..by Peter Schafer.Inflammatory material handled in a scholarly and interesting way.,
February 6, 2012
Peter Schafer does a terrific job of threading the needle on a subject that could be inflammatory in any of several directions. Professor Schafer handles the incindiary subject matter of slurs against Jesus and his mother by focusing on matters of scholarly interest, namely by examining what the Talmudic texts meant about the interaction between Jewish and Christian communities and Palestine and Babylon and about the knowledge of Jewish writers with the basic Christian narrative.
It shouldn't be surprising to find that there were some really vile slurs against Jesus, his mother and disciples floating around in Jewish communities during the period from the 2d to the 4th Century. Judaism and Christianity were engaged in a forceful debate about the meaning of Jewish and Christian identity, and as Oscar Skarsaune argues in In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity there was a heated competition between Christians and Jews for adherents.
We know about the Christian anti-Jewish side of the inter-religious slandering competition. "Jews" are described in the Gospel of John as being children of Satan; a fair number of early Christian fathers wrote embarrassingly anti-semitic tracks; and there was a tradition that equated Jews with being "God-killers."
It would be unimaginable to think that Jews wouldn't respond in kind.
As Professor Schafer points out they did by regularly inverting the Gospel narratives. So, in place of Jesus' birth from the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mary, or Miriam, is a whore and an adulterer, and Jesus is a "mamzer" (bastard) whose real father was a Roman soldier names "Panthera." (Professor Schafer speculates that the theme of intentional inversion may be seen in the name "Pantera," which seems to invert "Parthenos" (virgin-birth) to "Panthera." (panther.)
If that isn't enough, Jesus was a bad son, a brick-worshipping idolater and a magician. Jesus' disciples recanted, pled for mercy and were killed. Jesus was never resurrected, rather he spends eternity boiling in excrement, in another inversion of the Gospel narrative that his followers should eat his flesh.
Schafer does a nice job of showing how these odd stories actually play a role in crafting a powerful "counter-narrative" in the Jewish community against Christian claims. Thus, rather than disclaiming responsibility for the death of Christ it seems that the Jewish community - particularly the Babylonian community - was proudly saying that "yes, the Jews did kill Jesus, which is what he deserved as a blasphemer and an idolater."
Schafer discounts the possibility that the odd stories found in the Talmud have any historical significance for understanding the life of Jesus. Rather, the stories have significance in showing what the Jewish community new later, and how it responded to the insurgent threat of Christianity.
Schafer concludes his short - approximately 130 page - text with discussion about the differences between the Palestinian and the Babylonian communities. My sense was that the scandalous stories about Jesus were few and far between in the Talmud's of both communities. Moreover, when the stories were told, the stories themselves were not so much the center of attention, but rather the stories were taken as a given and the information that the stories related were used to make some other point about Jewish law and customs. One of things that I take-away from this book is that even if the scandalous things said about Jesus were few and far between in the Talmud, I suspect that these stories circulated in a fairly unrestrained fashion in discourse between and among Jewish and Christian communities.
In any event, these stories were more often to be found in the Babylonian Talmud. Schafer points out that the reason for this may have been the fact that Babylon was under the control of Zoroastrian Persians, and, after the conversion of Constantine to Christianity, Persia began to look at Christians as a potential "Fifth Column" and began a long period of persecuting Christians in the Persian Empire. The Jewish community of the Persian Empire may have been emboldened in that context to, as Professer Schafer argues, "take up, and continue, the discourse of their brethren in Asia Minor."(p. 129.)
From my standpoint, I find the mention of the Zoroastrian persecution of Christians to be something I don't think I had heard about before. Likewise, my next book will probably be Robert Louis Wilkens' John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th Century. After reading this book, I will probably have a better context to weigh the rhetorical excesses of Chrysostem because this book suggests that the "norm" of inter-religious discourse was not particularly edifying.
Posts
