WHO IS JESUS TO THE JEWS?

WHO IS JESUS TO THE JEWS?

For Jews, Jesus is not the Messiah. He is a sorcerer whom a court condemned, and that is written down in the Babylonian Talmud tractate Sanhedrin folio 43. That page was torn out of every printed edition for more than 400 years. Today, you are going to read it in full, line by line, and you are going to see who erased it and with whose permission. But that is only the first of five distinct answers Judaism has given about the same man. You are going to hear all of them, and the one that will surprise you most is not the oldest or the most recent. It is the one in the middle, and it was signed by the most influential rabbi in Jewish history. If you think this deserves to be treated with the sources in hand, hit like now. If by the halfway point you think otherwise, take it back and that is fine. One clarification before we begin. Almost nothing here is from the Bible. These are real, verifiable documents, but from outside scripture. Our position does not move a millimeter, and you will hear it clearly at the end. An informed believer is not afraid to read someone who thinks differently; they are afraid of being told a distorted version. Let us start with the only thing nobody disputes. Jesus was Jewish. He was born into a Jewish family, he debated Torah with Jewish teachers, he observed Jewish festivals, and he died in Jerusalem during Passover. His first followers were Jewish, and the movement that started with him was not a new religion. It was one more current within a Judaism that already had Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots. Then at some point between the year 30 and the year 100, that current broke from the trunk. It was not a single day. It was a process of friction, expulsions, bitter arguments, and in time, blood. And out of that friction came what we are about to read. Not calm biographies, but verbal weapons. Writings designed so that a Jew who encountered a Christian missionary in the marketplace would have a ready answer on his lips. Now, the erased page. The Talmud is an enormous collection. It is not a book; it is a library. Discussions by Jewish teachers on law, ritual, ethics, medicine, agriculture, dreams, everything. It was assembled over centuries, and the most complete version, the Babylonian, was composed in Persia under the Sasanian Empire, roughly between the third and seventh centuries. Hold on to that geographical detail because in a few minutes it is going to explain something almost nobody connects. Within that library there is a tractate called Sanhedrin which discusses how courts and executions worked. And in folio 43, in the middle of a dry technical discussion about whether a herald should announce a verdict before or during the condemned man’s transfer, a line suddenly appears that has nothing technical about it. The section says that on the eve of Passover, they hanged Yeshu. That for 40 days before the execution, a herald went out to proclaim that this man was going to be stoned because he had practiced sorcery and had seduced Israel into straying. That anyone who knew something in his favor should come forward and speak for him, and that since no one came forward, they hanged him on the eve of Passover. Stop for a second at that scene. Imagine the streets of Jerusalem packed for the festival, pilgrims arriving from Galilee, from Alexandria, from Babylon, lambs crowded in the temple’s enclosures. And in the middle of that noise, a man walking every day for over a month, shouting the name of the condemned and asking someone, anyone, to come defend him. Forty days of public invitation, forty days of silence. It is a powerful scene, and it is point by point the exact inversion of what the gospels tell. Hold on to that sensation because in a few minutes you will understand why it fits so well in reverse. It is not coincidence, it is design.

