Corrected spelling and grammar.
My spelling and grammar errors are annoying the tar out of me, so I tried to clean up a few areas as follows (in bold);
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These junior threads are prolific and some of the same issues keep coming so often, I thought this is a good a thread as any to answer this incessant pounding of the 1st century
BCE junior date.
Originally Posted by davefoc
Could you point out what part of the Talmud refers to the Christian Jesus? My understanding of the situation is that the basis of the composite Jesus theory is that several characters described in the Talmud bare resemblances to the Christian Jesus. You seem to be claiming now that it has been proved that the composite Jesus theory is correct and that this provides proof that people in the third century believed that the Christian Jesus was born in 100 BC.
You will only find references to Yeshu ha-Notzri in the Babylonian Talmud. Of the four manuscripts only the Munich version has the ha-Notzri added to the Yeshu name.
Scholars generally translate it to meaning "Nazarene" though some do translate it as netzer (Hebrew for branch) or even Nazirite ( messianic title meaning consecrated/devoted). But that's a pissing match for another day.
It looks as though a scribe has gone through the old texts and inserted ha-Notzri to the old ben Stada and Yeshu "names" as a reaction/polemic to Christians.
A few entries that have inserted
the ha-Notzri "name" are as follows;
b. Sanhedrin 103a
b. Ber. 17b
b. Sanhedrin 43
b. Sotha 47a
I think there are a few others as well. Check wiki for a complete list.
The problem here, as is similar to all other HJ theories, is that there isn't a hard fact to serve as a solid platform for the theory. Yes, the Christian Jesus stories might be based on an amalgam of characteristics of people that were described in the Talmud but where is the proof?
And if I understand your claims here you are also suggesting that since the composite theory is true that there were people who believed in the third century that the Christian Jesus existed in 100 BC. Even if the composite Jesus theory is correct it doesn't necessarily follow that in the third century a religion based on a 100BC Jesus existed.
I don't think you'll find any proof. Scholars are all over the map as to the references about junior in the Talmud. Hereford sees every Balaam, so & so, Yeshu, ben Stada,
and ben Pandira as code names for junior. Which imo is ridiculous. That seems to be more of a believing scholar not facing (or being too biased to accept) the fact that junior was a mostly unknown/minor player that Judaism didn’t pay much if any attention to (at least initially, sure more so later as it spread throughout the empire, but the closer to junior's supposed "time" the more crickets you tend to hear). Yes, I know, the MJ camp will say…”naturally because he’s fictional.” But for the sake of this discussion, I’m coming from the angel of a real though mostly unknown individual.
And just to make it clear: I have no doubt that there are experts that argue for all sorts of Jesus theories. The questions that I and others have asked is what is the evidence that the experts you cite based their claims on?
As has been repeated in this thread over and over, three main “evidences” have been proposed.
1. Epiphanius
At this point I think we can lay this one to rest. Even if Epi’s statements regarding succession are implying a BCE junior, it’s probably because he doesn’t realize that he’s’ screwing up the dates. Not to say he hasn’t soaked up some of the Jewish polemics regarding junior, because it seems he has. For example, he says Panther was part of Joseph’s and Jacobs’s family name!
That looks like he’s picking up on the polemic about junior being the bastard son of the Roman Soldier Panther as described in the Contra Celsum. Maybe it’s been repeated so many times that he’s being bamboozled into accepting it as a fact?
2. Talmud
A few entries in the Babylonian Talmud one of which has the rabbi Jehosha ben Perahjah “repelling Yeshu ha-Notzri with both hands” . If I recall, Perahjah was operating at the time of Alexander Jannaeus.
Again it looks like a scribe/interpolater is adding in the ha-Notzi
to passages that used to say just Yeshu and some that even only had ben Stada.
So the so called “Jewish-Christian tradition” of junior being dated to 100 BCE is hardly that. If anything it’s a Jewish tradition of older material that includes the Yeshu name in some Talmudic entries.
Yeshu isn’t even used in the Mishna (but it does pop up in the Tosfeta).
The 100 bce connection as an alternate/correct date seems more a manufactured item made by the 19th century
scholars and reiterated by a few in the 20th (including Price). This may simply be an interpolation in one of the Babylonian manuscripts added by a scribe that may have thought..."oh, here's a good spot to add ha-Notzri to the older material to smear the Christian junior!...tee-hee!" The final redaction of this Talumd has been placed around the beginning of the 6th century, so it's easier to see a later author interpolating the older texts.
3. Toldoth Yeshu
Oh boy, this one is drug out continuously because of the Wagenseil translation has the Alexander Jannaeus date for junior’s birth. Interestingly, you won’t hear too many bringing up the Strassburg manuscript version. That one has a reference to a rabbi named Yohanan. Several rabbis have had that name living between 40 CE to 300 CE, so take your pick.
The 100 bce date is hammered continuously, but few seem to have a problem with the stories of junior being hung on a cabbage stalk or buried under the gardeners stream. It has several deviations from the canonical accounts not just the date.
Why the BCE date?
-IDK, maybe the authors didn’t know the standard Christian dating for junior (yes I know, they themselves have vacillated also) so they mined the Talmud to fill it in. Perhaps they did know
that Yeshu better than details regarding the biblical junior.
The Toldoth does mention Pandera as the bastard father, so it does have some bits of ancient pieces in it, though its history as a more completed work isn’t well known before the 7th century CE.
This question also pops up continuously;
Originally Posted by max
So again if Jesus' life was so well known why was this 100 BC origin floating around in the 4th century and reiterated some time in the 6th to 9th?
The "well known" routine is coming from the NT. I thinks it's obvious that if anything, junior is virtually unknown. But if you're writing accounts and "the good news" about the most high incarnate, you are hardly going to say the logos walking around in the flesh, was an obscure backwater figure that missed the attention of every contemporary historian of the day.
Again, the 100 BCE date seems to be mined from the Babylonian Talmud and then picked up by one of the Toldoth versions. Yes, it was attached to junior by Jewish polemicists, but it never had anything to do with the biblical junior imo.
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) And Epiphanius's style is a bit muddy. But if you follow it up to 5:1, he makes it repeatedly clear that what he described up to that point are the Christians. He does make the confused identification of Philo's Jessaeans, i.e., Therapeutae, with Christians, but that's not the description of a heretical sect, but what he considers the proto-orthodoxy. Pretty much he considers the RCC to be the continuation of the proper Christians who were (in his deranged misunderstanding) the Therapeutae.
