Jacob the Heretic

Modern scholars are divided on whether the earliest forms of the Talmud contains direct references to Christianity. On the one hand stand scholars such as Peter Schäfer who sees the Gemara as containing developed reaction to Christianity, on the other scholars such as Daniel J. Lasker who see references to Christianity in the Talmud as "embryonic". Likewise a similar spectrum exists regarding the references to Jesus in the Talmud from, on the one hand, scholars like Maier (1978) who sees insertions of the name "Yeshu" into the Talmud as later interpolations in "Reaktion" to Christian "Provokation," and on the other those such as Joseph Klausner (1925) who argued that there were traces of the historical Jesus visible in Talmudic traditions. Related to these stories in the Talmud are those recounted by the pagan Celsus.

During the Disputation of Paris, 1240, and Disputation of Barcelona 1263, references to Jesus in the Talmud became a pretext for Christian persecution and Jehiel ben Joseph in Paris,[1] Nahmanides in Barcelona, defended the Jewish community from Christian inquisitors by denying that the "Yeshu" passages had anything to do with Christianity. Jacob ben Meir (1100-1171) and Jacob Emden (1697-1776) also took this position. In the censorship and self-censorship of the Talmud which followed Adin Steinsaltz notes that references to Christianity were censored out of the Talmud, even where the reference was not negative.[2]

Today scholars generally recognise some reference to Jesus in the Talmud but differ as to which texts are original.[3] Recently, some scholars have argued that the references to Jesus in the Talmud provide a more complex view of early Rabbinic-Christian interactions. Whereas the Pharisees were one sect among several others in the Second Temple era, the Amoraim and Tannaim sought to establish Rabbinic Judaism as the normative form of Judaism. Like the Rabbis, early Christians claimed to be working within Biblical traditions to provide new interpretations of Jewish laws and values. The sometimes blurry boundary between the Rabbis and early Christians provided an important site for distinguishing between legitimate debate and heresy. Scholars like Rabbi Jeffrey Rubenstein (PhD. in Religion from Columbia University; professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University) and Dr. Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmud at the University of California, Berkeley, argue that it was through the Yeshu narratives that Rabbis confronted this blurry boundary.[4][5]

Jeffrey Rubenstein has argued that the accounts in Chullin and Avodah Zarah reveal an ambivalent relationship between rabbis and Christianity. In his view the tosefta account reveals that at least some Jews believed Christians were true healers, but that the rabbis saw this belief as a major threat. Concerning the Babylonian Talmud account in Avoda Zarah, Dr. Boyarin views Jacob of Sechania as a Christian preacher and understands Rabbi Eliezer's arrest for minuth as an arrest by the Romans for practising Christianity (the text uses the word for heretic). When the Governor (the text uses the word for chief judge) interrogated him, the Rabbi answered that he "trusted the judge." Boyarin has suggested that this was the Jewish version of the Br'er Rabbit approach to domination, which he contrasts to the strategy of many early Christians, who proclaim their beliefs in spite of the consequences (i.e. martyrdom). Although Rabbi Eliezer was referring to God, the Governor interpreted him to be referring to the Governor himself, and freed the Rabbi. According to them the account also reveals that there was greater contact between Christians and Jews in the 2nd century than commonly believed. They view the account of the teaching of Yeshu as an attempt to mock Christianity. According to Dr. Rubenstein, the structure of this teaching, in which a biblical prooftext is used to answer a question about Biblical law, is common to both the Rabbis and early Christians. The vulgar content, however, may have been used to parody Christian values. Dr. Boyarin considers the text to be an acknowledgment that Rabbis often interacted with Christians, despite their doctrinal antipathy.[4]

R. Travers Herford used a translation of the passages which named Jacob's hometown as Sama in the first account strictly speaking the name of a town nine miles away from Sakhnin (the account is mentioned in corresponding passages of the Jerusalem Talmud (Avodah Zarah 2:2 IV.I), and Babylonian Talmud (Avodah Zarah 27b) where his home town is Sama in the former but Sakhnin (Aramaic Shekhania) in the latter). As a result of the variant reading Herford considered the question of whether the account is about the same Jacob or not, but concluded that it is.[6] Saul Lieberman who compared early manuscripts to identify copying errors found Sakhnin to be the correct reading.