Now, there is a detail that history channels usually present as a flaw in the passage, and it actually is not. You may have noticed that the herald announces stoning, but the paragraph ends with hanging. It sounds like a contradiction, like a paragraph badly stitched together, and the truth is it is not. And this can be verified in the Mishna, which is the oldest layer of written rabbinic law. In tractate Sanhedrin chapter 6 Mishna 4, the Mishna describes the procedure for stoning with an uncomfortable level of detail the height of the platform, who does the pushing, who throws the first stone, and after that it discusses the matter of hanging the body. Rabbi Eleazar holds that all who are stoned are then hung. The sages respond that only the blasphemer and the idolater are hung. The biblical basis for all of this is Deuteronomy 21 22 and 23, where the text speaks of hanging on a tree someone who has been executed with the express order not to leave the body there overnight. In other words, hanging was not the execution. It was the public display of the body after the execution. And notice the exact charges the herald announces, sorcery and leading Israel into idolatry. Precisely the two categories that according to the sages do require the body to be hung. The paragraph is not broken. It is following a legal procedure to the letter, which for the purposes of whoever wrote it is even more devastating. It does not say they killed him. It says we processed him correctly and the law condemned him. And the end of that section is almost never quoted. At the close of the execution account, a teacher named Ula objects. He asks mockingly whether anyone would really expect to search for evidence in favor of a man like this, a seducer whom the Torah commands us not to pity, citing Deuteronomy 13. And the response he gets is a single line, and it is the strangest line in the entire passage. With this one, it was different because he was close to the government, close to the government, close to those in power. In a passage that denies absolutely everything Christians say about him, that splinter remains embedded. This case received special treatment because the man had connections above. No one knows for certain what that refers to, and there we will leave it for now because there is something more urgent. The other passage, the one about the birth. And this one is harder to read. A tone warning. What follows was written by people in theological war with Christians, and it responds to things just as harsh that Christians wrote about them. We are not reading it to accuse anyone. We are reading it to understand how two communities that came from the same trunk told opposite stories about the same man. In tractate Shabbat folio 104, there is a discussion about what constitutes writing on the Sabbath. Someone asks whether scratching letters into your own skin counts as writing. And in the middle of that completely dry legal discussion, Rabbi Eleazar drops an example. Did not Ben Stada bring sorceries out of Egypt by scratching them onto his flesh? The others dismiss this quickly. They say that man was a fool and you cannot draw legal proofs from a fool. But the discussion cannot let go of the name, and so a secondary discussion opens, and that is the one that really matters. Why do they call him Ben Stada if he was the son of Pandera? Rav Hda answers that the mother’s husband was named Stada and the lover who fathered him was named Pandera. Someone else replies that the husband was Pappos ben Yehuda, and another clarifies that the mother was Miriam, the one who braided women’s hair. And the name Stada, the passage says, comes from a saying in the city of Pumbadita. She strayed from her husband. There is the full attack in three lines of a Sabbath discussion. The mother’s name is Miriam, that is Mary. The nickname is not a name; it is a word play meaning unfaithful. The real father is not the husband, and the son learned magic in Egypt, which is exactly where the gospels say the family fled when the child was young. It is the enunciation told backwards, sentence by sentence. And now I have to stop because if I continue without putting up a warning, I would be doing exactly what I criticize in other channels. That identification is not a settled fact. It is an open academic debate, and a fairly ugly one. The medieval Jewish commentators themselves, the Tosafot, rejected the identification of Ben Stada with the Nazarene, and they did so on chronological grounds. The character appears associated with the city of Lud and with Pappos ben Yehuda, who lived more than a century later. Some modern scholars have proposed that Ben Stada was a different Egyptian born sorcerer, one of the type Josephus mentions. And in the twentieth century, the debate polarized into two extremes. On one side, Travers Herford, who in 1903 saw references to the Nazarene in virtually every corner of rabbinic literature. On the other, Johan Maier, who in 1978 did the most meticulous work ever done on these texts and concluded that almost none of them served to tell us anything about the historical Jesus. Between those two extremes stands Peter Schaefer of Princeton with a 2007 book called Jesus in the Talmud, and his thesis is the one I find most solid, though not