So claims Christopher Zeichmann, in this excerpt from a new book. The basic gist is that this was a Christian anti-Jewish polemic:
Early Christian writers placed the accusation in the mouths of fictional or stylized Jewish opponents to defend the virginal conception, police Christian belief, and portray Jews as hostile outsiders. Rabbinic references to the “son of Panthera” are late, fragmentary, and too ambiguous to support the idea of an organized Jewish anti-Christian polemic.
INNteresting.
My first counter-thought is, then how did it wind up in the Toledoth Yeshu? Did rabbis forget entirely about its Christian origin? (Zeichmann doesn't claim the whole TY is a Christian creation, or even with largely Christian roots. He knows that's simply not possible.)
Zeichmann notes that its first Jewish reference is in the third century CE, in the Tosefta. He also notes the Tosefta refers to a "heretic" named Yaakov, who invokes the name of Yeshu to try to heal someone from snakebite. Is this a play on "Yohanan the Dyemaker" in Toledoth Yeshu, generally regarded as John the Baptizer? Both it and the Jerusalem Talmud's story play off the idea of Jesus the Magician, which appears to be a strain of thought from early on in the TY.
Second, why did it already arise in the second century? Wasn't Christianity still too small to be issuing bank-shot anti-Jewish counterblasts, at least ones with enough legs to get the attention of Celsus?
Zeichmann says:
[T]here are two major flaws with the prevailing opinion that the Panthera legend was the product of Jewish slander and largely perpetuated by Jews. First, Christian texts claiming that real, historical Jews were the primary articulators of the Panthera legend are deeply unreliable. Second, it is not clear that the earliest Jewish references to “Yeshu son of Panthera” refer to the Christian figure of Jesus. Let us consider these issues in turn.
Well, let's see now.
He goes on to claim that since we don't have Celsus' own words, who claims to be quoting a Jew, we can hardly know what Celsus actually said. Well, that's true of ANYTHING where Celsus is being refuted by Origen.
He then claims the Jewish Yeshu has but few points of comparison with Jesus.
Yes, but isn't that the whole point? The TY, for example, is largely a scurrilous screed. Zeichmann approaches the Jesus Seminar's use of the "criterion of dissimilarity," or perhaps its overuse.
Zeichmann then says it's the Babylonian Talmud that conflates ben Stada and ben Panthera, and after the conflation, makes the new person to look more like Jesus.
Interestingly, Zeichmann only references the TY twice.
I just don't buy the idea that some Christian, pre-170 CE, would have made this story up to kneecap Jews and specifically over a dispute about Mary's virginity or not.
Going beyond that, Zeichmann claims this is Christian projection of doubt about the virginal conception. Also unlikely.
Plus, this is not the only time Zeichmann has had an "out there" interpretation. (Among other things, he posits a gay relationship between the centurion and servant of Jesus' healing in Matthew 8/Luke 7, though his focus is more on the interpretation history of the passage. Where he really goes wrong, on that link, beyond that, is the assumption this is based on a historical event. The idea that Capernaum, largely Jewish, had an actual centurion, per both Matthew and Luke and presumably Q behind it [I take John as derivative from Luke] is simply a non-starter. Yes, Antipas had elements of his army partially, and in places, organized on Roman lines, but that's not a guarantee. Besides, at no more than 1,000 people there, Antipas would have had no more than a small constabulary. Zeichmann has a much more detailed discussion of the discussion, and pros and cons, here.)
Finally, an author who five-star ratings-bombs his own book before it appears in print, as Zeichmann did on Goodreads? (I one-star rating-bombed in response to set the scales back to even.)
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