in the Talmud, but we were not really convinced by Schafer’s argument that the Talmud’s narrative is deliberately responding to details of the Christian Gospels:

• The Talmud does give a counter-narrative that differs from that of the Gospels: Jesus is an illegitimate child and a bad student who learns magic in Egypt, leads Israel to idolatry, and commits some kind of sexual immorality.
• Schafer stresses that this is not historical information about Jesus, but entirely a construct.
• The Talmud constructs this counter-narrative by alluding to and parodying Gospel stories it assumes are known to its audience.
• But is it all a sophisticated response to specific details in the Gospels, as Schafer claims? It does counter at least indirectly the story of Jesus virgin birth, his lineage, his divinity, his teaching against the Jews, and his resurrection.
• But its main theme of sexual immorality, while it does go against the Christian doctrine of Jesus’ sinlessness, does not seem to be countering any particular part of the Gospels’ narrative. This part of the Talmud’s picture of Jesus sounds like just mean-spirited polemic invented simply because it was the worst accusation the Rabbis could think of.
• What motivated this polemic? We imagine that the Rabbis viewed Christianity as a competing sect of Judaism gone rogue. But only the Rabbis in Babylonia felt safe enough to put this polemic in writing; the Palestinians, who lived under Christian rule, did not, and later European Jews erased references to Jesus from some copies of the Talmud, presumably for fear of persecution.

In Barker’s survey of later Jewish writings we found three things:

• Some anti-Christian polemics seemed quite shallow, taking cheap shots at details that puzzled the Jewish author but would not have puzzled Christians at all. These authors seemed uninterested in understanding how Christians understood the Gospels, and seemed to be speaking out of insecurity or to justify themselves (which is common and understandable).
• We can see, however, that some of these Jewish interpretations made sense given the author’s own assumptions (e.g. that Jesus should be powerful, or that God should not hunger, or that religion should strengthen the nation).
• One common reinterpretation is that Jesus was a good teacher but not divine. This interpretation is shared by Muslims, many Jews, and many modern liberal Christians, and it makes sense given the modern post-Enlightenment shift toward viewing religion as about ethics rather than doctrine or ritual.

Apart from a few examples of apparently mean-spirited and shallow polemics, such reinterpretations from Jewish perspectives of a figure “owned” by Christians seems to us morally okay, because Jesus is not simply a historical person who must be respected for who he was (who he actually was being itself a matter of ideological debate), but a public symbol of controversial religious ideas that are quite properly matters of debate. To reinterpret Jesus is to debate ideas, not to abuse someone else’s cherished symbol.