everyone shares it. Schaefer argues that these passages do speak about Jesus, but that they are not historical memory. They are response literature. He argues they show a remarkable familiarity with the gospels, especially Matthew and John, and that they function as a deliberate counternarrative, a parody built on top of the Christian text. And here, two things must be separated that are almost always confused. That a document is authentic does not mean its content is true. A trial record is authentic, and inside it there can be false statements from beginning to end. The Talmud exists, is dated, and is studied today in academies around the world. Celsus’s work exists, and we have it because a Christian copied it out sentence by sentence in order to refute it. The Munich manuscript can be seen in Bavaria. All of that is real, and not a single serious scholar disputes it. What does not hold up is the portrait, and there is no need for me to assert that the way it is constructed gives it away. Built directly on top of the Christian narrative, answering it point by point. Look at it this way, and it fits in an almost architectural manner. Christians say he was born of a virgin. The response says he was born of adultery. Christians say he performed miracles. The response says he performed magic learned in Egypt. Christians say the people loved him. The response says there were 40 days to defend him and no one spoke. Christians say he was condemned in an irregular night trial. The response says the procedure was impeccable. Every claim has its inverted mirror image. It is not a biography; it is a mirror. And this was not a literary exercise; it was practical. Think of a Jew in the fourth century in Babylon or Alexandria or Rome who runs into a Christian preacher in the marketplace. That preacher has a complete, coherent, compelling narrative. If the Jew has nothing to answer, the other person wins the conversation. These texts are the response that was memorized and taught. Now, something that is almost always overlooked and that I think is the most honest thing in this whole matter. The accusation of sorcery was not invented by the rabbis. It is in the gospels in Mark 3 22. The scribes who come down from Jerusalem say that Jesus casts out demons by the prince of demons. They do not deny that things are happening; they dispute the source of the power. And that is exactly the logic of the Talmudic passage. The problem was never whether he did extraordinary things. The problem was where the power came from, which means the polemic is ancient. Ancient enough to be recorded inside the New Testament itself. And there is another proof of that antiquity from an unexpected place. A pagan philosopher. Around the year 178, a Platonist named Celsus wrote an attack on Christianity titled The True Discourse. The work was lost. We know it because roughly 70 years later, around the year 248, Origen of Alexandria wrote an enormous refutation called Against Celsus. And in order to refute it, he quoted it paragraph by paragraph. Thanks to the enemy, we preserved the critic. And in that work, Celsus does something curious. He does not speak in the first person. He constructs a Jewish character who debates with the Nazarene, and through the mouth of that character, he claims that Mary was rejected by her carpenter husband after becoming pregnant by a soldier named Pantheras. Pantheras. Pandera. Note the date. We are around the year 178. That is more than a century before the Talmudic passages we just read were composed, and the one telling it is a pagan who says he is reporting what Jews say. This is as close as we will get to dating the tradition. It does not prove it is true. It proves it was already circulating in the second century, that it did not originate in Babylon, and that it reached the ears of a Greek philosopher who used it as ammunition against Christians. Origen of course dismisses it as slander. And here we reach the point where the topic stops being ancient and becomes modern because we need to talk about why you, if you open a Talmud today, will probably find none of this. This is the moment to subscribe, and I will tell you exactly why. What comes next is the missing piece that makes everything above make sense, and it is the part that gets talked about least. For centuries, the Talmud circulated in handwritten copies, and in those medieval manuscripts, the passages are complete. There is one in particular that must be named. It is known as Hebrew Codex 95, and it is held at the Bavarian State Library in Munich. A scribe named Solomon, son of Samson, finished copying it in France in the year 1342. It is the only complete manuscript of the Babylonian Talmud to survive in the entire world and the only one without Christian censorship. UNESCO inscribed it in its Memory of the World Register. And there in that volume a detail occurs that gives me chills. Of all the manuscript witnesses to that passage about the execution, only the Munich manuscript preserves the full name. It does not just say Yeshu. It says Yeshu the Nazarene. The problem begins with the printing press. When the Talmud began to be printed in Europe in the sixteenth century, it stopped being a discrete object circulating within a community and became a