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Ecclesiaphobia

Previous installments in this series have traced to the early rabbinic period the anxieties expressed by my teenage friends when I invited them to join me at Midnight Mass. In view of the Jews’ conspicuous indignation over the infamous “blood-libel” of which they have been accused, I have pointed out the irony of the ancient (and modern) Jewish allegation that the central rite of the Christian liturgy involves child sacrifice and cannibalism. In fact, I regard this as doubly ironic, inasmuch as I have never in my lifetime been witness to a religious rite involving child mutilation and blood – other than Circumcision. Whenever familial duty requires my attendance at such an event, I note that the adults present invariably reassure themselves that the male neophyte is too young to understand what is about to befall him, or to be sensible to its pain. But their consoling assumptions are belied by the wailing protests of the child as soon as the Rabbi’s knife bites into his flesh.

Whether or not their theory of infant anaesthesia is scientifically sustainable, there is no doubt that the Jewish rite is grossly primitive. In the baptismal ceremony, the infant’s drowning death is mimetic and symbolic; in the Eucharist, Christ’s blood is volatilized into the archetypal imagery of the wine. In Circumcision, the victim’s blood is real. I mention this as merely the most graphic example of the fundamental incapacity of Judaism for symbolic or spiritual imagination.

 

In a passage I’ve already quoted, Origen remarks on the purpose of the ancient Jewish anti-Christian propaganda campaign: to make non-Christians think twice before entering a church. It worked. My young friends in the Manor didn’t so much decline my invitation as recoil from it. But then, the ecclesiaphobia they exhibited has, it seems to me, been a more or less permanent Jewish condition.

As I am reminded whenever one of my relatives returns from a trip to Europe, the atavistic fear that churches are infectious breeding grounds of superstition and black magic is never wholly banished, not even when Jews reach the age at which they should have put away such childish things. The first destination for Jews visiting such European capitals as London, Paris, or Rome is usually the old Jewish quarter, with its narrow streets and medieval synagogues, to whose magnificent architecture they seem to respond even as they insist on building the sterile boxes that enclose the Holy of Holies in such North American suburbs as the Manor. The great churches of Europe are, however, off limits.

I remember a second cousin reporting enthusiastically on a circuit he had made of the cathedral towns around Paris, which so impressed him that he was inspired to rank their facades: first Rheims, Amiens second, Laon, then Chartres, and so on. But he couldn’t allow himself to enter and enjoy the consonant glories of their interiors. An uncle back from Paris was particularly impressed by the sixteenth-century rows of the Marais (once the Jewish quarter, naturally). When I asked what he thought of Notre Dame, Ste. Chapelle, St. Eustache, or the Pantheon, he seemed to regard the question as an impertinence. Why would he visit a church? To change the subject, I wondered if he had gone anywhere outside of Paris. Yes. A Paris cabby had informed him that Chartres was a “must-see”; but when he arrived he realized it was “just another church”, so he got back on the train and headed for the high-priced shops on the Champs d’Elysee.

 

To inflict upon oneself such cultural and aesthetic deprivations for the sake of a primitive taboo against the “pollutions of the Gentiles” seemed to me as absurd as it was illiberal. When, at eighteen, I proposed my ill-fated outing to Christmas Mass, I had already been going to churches (as opposed to going to Church) for some time. My earliest pilgrimages were musical and architectural, rather than religious. At that time, before such wildly successful (and state-sponsored) groups as Tafelmusik and Opera Atelier had come into fashion, Toronto’s nascent early music ensembles performed in local churches, rather than concert halls. Their directors rationalized that their intimate settings were more congenial to the small consorts and choirs that the music of the period called for; but the main reason was economic: Renaissance motets or Baroque oratorios were still exotic fare, and it was easier to fill a small church.

The nineteenth-century Gothic and Romanesque buildings into which I was invited for the purpose of listening to the music of Gabrielli or Monteverdi were hardly St. Mark’s in Venice; but by comparison to the bungalows and strips malls of Bathurst Manor, they might as well have been. These journeys downtown opened my eyes as well as my ears. Indeed, as any concert-goer knows, it is not only the acoustics of these old buildings that enhance the concert-going experience; there is also the visual acoustic of the architecture. You don’t have to be a medieval art historian to understand why Gothic and Romanesque interiors have been described as “polyphony in stone”. The fact that what I was seeing was the bowdlerized institutional Gothic and Romanesque of the modern North American city could in no way diminish its effect on an adolescent hick from the architecturally impoverished suburbs.

While still a teenager, I was as yet only dimly aware that the aesthetic awakenings I was experiencing had anything to do with my ancestral Judaism, or, indeed, that such awakenings were an almost hackneyed theme in the narrative of the modern Jew’s journey out of the ghetto. The fear of setting foot inside a Christian church is, of course, merely emblematic of the besetting problem of the Jew who, trapped within the temenos of the tribe, finds himself poised guiltily on the threshold of the greater cosmos of human art and culture, looking in.

Every Jew must at some time or other come to grips with the implacable logic of his forebears’ separatist syllogism: Gentile culture is polluted; world culture is Gentile culture; therefore, world culture is polluted. It is an impossible dilemma, especially for a group that so obviously cherishes learning and the life of the mind, and is just as obviously the inheritor of enormous intellectual and artistic gifts. Ironically, it is the intolerable prohibition against Gentile art and culture that has resulted in the self-estrangement of so many Jews, and their eventual assimilation into Christianity.

