The Talmud’s Portrayal of Jesus

While the Talmud undoubtedly has occasional allusions to Jesus of Nazareth,“Jesus is mentioned in the Talmud so sparingly that in relation to the huge quantity of literary production culminating in the Talmud, the Jesus passages can be compared to the proverbial drop in the yam ha-talmud” (“the sea of Talmud”; Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud, 2).

The possible references to Jesus in the Talmud are likely “dependent on popular corruptions of Christian gospel traditions” (Bockmuehl, This Jesus, 13). That is, they are responses to the spread of Christianity, not independent witnesses to the historical Jesus (Meier, A Marginal Jew, 1:98). The stories and sayings are intentionally derogatory and polemical. They reveal a basic picture of Jesus similar to the New Testament: his mother was Mary, he had disciples, he performed miracles, and he was executed. However, the Talmud also portrays Jesus as an illegitimate child, a failed student of a prominent rabbi, and an apostate from Judaism. The passages that offer chronological clues reveal that the historical period that Jesus belonged to had been forgotten. For example, the tradition that Jesus was a disciple of Rabbi Joshua ben Perachiah places Jesus in the 2nd century bc during the reign of the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus (r. 104–78 bc; b. Sanh. 107b; b. Sotah 47a).

The passages from the Talmud most commonly associated with Jesus of Nazareth are the texts referring to Yeshu, Ben Stada, and Ben Pandera. The latter name is sometimes rendered as “Panthera” or “Pantera” and is “reasonably identified with Jesus” (Van Voorst, Jesus Outside, 117). The name is probably a pun on the idea that Jesus was born of a virgin (parthenos in Greek); one passage equates Ben Stada (i.e., “son of Stada”) with Ben Pandera (i.e., “son of Pandera”), making Pandera the name of the man with whom Mary had an extramarital affair (b. Shabbat 104b). The name “Stada” is explained as an allusion to Mary’s unfaithfulness because the phrase satath da means “this one was faithless.” The story that Mary conceived Jesus out of wedlock with a Gentile soldier named Panthera was circulating among the Jews by the late 2nd century, as attested by Celsus (ca. 180; Origen, Against Celsus, 1.32). The charge of illegitimacy was an assertion that Jesus “should have no religious authority” (Van Voorst, Jesus Outside, 117).