visible, controllable product that required permits, and the church granted them with conditions. In 1554, a papal bull was issued introducing censorship over the Talmud and other Hebrew works. Five years later, the Talmud was placed on the first Index of Forbidden Books. Then came a phase of negotiation. In 1564, Pope Pius IV lifted the prohibition, but with two conditions that the text be censored and that the word Talmud not appear on the cover. That is why even today many editions are simply called Shas. And between 1578 and 1581 in Basel, a complete edition was published under the permission of Pope Gregory XIII, supervised by the ecclesiastical censor Marco Marino. It is the most heavily altered edition in the history of the text. Entire passages changed until they were unrecognizable. Picture the scene. A Swiss print shop, cases of movable Hebrew type, a Jewish editor who knows exactly what is about to be lost, working beside a clergyman with a list of marked paragraphs and a decision to make on every page. Cut it, or print nothing at all. They cut, and those cuts were inherited. The Vilna edition of the nineteenth century, which is the basis of almost every Talmud studied in the world today, carries the gaps. That is why on folio 43 of Sanhedrin there is that blank space at the bottom of the page with the commentary of a medieval rabbi wrapping around an emptiness, and a detail that is usually told the wrong way around. It is sometimes said that it was the Jews themselves who changed the names when copying by hand to protect themselves from reprisals. And yes, there was self censorship and there was caution, and probably some of those strange nicknames functioned as a shield. But the large systematic eraser, the one that produced the text that circulates today, did not come from within. It came with papal permission and a censor being paid for the work, which produces an irony worth sitting with. The reason there needs to be a video today explaining what Jews said about Jesus is that for 400 years they were not permitted to say it in writing. And now we go to the Middle Ages, where the most uncomfortable text in this entire story appears. It is called the Toledot Yeshu, which means the generations or the life of Yeshu, and it is not a legal treatise or a commentary. It is a novel. It takes the scattered fragments we just read and sews them into a continuous narrative with characters, dialogue, and plot. The illegitimate birth, the theft of God’s divine name from the temple as the source of his miracle working power, a magic duel in midair against an emissary of the sages, and a final scene in which the body is hidden to simulate a resurrection. It is point by point an anti gospel. About the date, caution is needed because it is often repeated that it is simply medieval, and the reality is stranger. The earliest external attestations are from Agobard, Archbishop of Lyon, around 826, and his successor Amulo about 20 years later. Both complain that the Jews in their city tell that story. The oldest Aramaic manuscripts we have come from the Cairo Geniza and date to the tenth century. But two recent linguistic analyses date the dialect of those versions to around the year 500. And the Aramaic points east to Babylon, to Iraq, not to Christian Europe, where no Jew in his right mind would have dared put something like that in writing and circulate it. Go back to the data point I asked you to hold on to at the beginning. The Babylonian Talmud was composed in Sasanian Persia. The Toledot Yeshu probably also originated in the east. And what did those places have in common? They were not under Christian power. The harshest Jewish writings about the Nazarene were not written where there was the most hatred. They were written where there was the least risk. And that is an enormous difference because the rabbinic sources from the land of Israel, which was under Roman and later Byzantine control, are far more silent on the subject. Silence is not always indifference; sometimes it is calculation. And with that we come to the man who closes the Middle Ages and opens everything that follows. Moses ben Maimon, the Rambam. He is probably the most influential Jewish thinker of the last thousand years. He codified all of Jewish law in a monumental work, the Mishneh Torah, and wrote the Guide for the Perplexed, which Thomas Aquinas read and cited. When someone says Judaism has a philosophical backbone, they are talking about this man. And here I need to correct something that is constantly repeated when this story is told, even in serious materials. It is usually said that Maimonides lived surrounded by a triumphant Christianity and that this is why he expressed his views about the Nazarene. That is wrong geography. He was born in Cordoba around 1138 under Muslim rule at the end of the great era when he was about 10. The Almohads took the city and gave Jews and Christians the choice of converting to Islam or leaving. His family ended up leaving. He went to Fez in Morocco, which was also Almohad territory with the same dangerous double life. He spent time briefly in Palestine, then in Crusader hands, and around 1166, he settled in Fustat, old Cairo in Egypt, where he lived the rest of his life, led the Jewish community, and became the court