It is a simple fact that for the last three thousand years, the highest achievements in human thought, literature, and art – Greek and Roman for the first millennium, Christian for the subsequent two – have been the achievements of a “Gentile” civilization. Any Jew who aspires to a life of genuine learning and culture must sooner or later accept this fact, and venture forth upon the “high places”. Many have done so, but often, it seems, at the price of their “Jewishness”.

 

Since, with the Stoics, I assume that the first step in achieving full humanity is the casting off of the purely accidental inheritances and allegiances of tribe, race, or nation, I don’t, obviously, regard this as calamitous. Most Jews, by contrast, have persuaded themselves that it is a matter, not only of religious purity, but biological survival. For them, parochialism is a duty.

Naturally, this makes for the most absurd contradictions. The Jews of my grandparents’ generation rejoiced at the world-wide fame of Jolson, but they would always rather that he had stuck with songs like “My Yiddishe Momma” than “Mammy”. That Irving Berlin was renowned as the greatest lyricist of his day was worth pointing out to the Goyim, but that his fame was achieved with compositions such as “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade” was regarded as a cause of embarrassment if not a betrayal.

The ancient separatist ethos of Judaism inevitably complicates the equally primitive impulse of Jewish racial pride. Jews revere Maimonides as a Talmudic scholar, but that his famous “Guide to the Perplexed” is really a standard twelfth-century synthesis of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and incipient Christian scholasticism – making its teaching genuinely universal, and providing the condition for its fame – is so problematic that it can scarcely be mentioned. Similarly, Jews note with satisfaction that Salamone Rossi’s madrigals were so brilliant and fashionable that, like Joseph at the court of Pharaoh, he rose to prominence at the ducal court of Mantua; but they are embarrassed into silence, once again, over the fact that his equally magnificent settings for the synagogue are wholly atypical of Jewish liturgical music, and wholly typical of the Christian motets that so palpably influenced them.

To the degree that so many Jewish writers and intellectuals – Spinoza, Freud, Marx, Bergson, Durkheim, Panofsky, Einstein, Simone Weil, Philip Roth, to name as eclectic a group as I can come up with off the top of my head – have achieved their distinction with no relation to, or in direct repudiation of their Jewishness, the problem becomes all the more acute: to the point where separatist discomfort can cancel out Jewish ethnic pride altogether, and the person of distinction descends, from the rank of Landsman to that of “self-hating Jew”, a mere step in the hierarchy above the Goyim.

Jewish anti-Christianism?

The Early Christian Apologists, as we have seen, alleged that the Jews were the inventors and disseminators of a scurrilous propaganda campaign accusing the initiates of the new Christian sect of believing in risible myths (the Virgin Birth, Resurrection, etc.), and participating in a sinister ritual involving idolatry, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and mass sexual licence. The writings of the early Talmud, in which we encounter the same polemical themes, confirm that such a propaganda campaign existed from the nascency of the Church, and continued to be prosecuted through several centuries.

The nature of, and inspiration for, this campaign are clear enough. Jewish contempt for the false teachings and repugnant rituals of the early Church is of a piece with ancient Hebrew contempt for Gentile religion, culture, and mores in general. It is impossible not to recognize in the idolatry, child sacrifice, cannibalism, and sacred prostitution that allegedly constitute the core of the Christian sacrament the main polemical motives of the Old Testament Prophets’ fulminations against the pagan “high places”. In the first centuries of the common era, with the deliquescence of the pagan rites as a threat to the survival of the Jews – and an excuse for the preservation of the separatist Jewish ethos –, the black masses of the Christians would come to replace them. Thus, the Hebrew Prophets’ anathematizations of the cults of Ashtoreth, Moloch, and Baal were merely redirected toward a new and more formidable competitor and claimant of the mantle of exclusive religious truth. Christianity became Judaism’s new paganism, and Christians its new Gentiles, after whose Triune God(s) the people of the covenant might, unless properly admonished, go a-whoring.

 

It came as something of a shock, as I have already said, to hear these primitive calumnies hurled at contemporary Christians by my teenage friends in the self-ghettoized Jewish suburb where I grew up. Since there was little chance that either they or their parents had been studying the religious controversies of the first centuries of the Christian era, one wonders how such detailed and specific repudiations of Christian doctrine and liturgy could have leapt with such alacrity to their lips. Apparently, that the Virgin Birth was the face-saving fiction of a loose woman, and that Christian communicants sacrificed innocent children and ate them, whilst engaging in wild sexual orgies, were widely held opinions amongst Jews: opinions that must have been handed down orally from generation to generation.

In Hebrew antiquity, similar calumnies had been propagated by the Priesthood to keep the children of the Jealous God safely within the fold: to guard against, that is, the apparently ever-present temptation of syncretism and miscegenation. In the North American suburbs of the late ninety-sixties, they continued to inspire a primordial fear and revulsion of the Satanic dromena supposedly enacted within Christian churches, as I discovered when I naively invited my friends to join me on an anthropological field trip to Midnight Mass.

