PASSAGES FROM THE RABBINICAL

LITERATURE,

ILLUSTRATING THE RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIANITY IN THE EARLY CENTURIES

DIVISION I

A.-PASSAGES RELATING TO JESUS

BIRTH AND PARENTAGE OF JESUS

6

(1) b. Shabbath 104b. (The passage in [ ] occurs also b. Sanh. 67.) "He who cuts upon his flesh." It is tradition that Rabbi Eliezer said to the Wise, Did not Ben Stada bring spells from Egypt in a cut which was upon his flesh?' They said to him, 'He was a fool, and they do not bring a proof from a fool.' [Ben Stada is Ben Pandira. Rab Hisda said,

6

The husband was Stada, the paramour was Pandira.' The husband was Pappos ben Jehudah, the mother was Stada. The mother was Miriam the dresser of women's hair, as we say in Pumbeditha, 'Such a one has been false to her husband.']

Commentary.

in

The above passage occurs in

a

1 I would here express generally my indebtedness to the work of Heinrich Laible, "Jesus Christus im Talmud," Berlin, 1891. In the section

discussion upon the words in the Mishnah which forbid all kinds of writing to be done on the Sabbath. Several kinds are specified, and among them the making of marks upon the flesh. The words at the beginning of the translation are the text, so to speak, of the Mishnah which is discussed in what follows. To illustrate the practice of marking or cutting the flesh, the compilers of the Gemara introduce a tradition (Baraitha, not included in the Mishnah, see above, p. 21) according to which R. Eliezer asked the question, 'Did not Ben Stada bring magical spells from Egypt in an incision upon his flesh?' His argument was that as Ben Stada had done this, the practice might be allowable. The answer was that Ben Stada was a fool, and his case proved nothing. Upon the mention however of Ben Stada, a note is added to explain who that person was, and it is for the sake of this note that the passage is quoted. First I will somewhat expand the translation, which I have made as bald and literal as I could.1

Ben Stada, says the Gemara, is the same as Ben Pandira. Was he then the son of two fathers? No. Stada was the name of the husband (of his mother), Pandira the name of her paramour. This is the opinion

of my work relating to Jesus I have made constant use of his book, and can hardly claim to have done more than rearrange his material and modify some of his conclusions. If it had not been my purpose to extend my own work over a wider field than that which he has so thoroughly explored, I should not have written at all.

1 In all the translations which I shall give, I shall make no attempt to write elegant English; I wish to keep as closely as possible to a word for word rendering, so that the reader who does not understand the original text may have some idea of what it is like, and what it really says. A flowing translation often becomes a mere paraphrase, and sometimes seriously misrepresents the original.

of Rab Ḥisda, a Babylonian teacher of the third century (A.D. 217-309). But that cannot be true, says the Gemara, because the husband is known to have been called Pappus ben Jehudah. Stada must have been not the father but the mother. because the mother was called women's hair? Miriam was her proper name, concludes the Gemara, and Stada a nickname, as people say in Pumbeditha Stāth dā, she has gone aside, from her husband.

But how can that be, Miriam the dresser of

The two names Ben Stada and Ben Pandira evidently refer to the same person, and that that person is Jesus is shown clearly by the fact that we sometimes meet with the full name Jeshu ben Pandira'-thus T. Hull, ii. 23, "in the name of Jeshu ben Pandira"; and also the fact that 'Jeshu' is sometimes found as a variant of Ben Stada' in parallel passages thus b. Sanh. 43a says, "On the eve of Pesaḥ (Passover) they hung Jeshu," while in the same tractate, p. 67, it is said, "Thus did they to Ben Stada in Lud, they hung him on the eve of Pesaḥ. Ben Stada is Ben Pandira, etc." Then follows the same note of explanation as in the passage from Shabbath which we are studying. (See below, p. 79).

There can be no reasonable doubt that the 'Jeshu' who is variously called Ben Stada and Ben Pandira is the historical Jesus, the founder of Christianity. It is true that the name Jeshu'a, though not common, was the name of others beside Jesus of Nazareth; and even in the New Testament (Col. iv. 11) there is mention of one Jesus who is called Justus. It is also true that the Jewish com

mentators on the Talmud try to prove that another Jesus is referred to, who is described in various passages as having been contemporary with R. Jehoshua ben Peraḥjah, about a century B.C. These passages will be dealt with hereafter.1 But when it is said, as in the passage referred to above (T. Ḥull, ii. 23), and elsewhere, that certain persons professed to be able to heal the sick in the name of "Jeshu ben Pandira,” it is impossible to doubt that the reference is to Jesus of Nazareth.

Various conjectures have been made in explanation of the epithets Ben Stada and Ben Pandira. In regard to the first, the explanation of the Gemara that Stada is a contraction of S'tāth dã is certainly not the original one, for it is given as a common phrase in use in Pumbeditha, a Babylonian town where there was a famous Rabbinical College. But the epithet Ben Stada in reference to Jesus was well known in Palestine, and that too at a much earlier date than the time of R. Hisda. This is shown by the remark of R. Eliezer, who lived at the end of the first century and on into the second. The derivation from S'tāth da would be possible in Palestine no less than in Babylonia; but it does not seem to have been suggested in the former country, and can indeed hardly be considered as anything more than a mere guess at the meaning of a word whose original significance was no longer known.2 It is impossible to say whether Stada originally denoted the mother or the father of Jesus; we can only be sure that it implied some contempt or mockery. I attach no value to the sug1 See below, p. 54, No. 8.

2 See below, p. 345, for a possible explanation of the name B. Stada.

1

gestion that Stada is made up of two Latin words, 'Sta, da,' and denotes a Roman soldier, one of the traditions being that the real father of Jesus was a soldier.

Of the term Ben Pandira also explanations have been suggested, which are far from being satisfactory. Pandira (also written Pandera, or Pantira, or Pantiri) may, as Strauss suggested (quoted by Hitzig in Hilgenfeld's Ztschft., as above), represent Eveрós, meaning son-in-law; but surely there is nothing distinctive in such an epithet to account for its being specially applied to Jesus. The name Pandira may also represent πάνθηρ (less probably πανθήρα, the final ā being the Aramaic article, not the Greek feminine ending); but what reason there was for calling Jesus the son of the Panther is not clear to me. Again, Pandira may represent Traplévos, and the obvious appropriateness of a name indicating the alleged birth of Jesus from a virgin might make us overlook the improbability that the form Traplévos should be παρθένος hebraized into the form Pandira, when the Greek word could have been reproduced almost unchanged in a Hebrew form. It is not clear, moreover, why a Greek word should have been chosen as an epithet for

1 Hitzig in Hilgenfeld's "Ztschft.," 1865, p. 344 fol.

2 I know that the name Пávon is mentioned in this connexion by Christian writers. Origen (ap. Epiphanius, Hær. 78, cited by Wagenseil) says, Οὗτος μὲν γὰρ ὁ Ἰωσὴφ ἀδελφὸς παραγίνεται τοῦ Κλωπᾶ. ἦν δέ υἱὸς τοῦ Ιακώβ, ἐπίκλην δε Πάνθηρ καλουμένου. ἀμφότεροι οὗτοι ἀπὸ τοῦ Πάνθηρος ἐπίκλην Yevv@vtal. Origen doubtless knew that the Jews called Jesus 'Ben Pandira'; but, as he does not explain how Jacob, the father of Joseph, came to be called Пávenр, he does not throw any light on the meaning of the term as applied to Jesus. And as there is no trace of any such name in the genealogy given in the Gospels, it is at least possible that the name Ben Pandira suggested Пár@np, instead of being suggested by it.