physician of Saladin. He wrote the Mishneh in Muslim territory. And there, the pattern you have already seen returns. He wrote where no Christian censor could reach him. In the final section of his code in the Laws of Kings chapter 11, Maimonides defines what the Messiah is and how he is recognized. And he establishes a criterion that is devastating in its simplicity. If a candidate fails to gather the dispersed, rebuild the temple, and restore observance, or if he is killed before completing this, then he is not the promised redeemer. He is one more king of the house of David who died and God raised him up to test the multitude. And then he names him directly. He says that Jesus of Nazareth who aspired to be the Messiah and was executed by the court had already been foretold in Daniel 11 verse 14, where the text speaks of the lawless among your people who exalt themselves to fulfill the vision but stumble. And he asks, can there be a greater stumbling than this? Because he says, all the prophets spoke of the Messiah as the redeemer of Israel, the one who gathers the dispersed and strengthens the keeping of the commandments. And what happened was the opposite. Jews killed by the sword, the survivors scattered and humiliated, the Torah altered, and the greater part of the world serving a God who is not the Lord. It is a devastating indictment, and that paragraph was removed from almost every printed edition since the Venice edition of 1574. The same scissors, the same century. What can be read in full today comes from Yemenite manuscripts and from editions printed before the censorship. But here is the part that is almost never told, and it is the reason I wanted to make this video. The paragraph does not end there. Maimonides continues and shifts register entirely. He says that the Creator’s thoughts are beyond the reach of human understanding because His ways are not our ways. And then he writes that everything done by Jesus of Nazareth and by the Ishmaelite who rose after him serves to smooth the path for the King Messiah and to straighten the entire world. He does not say Islam. He says the Ishmaelite who came after. And he explains how the world, he argues, has already been filled with the mention of the Messiah, of the Torah, and of the commandments spread to the most remote islands and among peoples who would never otherwise have heard of them. So that when the true one arrives, the world will already have the vocabulary to recognize him. Read that again slowly. The most important rabbi of the Middle Ages in the same paragraph where he says the Nazarene stumbled says that the religion that came out of him is preparing the world for redemption. Which means the idea that Judaism only began to look at Jesus with something other than contempt in the modern era is false. The functional reading, the one that finds him a place within God’s plan, was already written in the twelfth century, and it was also censored incidentally because it came attached to the other half. Two erasers over the same paragraph. One to cover the accusation, the other in passing to cover the acknowledgement. And since we are on Maimonides’s criteria, it is worth understanding them properly. Because when an observant Jew says Jesus is not the Messiah, they are not saying something arbitrary. They are applying a list of requirements that can be read in the Hebrew Bible. Start with what can be seen from the window. The prophet’s expectation is concrete and verifiable to the naked eye. Gather the exiles, rebuild the temple, end wars. Isaiah 11 12 speaks of gathering the dispersed from the four corners of the earth. Isaiah 2 4 speaks of swords beaten into plowshares and nations that will no longer learn war. And from the Jewish perspective, none of that happened. On the contrary, the temple fell in the year 70, 40 years later, and the dispersion deepened. Below that is a bloodline problem. The Messiah must descend from David through the paternal line, and there a crack appears within the Christian narrative itself. If there was no biological father, Joseph’s genealogy transmits nothing. The answer comes through the concept of legal paternity, and it is a serious answer. But it does not close the objection for those who require physical descent. And beneath the bloodline, there is something even harder. The Torah itself, the law, is declared eternal. And Deuteronomy 13 establishes that anyone who comes to turn the people away from the commandments, even if they perform signs, must be rejected. Notice the bitter elegance of that argument. The miracle does not validate the messenger. What validates the messenger is the content. That is why the charges of sorcery and leading Israel astray always travel together in these passages. They are never two counts. They are one. All of that rests on a sentence an observant Jew recites twice a day. Deuteronomy 6 4, The Lord is one. From there, the Messiah is a human king, not God incarnate. And the incarnation stops being a debatable doctrine and becomes a line that cannot be crossed. And when someone asks why they do not accept the testimony of the apostles, the answer is not about the apostles. It is about the standard of proof. Jewish faith rests on a national revelation, an entire multitude standing before