 

The history of such anti-Christian libels, from the early Rabbinic period right down to the present day, has been widely known for years. Modern Talmudic scholars, both Jewish and Christian, have been aware of the Rabbis’ animadversions on Christianity since the late-nineteenth century. Oddly, their main interest seems to have been to prove that the Talmudic passages did or did not shed any credible light on the “historical Jesus”. Meanwhile, Jews world-wide were laying at the threshold of the Church evidence of its vilest crimes: the pogroms, and the Holocaust, which supposedly arose from a congenital Christian anti-Semitism. Surely the evidence of an age-old Jewish anti-Christianism would have furnished a valuable perspective from which to reflect upon so intractable and complex an historical and moral problem as that of religious bigotry. But such evidence has been scrupulously ignored, since it hardly accords with the modern stereotype – a benign one, but a stereotype nonetheless – of the Jew as the religiously tolerant victim of religious intolerance.

It need hardly be said that Jews have every right to criticize, indeed, to ridicule the beliefs of Christians; but it takes no great exertion of the imagination to conceive of the outcry amongst Jewish groups in particular and – in this age of racial hypersensitivity – polite society in general, were Christians to deride such central tenets of Judaism as the Election of the Chosen People, the Lawgiving on Sinai, or the parting of the Red Sea – in the contemptuous tones, that is, in which Jews have heaped scorn on the doctrine of the Virgin Birth and other New Testament miracles, for centuries and, apparently, still today.

The accusation that the Eucharist involves human sacrifice, cannibalism, and the drinking of the victim’s blood is especially ironic in the context of the long history of the anti-Semitic “blood libel”. Every school child, Jewish and Gentile, is now taught about the scurrilous charge, supposedly leveled by Christians since the time of Apion (and recently renewed by militant Muslims), that Jews regularly kidnap the young children of non-Jews, ritually slaughter them, and drink their blood. Along with the Inquisition, the pogroms of eastern Europe, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Holocaust, this is one of the prime exhibits in the case against Homo Gentilis as innately anti-Semitic.

But, once again, the complex religious-historical circumstances and history of the “blood-libel” have been conveniently obliviated. Apion was a Greek pagan controversialist of the second century B.C., hardly a Christian. It was Jews, mocking the eucharistic miracle of the Transsubstantiation, who first accused Christians of fattening children for slaughter, eating their flesh and drinking their blood: a charge that medieval theologians subsequently parried back at them. It is an irony at least worthy of mention, is it not, that the medieval Christian propagators of the anti-Semitic blood-libel had been schooled in the effectiveness of such vicious lies by the Jews themselves?

As I have argued at length in earlier numbers in this series, Christian anti-Semitism is now practically a phantom, kept alive by a Jewish mindset that, it seems to me, is equivalently morbid and ultimately self-defeating. Historically, anti-Semitism was real enough, but it hardly existed in vacuo; and as I’ve also argued at length, a racially motivated sense of Jewish moral superiority and contempt for the “Goyim” has been a central tenet of Jewish religion and consciousness since the time of Abraham. We only trivialize the human capacity for mendacity and pride when we pretend that certain groups are incapable of them, and avert our eyes to the countervailing evidence.

A Religion of Lust

The sexual trajectory of the Talmudic polemic, beginning with Mary’s sordid affair with a Roman soldier and continuing with Jesus’ relations with prostitutes and marriage to the most notorious of them, leads inevitably to the rabbinic defamation of the Eucharist as a heathen orgy of temple prostitution and cannibalism. I have already cited a passage from Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, in which Justin’s representative of second-century Judaism acknowledges that this dark parody of the Christian sacrament was widely accepted amongst his fellow Jews. I will return to this passage after examining some of the rabbinic sources of this myth which, as I discovered from my teenage friends in the Manor, has been preserved and handed down amongst the folkways of the Tribe through the generations – more proof of the power of Jung’s archetypal race memory –, and is no doubt still being rehearsed by fearful Jewish children today.

The Jewish caricature of the Eucharist as a repugnant pagan rite is carefully nurtured by the Rabbis throughout the Talmud. In two passages from the Bavli (b Sanh. 107b and b Sot 47a), Jesus and his master, R. Yehoshua b. Perahya, are described as entering an inn just outside Jerusalem on their return from Alexandria. R. Yehoshua praises the hospitality of the place, but Jesus, sexually preoccupied as usual, thinks his teacher is remarking upon the physical allurements of the innkeeper. Yehoshua rebukes his student’s impure thoughts, and Jesus, rejected, angrily departs to “set up a brick and worship it”. At the end of the passage, the rabbinic interlocutors lament that “Jesus the Nazarene practiced magic and deceived and led Israel astray.”

The charges of idolatry and magic are entirely consistent with the Jewish polemic against Christianity as but another heathen cult, no different from those practiced by the “nations” upon the high places of the Ancient Near East, and routinely abominated by the Hebrew Prophets. Jesus’ “brick-worship” associates the new Christian paganism with that of the Babylonian Great Whore, and his “magic”, while similarly an ancient Chaldaean science, also reminds us of the rabbinic allegation that he studied with the magicians of Egypt during his exile there, before introducing their black arts into Israel.

 

Another story preserved in two versions concerns Eliezer b. Hyrkanos, a late-first-century Rabbi who is secretly denounced as a disciple of Jesus, then arrested and charged with heresy. Though the Roman Governor dismisses the charge on an obscure technicality (as Pilate hoped to be able to dismiss the charge against Jesus?), Eliezer does not deny it, and in the dialogue that ensues upon his return home from his arraignment, he wonders only about what might have led to his denunciation. (In the interests of brevity and clarity, I have interwoven passages from the two versions of the narrative):

When he came home, his disciples arrived to comfort him, but he would accept no consolation. Said R. Aqiva to him:… “Master, perhaps you encountered some kind of heresy and you enjoyed it and because of that you were arrested?” He answered him: “Aqiva, you have reminded me! Once I was walking in the upper marked of Sepphoris [in Galilee] when I came across one of the disciples of Jesus the Nazarene, and Jacob of Kefar was his name. He [Jacob] said to me.… (Avodah Zarah 16b)

***

‘It is written in your Torah: You shall not bring the hire of a harlot or the pay of a dog into the house of the Lord your God in payment for any vow…[Deut. 23:19]. What is to be done with the money?’

