September 12: Talmud on Jesus’ disciples, ministry and death / disciples

David Vishanoff

Tuesday, July 21st, 2015

Assignment

First, read Peter Schafer, Jesus in the Talmud, pp. 41-129, keeping in mind the following questions:

• Again, just name and list for yourself the different images of Jesus that we see in these chapters.
• What more can you say about how the Talmud constructs its images of Jesus? Is it parodying the Gospels, exploiting inconsistencies in the Gospels, or simply contradicting them?
• What do you think motivates these depictions of Jesus?
• Do these images of Jesus violate something about who Jesus essentially is, or are they just another interpretation of the same person from a different perspective?
• Is it ethical to say such things about a religious figure? Or is it least understandable given the Rabbis’ situation, presuppositions, and goals?
• Are you convinced that the Talmud really is speaking about Jesus in all the passages Schafer quotes? Why do you think he is so bent on finding every possible connections to Jesus in the Talmud? What purpose does his scholarship serve?

Then write a first draft of your gospel’s account of Jesus calling his disciples or gathering followers (or some equivalent that makes sense for your gospel).

• Try to respond a bit, at least in your comments, to the way the Talmud presents his disciples.
• Keep refining your idea of the purpose, tone, audience, and context you want your gospel to have.
• Please put this section of your gospel on our web site as a new page, with your gospel as its parent page so that it shows up as a subheading under your gospel.
• OR, if you aren’t yet clear enough about how to proceed with your gospel, spend your time writing an introduction spelling out the goals and form you want your gospel to take.
• OR, if what you really need right now is to do some background reading, just create a “bibliography” page, start adding sources to it, and add some notes about potentially useful background and ideas you have found in your reading of one of those sources.

Today in class I will ask how everyone is doing on their practical steps toward life after graduation!

Notes from class

We are still not convinced that in every instance the Talmud is responding to specific elements of the New Testament Gospels, or to specific instances of Christian-Jewish-Christian polemics. Some allusions to Jesus are clearly responding to Christian teachings (like the five Biblical puns on imaginary disciples’ names which refute five Christian teachings about Jesus), but others seem more like simple Jesus bashing than like sophisticated responses (like Jesus’ punishment in boiling excrement, which can’t really be about the Eucharist). But we think we came up with a good explanation for these Talmudic jabs at Jesus:

• These are inside jokes, full of puns and allusions, directed only to other Rabbis who will get all the obscure allusions, and intended mainly to feed their own collective scorn of Christians.
• That scorn is a defensive response to the competition for adherents and for authority that Christians present, and also to the early history of polemics that went both ways between Christians and Jews.
• In one case that defense is not just a joke, but a proud affirmation of the Christian charge that the Jews killed Jesus: yes, they say, we did, and we were right to do so.

This puts in historical perspective our current sensitivity about Christian antisemitism, and about offending people generally. Neither the early Christians nor the Rabbis seem to have been too worried about offending each other, or too offended by the other’s polemics, to which they responded in kind. We don’t think Schafer is trying to fan the flames of polemics, but rather is just trying to overcome the overly sensitive scholarship that has avoided talking about polemics that really happened. We appreciate that. I also appreciated our discussion of whether to shut down and exclude from our academic and national cultures all offensive and exclusionary speech, or whether to seek to understand those who utter it (as we have done with these Jewish polemics) and even engage them through personal relationships, affirming their humanity without affirming or promoting their views.