a mountain, not on what a small group of witnesses reported. To that are added the translation debates, which are the most widely known. Isaiah 7 14, where the Hebrew word almah means young woman, while the specific word for virgin is betulah, and where the context of chapters 7 and 8 points to a sign for King Ahaz in his own century. And Isaiah 53, where the suffering servant is read collectively as Israel itself, the wounded people among the nations, a reading Rashi consolidated in the eleventh century, and that has genuine internal logic. Israel has suffered that way. Each of those objections has a Christian answer, some of them quite elaborate, and this is not the video to develop them. What matters today is to understand that the refusal is not stubbornness or blindness. It is a coherent system with explicit criteria applied consistently for 2,000 years to every candidate. Not only this one. Bar Kokhba in the second century was supported by Rabbi Akiva, one of the greatest sages. And when the man died in battle, the verdict was the same. He died, therefore he was not. Sabbatai Zevi, who in 1665 swept along entire Jewish communities and the following year converted to Islam to save his life. Same verdict. The criterion was not invented to exclude Jesus. It was applied to him the way it was applied to everyone. And the case of Bar Kokhba is not something I am bringing in from outside. Maimonides brings it in himself a few lines earlier as proof that the Messiah does not need to perform signs or wonders. He recalls that Rabbi Akiva, one of the greatest sages of the Mishna, held that that man was the Messiah King and that the sages of his generation thought the same until he was killed. And then they knew he was not. And he adds a detail that dismantles any argument about miracles. The sages never asked him for a single sign.

Now the turn. For nearly 1,800 years, what you have just heard was virtually the entire repertoire. Polemic, distance, counternarrative. And then in the nineteenth century, something happened that no one could have predicted. A group of German Jewish intellectuals began to read the gospels differently. Context matters. This was the era of emancipation when European Jews began to gain access to universities and citizenship. And a movement called the Science of Judaism was born, dedicated to studying Jewish history with academic method. And within that movement, Abraham Geiger, one of the founders of Reform Judaism, made an extraordinary move. Geiger read the New Testament and concluded that Jesus taught nothing that was not already inside the Judaism of his time. That he was in essence a Pharisee. That his parables, his ethics, his way of debating the law are Jewish from beginning to end. And realize what that implies, because it is not a conciliatory gesture. It is an intellectual offensive. If the man from Nazareth is an ordinary Jewish teacher, then Christianity is not the surpassing of Judaism, but its product. German Protestant theologians reacted with fury. Heinrich Graetz, the great Jewish historian hostile to Geiger on almost everything else, reached similar conclusions on this point, and from there the movement accelerates. Claude Montefiore in England, Joseph Klausner who in 1922 published in Jerusalem the first complete book about Jesus written in modern Hebrew by a Jew in the land of Israel, arguing there that he can only be understood as a Jew who tried to reform his own religion and who died a devout Jew. Leo Baeck, the last great rabbi of pre catastrophe Germany, writing about him with respect in the darkest years, and Martin Buber, the philosopher of encounter, who in Two Types of Faith from 1950, calls him without detour his great brother. That phrase must be understood properly because it is constantly misquoted. Buber is not saying the Nazarene is the Messiah or the son of God or anything of the kind. He is making two moves at once. Toward Jewish tradition, he elevates him to elder brother, a figure of his own, someone of the family. And toward Christian tradition, he lowers him. He is the great brother of the Jewish people, not the incarnate god of the creed. It is a claim of ownership. He comes home, but he comes back as one of us. And here I genuinely ask you, which weighs more, a thousand years of attacking him or the shift to reclaiming him as their own? Leave it in the comments. And that line continues to the present with force in the twentieth century. And in this one, David Flusser in Jerusalem, Geza Vermes, Shalom Benhorin and his book Brother Jesus. Scholars like Amy Jill Levine, an observant Jew and professor of New Testament who in 2019 became the first Jew to teach New Testament at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. Or Daniel Boyarin, who has argued that several ideas we assume to be exclusively Christian were already alive within first century Judaism. None of them says Jesus is the Messiah. All of them say he is theirs. And there is a hard historical reason behind this change that cannot be prettied up. Opinions about him always followed the relations between communities. It is very difficult for a man to write warmly about a figure whose shadow historically fell across them as a threat, and much easier when that threat recedes into the past.