I [R. Eliezer] told him: ‘ They are prohibited.’

He [Jacob] said to me: ‘They are prohibited as an offering, but it is permissible to dispose of them.’

I answered: ‘In that case, what is to be done with them.’

He said to me: ‘Let bath-houses and privies be made with them.’

I answered: ‘You have well spoken because this particular Halakha escaped my memory for the moment.’

When he saw that I acknowledged his words, he said to me: ‘Thus was I taught by Jesus of Nazareth: From filth they came and to filth shall they return [=on filth they should be expended], as it is said: for from the hire of a harlot was it gathered, and to the hire of a harlot shall it return [Mic. 1:7]—Let them be spent on public privies!’

This interpretation pleased me, and on that account I was arrested for heresy. (Quohelet Rabba)…Because I transgressed what is written in the Torah: Keep your way far from her—this refers to heresy–and do not come near to the door of her house—this refers to the harlot [Prov. 5:8].

And how far is one to keep away? Rav Hisda said: Four cubits. (Avodah Zarah 17a)

Once again, this oddly pedantic dialogue is, as Schafer assures us (Jesus, p. 44), a typical example of Talmudic halakhic exegesis. The Bible forbids the use of the proceeds of prostitution for the purchase of Temple offerings; the only question is whether they may be employed for other purposes. Initially, R. Eliezer puts the strictest construction upon the prohibition in Deuteronomy, but Jacob, speaking in the name of Jesus, argues that the money may be spent in the public interest: for the building of public bath-houses or toilets. Both of these conveniences are depositories of filth; hence, they are the most appropriate public undertakings in which to invest money derived from filth. In the end R. Eliezer is won over by Jacob’s halakhic reasoning, and confesses to have been especially pleased by Jesus’ appeal in support of it to the authority of the Prophet Micah.

Jesus’ supposed interest in improving community hygiene by means of such public works projects makes him sound like an ancient FDR. (“Social Gospel” Christians who confuse the New Dispensation with the New Deal have apparently always been with us.) No doubt it is Christianity’s reputed solicitude for the well-being of the common man, along with its willingness to discover a less stringent (i.e., less literal) and more merciful interpretation of the Law, that the Rabbis are here poking fun at. Jesus is as always willing to look beyond the “outward” sin of prostitution (he allowed one to wash his feet, and later married her, after all) and convert its profits to the public good! How? By laundering (pun intended) the profits of sin! By building privies!

R. Eliezer concludes that it was the pleasure he took in this liberal Christian interpretation of the Law that must have provoked the accusation of heresy. Nor does he protest his innocence. Indeed, he himself invokes Proverbs 5:8, which he then interprets expressly as an admonition against associating with heretics: advice which, unfortunately, he failed to heed.

Literally, of course, the verse from Proverbs with which R. Eliezer concludes “his soul-searching” (as Schafer puts it) is a warning against prostitution, not heresy. It refers to the harlot as a “strange woman” whose lips drip honey but whose “end is bitter as wormwood” and whose feet go down to hell and death (Prov. 5:3-5). But as the admonition against consorting with prostitutes continues in Prov. 7:10 ff., a familiar theme is struck:

And behold, there met him a woman with the attire of a harlot, and subtile of heart.

(She is loud and stubborn; her feet abide not in her house:

Now is she without, now in the streets, and lieth in wait at every corner.)

So she caught him, and kissed him, and with an impudent face said unto him,

I had to offer sacrifices; and this day have I paid my vows.

Therefore came I forth to meet thee…

The harlot’s paying of her vows with temple offerings is a conspicuous violation of the prohibition in Deut. 23:19 against the use of the profits of prostitution for such purposes – the subject-text of Jacob/Jesus’ halakhic exposition. As Schafer notes, “This can hardly be by coincidence. It seems therefore that the editor of our story wants to imply [that] R. Eliezer was indeed accused of being a member of a forbidden (orgiastic) sect…” (Jesus, p. 46) In fact, the passage from Proverbs with which the dialogue not coincidentally concludes implies rather more than that. The Rabbis are less interested in discrediting R. Eliezer personally than in discrediting the “heresy” to which he subscribes. For this purpose, the text from Proverbs serves them admirably.

In Jewish (and early Christian) commentary, the harlot of Proverbs 5-7 was traditionally interpreted as an allegorical symbol of the whole pagan mother-goddess cult and culture after which the adulterous people of Yahweh were forever going “a-whoring”, and in which sacred prostitution was, notoriously, an ancillary rite. Proverbs’ “strange woman” is the Great Whore of Babylon, Ishtar-Ashtoreth-Astarte; the Egyptian goddess of harlotries, Isis; the Phrygian Magna Mater, Cybele; the temple prostitutes of Baal-Peor. When R. Eliezer relates one part of the warning of Prov. 5:8 to prostitution and the other part to heresy, he admits that his guilt consists of heresy connected to prostitution. In other Talmudic texts – quite outside the context of his denunciation for Christian heresy –, R. Eliezer is suspected of having been involved with prostitutes and participating in sexual orgies (Jesus, p. 46). Here, the reason for, and circumstances of, his moral dissolution are made clear: he has been led astray into a sect in which mass sexual orgies are ritually convened. (This, of course, is only to be expected of the followers of a bastard son who issued from the womb of another “strange woman”, and who was accordingly predisposed to a life of wanton misconduct.) In consorting with Christian heretics, a remorseful R. Eliezer – that is, the Talmudic editor who has invented this little vignette and put the words from Proverbs into his mouth – convicts himself of having approached too near to the door of a religion that, like all the other Gentile religion, is a house of harlotries.

 

Whether or not R. Eliezer was an actual historical personality, it is apparent that for the Rabbis of the Talmud, his principle utility and significance were as an admonitory type of the Jews of the period, who were being “seduced” in numbers into a dangerous new cult of neo-pagan licentiousness. That its central sacrament, moreover, consisted in a Thyestean banquet followed by a communal sexual orgy, became the Jews’ most potent polemical argument against Christianity. As Justin Martyr asks impatiently (in a passage I’ve already quoted from his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew):

Is there any other matter, my friends, in which we are blamed, than this, that we live not after the law, and are not circumcised in the flesh, as your forefathers were, and do not observe Sabbaths as you do? Are our lives and customs also slandered among you? And I ask this: have you also believed, concerning us, that we eat men; and that after the feast, having extinguished the lights, we engage in promiscuous concubinage? Or do you condemn us in this alone, that we adhere to such tenets, and believe in an opinion, untrue, as you think? (Dial. x)

That Justin enumerates them in conjunction with the more fundamental doctrinal disagreements between Jews and Christians (circumcision, Sabbath, Law, etc.) suggests that the anti-Christian calumnies of eucharistic cannibalism and nocturnal orgies were widely credited by Trypho’s fellow Jews; and Trypho’s response confirms as much.

On his own part, says Trypho, he finds these allegations “unworthy of belief”. His own more judicious criticism of the new sect is, rather, that “professing to be pious”, Christians do not separate themselves from the nations through the practice of circumcision, the observance of festivals and Sabbaths, and a rigorous adherence to the Law. He admits, nonetheless, that amongst the Jewish “multitudes”, the belief that Christians eat the flesh of human victims and participate in Bacchanalian orgies is common. As Schafer observes, Trypho “seems to ignore the question of who was the originator of these slanders – or else takes the answer for granted” (Jesus, p. 100). But Justin himself has no doubt about who is responsible. A few chapters on in the Dialogue, he chides:

For other nations have not inflicted on us and on Christ this wrong to such an extent as you have, who in very deed are the authors of the wicked prejudice against the Just One, and us who hold by Him. For after you had crucified Him…you not only did not repent of the wickedness which you had committed, but at that time you selected and sent out from Jerusalem chosen men through all the land to tell that the godless heresy of Christians had sprung up to publish those things which all they who knew us not speak against us. (Dial. xvii)

Justin then reiterates these complaints in chapter cviii:

…you not only have not repented, after you learned that He rose from the dead, but, as I said before, you have sent chosen and ordained men throughout to world to proclaim that a godless and lawless heresy had sprung from one Jesus, a Galileean deceiver, whom we crucified, but his disciples stole him by night from the tomb…and now deceive men by asserting that he has risen from the dead and ascended to heaven. Moreover, you accuse Him of having taught those riotous, wicked, and unholy practices which you mention…

Clearly, these “riotous, wicked, and unholy practices” are the orgies of cannibalism and fornication to which Justin had earlier alluded. (They are the same “fabulous and shameful deeds—the upsetting of the lamp, and promiscuous intercourse, and eating of human flesh”, the rumours of which Justin accuses the opponents of Christianity of having perpetuated in his First Apology [xxvi].) The Jews are not only represented here as the inventors of these malicious fictions but their systematic publicists, having commissioned certain ministers of propaganda to travel throughout the civilized world and disseminate the slanders in which they had been carefully rehearsed.

 

In so doing, according to Origen, the Jews were the preceptors of the pagans, whom they tutored in the main themes of their own anti-Christian polemic. As Origen characterizes the vitriolic attack on Christianity mounted by the pagan Celsus in his True Doctrine (late second century):

He seems to have behaved in much the same way as the Jews who, when the teaching of Christianity began to be proclaimed, spread abroad a malicious rumour about the gospel, to the effect that Christians sacrifice a child and partake of its flesh, and again that when the followers of the gospel want to do the works of darkness they turn out the light and each man has sexual intercourse with the first woman he meets. This malicious rumour some time ago unreasonably influenced a very large number and persuaded people knowing nothing of the gospel that this was really the character of Christians. And even now [i.e., early second century] it still deceives some who by such stories are repelled from approaching Christians even if only for a simple conversation. (Contra Celsum VI, 27)

(Even now, indeed. How astonished Origen would have been to learn that “such stories” would continue to be circulated within the Jewish community and to frighten its members well into the twentieth century.)

 

Many similar accounts can be found in the writings of the major early Christian Apologists (which suggests that the Jewish propaganda campaign was both effective and persistent). Tertullian, for instance, details the grisly content of these Jewish embassies in a famous parody in his Apology (late second century):

Monsters of wickedness, we are accused of observing a holy rite in which we kill a little child and then eat it, in which after the feast, we practice incest, the dogs—our pimps, forsooth—overturning the lights and getting us the shamelessness of darkness for our impious lusts…

See now, we set before you the reward of these enormities. They give promise of eternal life….Come, plunge your knife into the babe, enemy of none, accused of none, child of all; of if that is another’s work, simply take your place beside a human being dying before he has really lived, await the departure of the lately given soul, receive the fresh young blood, saturate your bread with it, freely partake. The while as you recline at table, take note of the places which your mother and your sister occupy; mark them well, so that when the dog-made darkness has fallen on you, you may make no mistake, for you will be guilty of a crime—unless you perpetuate a deed of incest. Initiated and sealed into things like these, you have life everlasting. (Apol. vii-viii)

Tertullian’s brilliant spoof concentrates on the culminating rite in the Christian sacrament, while a more comprehensive catalogue of Christian obscenities, marshaled by the pagan interlocutor “Caecilius” in Minucius Felix’ dialogue Octavius (ca. 200), places it in the wider context of a “religion of lust”:

“Already…decay of morals grows from day to day, and throughout the federacy multiply….They recognize one another by secret signs and marks; they fall in love almost before they are acquainted; everywhere they introduce a kind of religion of lust, a promiscuous ‘brotherhood’ and ‘sisterhood’ by which ordinary fornication, under cover of a hallowed name, is converted to incest. And thus their vain and foolish superstition makes an actual boast of crime. For themselves, were there not some foundation of truth, shrewd rumour would not impute gross and unmentionable forms of vice. I am told that under some idiotic impulse they consecrate and worship the head of an ass, the meanest of all beasts, a religion worthy of the morals which gave it birth. Others say that they actually reverence the private parts of their director and high-priest, and adore his organs as parent of their being. This may be false, but such suspicions naturally attach to their secret and nocturnal rites. To say that a malefactor put to death for his crimes, and wood of the death-dealing cross, are objects of their veneration is to assign fitting altars to abandoned wretches and the kind of worship they deserve. Details of the initiation of neophytes are as revolting as they are notorious. An infant, cased in dough to deceive the unsuspecting, is placed beside the person to be initiated. The novice is thereupon induced to inflict what seem to be harmless blows upon the dough, and unintentionally the infant is killed by his unsuspecting blows; the blood—oh, horrible—they lap up greedily; the limbs they tear to pieces eagerly; and over the victim they make league and covenant, and in complicity in guilt they pledge themselves to mutual silence. Such sacred rites are more foul than any sacrilege. Their form of feasting is notorious; it is in everyone’s mouth, as testified by the speech of our friend of Cirta [Fronto, teacher of rhetoric to Marcus Aurelius, of whose Speech against the Christians nothing survives]. On the day appointed they gather at a banquet with all their children, sisters, and mothers, people of either sex and every age. There, after full feasting, when the blood is heated and drink has inflamed the passions of incestuous lust, a dog which has been tied to a lamp is tempted by a morsel thrown beyond the range of his tether to bound forward with a rush. The tale-telling light is upset and extinguished, and in the shameless dark lustful embraces are indiscriminately exchanged; and all alike, if not in act, yet by complicity, are involved in incest…

The principal motives of such depictions of Christian ritual depravity, remarkable in their consistency, require little comment. The swarming promiscuity and incest supposedly practiced by the Christian “brotherhood” and “sisterhood” are meant, clearly enough, to mock the chaste communal love of the so-called agape. The infanticide, and the grisly symposium that follows, are pointed caricatures of both the Eucharist and the Pauline doctrine of rebirth through the adherent’s identification with the sacrificial Christ. In Tertullian’s account, the sopping up of the infant’s blood with the bread can only signify the eucharistic elements. But above all, these parodies are heavily inflected, and meant to identify the Christian cult, with the grossest, most primitive, and generally long outmoded features of Greek and oriental paganism: the nocturnal darkness (which, in the mysteries, furnished the atmosphere necessary to the occultation of their secrets from the gaze of the unworthy, and hardly to hide crimes); the practice of child-sacrifice (which, in fact, was almost always mimetic, rather than actual, and part of a dromenon in which the initiate’s death and rebirth were represented); the sparagmos and “eating of the god” (in which, again, the victim was never human, but an animal or vegetal attribute of the god—as in the Christian communion); and the sacred prostitution (which was also usually mimetic, culminating in the hieros gamos of the Priest, standing in loco dei, and the Priestess, in loco populi). Ironically, then, the pagan polemic against Christianity, learned from the Jews, involved a monstrously reductive and distorted critique of paganism itself, of the sort that Jewish propagandists had been ventilating since the age of the Prophets. That Celsus, Fronto, et al. are willing to persuade themselves that the Jewish rumour campaigns “have a foundation of truth”, and make themselves parties to such self-incriminating slanders, merely demonstrates the old saw: that, in a time of sectarian hostilities, the enemy of your enemy is your friend.

 

What, if anything, are we to make of these Jewish anti-Christian calumnies, in our supposedly post-sectarian age? Nothing at all, according to the modern Jewish scholars who explain that early Jewish propaganda about Christian infanticide and cannibalism merely parries the same malicious fictions back at those who originally invented and directed them against the Jews. They refer, of course, to the infamous “blood libel”—the charge that Jews kidnapped unsuspecting Greek travelers, fattened them for slaughter, and consumed them in a communal feast—first concocted, according to the Jewish historian Josephus, by the Alexandrian Greek rhetorician and Homeric commentator Apion (first century B.C.). As Josephus writes in his Contra Apionem (II, 8):

He [Apion] adds another Grecian fable, in order to reproach us… and says that “Antiochus found in our temple a bed and a man lying upon it, with a small table before him, full of dainties, from the sea, and the fowls of the dry land; that he immediately adored the king, upon his coming in, as hoping he would afford him all possible assistance…that the man made a lamentable complaint, and with sighs, and tears in his eyes, gave the king this account of the distress he was in; and said that he was a Greek, and that as he went over this province, in order to get his living, he was seized upon by foreigners, on a sudden, and brought to this temple, and shut up therein, and was seen by nobody, but was fattened by these curious provisions thus set before him: and that truly at the first such unexpected advantages seemed to him matter of great joy; that, after a while they brought a suspicion upon him, and at length astonishment, what their meaning should be; that at last he inquired of the servants that came to him, and was by them informed that it was in order to the fulfilling a law of the Jews, which they must not tell him, that he was thus fed; and that they did the same at a set time every year: that they used to catch a Greek foreigner, and fatten him thus up every year, and then lead him to a certain wood, and kill him, and sacrifice with their accustomed solemnities, and taste of his entrails, and take an oath upon this sacrificing a Greek, that they would ever be at enmity with the Greeks; and that then they threw the remaining parts of the miserable wretch into a certain pit.” Apion adds further, that “the man said there were but a few days to come ere he was to be slain, and implored Antiochus that…he would disappoint the snares the Jews laid for his blood…”

However scurrilous Apion’s attack upon the Jews, it seems unlikely that it could have been the model or occasion for a reciprocal Jewish anti-Christian polemic. There are, in fact, very few points of comparison. The Christians’ victim is a child; Apion’s temple victim is an adult, and quite specifically, a Greek. The culmination of the Christian banquet is a sexual orgy; Apion’s account of the Jewish rite mentions neither sexual promiscuity nor incest.

The two polemics, in fact, are manifestly independent, having arisen in disparate historical ages and religious contexts. Apion’s polemical fable, set, not coincidentally, in the period of the Seleucids (second century B.C.), is a document of the conflict between Hellenism and the Maccabean Jewish party—for it was also a conflict within Judaism–that insisted upon the most fastidious separation of the Jews from the contaminating influence of the circumambient Hellenic culture. (That is why, of course, the Jews’ sacrificial victim is a Greek, and why, in Apion’s account, the communicants take an oath that they would ever be at enmity with the Greeks. Why, besides, the fable of this pagan grammarian and Homeric commentator is so palpably suffused with Homeric narrative themes and atmosphere.) None of this has anything to do with hostilities between Jews and Christians (except insofar as Jews regarded Christians as neo-pagans, as I have already argued). It is simply absurd to contend that the Rabbis would have felt (or been) justified in maligning the Christian sacrament as orgiastic and cannibalistic in retribution against the Greek pagans who had maligned the Jews in such terms. There is no reciprocity here. The Jewish propaganda campaign against Christianity was mounted for its own reasons, motivated by its own primitive sectarianism, and quite as ugly as Apion’s “blood libel” in its own right.

When modern Jewish scholars attempt to explain the rabbinic rumour-mongering as an answer to Apion, it is clear that they are themselves writing as polemicists, rather than historians; two thousand years post facto, they, too, have entered the lists of religious propaganda. Their purpose, especially after the Holocaust, is to keep the focus of civilized indignation on “anti-Semitism”. Any acknowledgement that Jews could be guilty of their own “blood-libel” would naturally puncture the myth of Jewish religious tolerance, enlightenment, and innocent victimhood. Jews, as I wrote in the autobiographical introduction to this essay, are by definition incapable of the racism they have historically suffered (notwithstanding their own racist contempt for “Goys”). They would never be guilty of the hateful religious bigotry that periodically inspires Gentiles to such malicious anti-Semitic fabrications as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or the ludicrous fiction that Jews kidnap and then drink the blood of human (specifically Gentile) victims in monstrous temple rituals.

It is one thing for twentieth-century Jewish scholars, laboring in the Holocaust Industry, to exert themselves to detoxify or suppress the anti-Christian blood libels of which Jews were the inventors and publicists. It is quite another, however, for ordinary Jews to repeat these libels two thousand years later. When, after naively inviting my teenage Jewish friends in the Manor to attend Christmas Mass, I was informed by them that Christians “worship statues”, “eat little children”, and engage in mass sexual orgies, I could hardly at the time have appreciated the antiquity, and longevity, of the Jewish rumour campaign.

I continue to wonder when my former friends and relatives will come to realize that the injunction to “Never Forget” has a dark side.

Jesus: Consort of Prostitutes, Spouse of Mary Magdalene…

Dan Brown and the Rabbis…

We have seen that the Talmud portrays the Virgin as an adulteress who conceived, not through the afflatus of the Holy Spirit (a face-saving fiction), but with her secret lover, a lowly and detestable Roman soldier. Sexual misconduct is the leitmotif of the rabbinic polemic. To the Rabbis, Jesus proves the maxim, like mother, like son.

The following dialogue in the Bavli (Sanhedrin 103a) appears to be an uncomplicated passage of exegesis on a verse from Psalms:

Rav Hisda said in the name of Rabbi Yimeya bar Abba: What is meant by the verse: No evil will befall you, no plague will approach your tent [Ps. 91:10]?

No evil will befall you: that the evil inclination shall have no power over you!

No plague will approach your tent: that you will not find your wife a doubtful Niddah [in an “unclean” state; menstruating] when you return from a journey.

Another interpretation: No evil will befall you: that bad dreams and bad thoughts will not frighten you.

No plague will approach your tent: that you will not have a son or a disciple who publicly spoils his dish like Jesus the Nazarene.

Rav Hisda, of course, is the interlocutor in a dialogue (Shab 104b) we have already quoted. There he identifies “Pandera” as the Roman soldier who was the lover of Mary and father of Jesus. Here he purports to furnish an exposition of Psalms in response to a question about its meaning, which he places in the mouth of Rabbi Yimeya b. Abba, a Babylonian amora of the mid-third century A.D.

Rav Hisda offers two different interpretations of each of the two clauses of which the verse is comprised. Together they constitute a “symmetrically structured exposition” (Jesus in the Talmud, p. 26): that is, the second of the two clauses, and the second interpretation, are meant to be read as thematically consistent elaborations upon the first.

In his first interpretation, Rav Hisda posits that the “evil” of Psalm 91:10 refers to an overriding “evil inclination”, and the “plague” that might threaten one’s tent, to the calamity in which a husband returns home to discover that his wife may be menstruating and therefore unfit for intercourse. His second interpretation identifies the “evil” of the Psalm with “bad thoughts” or “dreams”, and the “plague” with a son or disciple who “publicly spoils his dish like Jesus the Nazarene”. This is evidently the climax of the exposition, toward which the three antecedent clausal glosses incrementally build.

In the first interpretation, the sexual character of the “evil inclination” is implicit in Rav Hisda’s definition of the word “plague”, in the second clause of the verse, as referring to the state of menstrual impurity that makes it legally forbidden for a husband to have intercourse with his wife. We have already seen that in Talmudic law this interdiction can apply in situations other than a wife’s regular menstruation. In the admonitory anecdote previously cited from Gittin, Rabbi Meir refers to Pappos ben Yehudi (identified as the husband of Mary in the dialogue between Rav Hisda and R. Eliezer in Shab) as the proverbial cuckold who locks his wife up inside the house and even then dares not risk congress with her for fear that she has been unfaithful. R. Meir goes on to describe ben Yehudi’s wife as one who shamelessly parades in public with her hair untied (cf. Miriam of the long hair in Shab), and comments that he should not only sexually quarantine her but immediately file for divorce.

Accordingly, in the passage at hand, the “plague” upon one’s tent of having a wife who is unfit for intercourse may thus be caused by her infidelity rather than her menstrual condition. Indeed, the fact that the single-minded Rav Hisda is the common link between the texts that mention ben Yehudi and the present one strongly suggests that that is precisely what he wishes to imply.

Whatever the reason for the husband’s abstention from intercourse with his wife, the sexual colouring of Rav Hisda’s exegesis of the “plague” clause of the verse from Psalms is clear. Within the parallel structure of the entire exposition, then, the “evil inclination” of the first clause must similarly refer to some sexual impropriety. This in turn indicates what sorts of “bad thoughts/dreams” Rav Hisda has in mind in his second interpretation. In ancient Hebrew dream theory, sexual dreams are usually sent by the Adversary, and the dreaded sort that causes a nocturnal emission is classed as a nightmare.

 

Of all such sexual calamities as might descend upon a man’s house, the worst is apparently having a son or disciple like Jesus the Nazarene, who in some sense embodies and personifies all of them by “spoiling his dish”. The literal meaning of this curious expression is to make a dish inedible by over-spicing it; as Schafer argues, however, this “can hardly be the misdeed of which the son/disciple is accused”. Rather, the symmetrical structure of Rav Hisda’s exposition once again “requires that ‘burning the dish’ has something to do with the son’s/disciple’s sexual relationship to his wife, in other words, that some kind of sexual misconduct is at stake here”. (Jesus, p. 27)

Schafer cites a number of parallels that demonstrate that “over-spicing one’s dish” is obviously another of those euphemistic innuendoes at which the Rabbis are so practised. Throughout the Talmud, the expression “to sip or eat one’s dish” is slang for a man’s enjoyment of coitus (cf. b Ber 62a; b Hag 5b). If a woman “spoils his dish”, therefore, she is guilty of some misdeed that prohibits him from duly satisfying his sexual hunger. In a discussion of the question of when a man may divorce his wife (m Git 9:10), the house of Shammai answers, “when he has found her guilty of some unseemly conduct [‘erwat davar, literally, ‘indecency’ or ‘lewdness’].” According to the rival house of Hillel, on the other hand, a husband has grounds for divorce when his wife “has spoilt his food”. Given the context, once more, “it does not seem very likely that the wife’s spoiling her husband’s food simply refers to preparing some oversalted or overspiced dishes” (Jesus, p. 27); it means, clearly enough, that she has committed some indecent act that has made her taboo, preventing her husband from partaking of the conjugal pleasure that is owed to him, and making it advisable for him to divorce her. (I note in passing how transcendently more refined, humane, tender, even egalitarian, is the Pauline Christian conception of marriage and the marriage debt, than the crudely carnal and patriarchal doctrine of the Rabbis.)

In our passage, in the case of the son or disciple who follows the example of Jesus the Nazarene, it is the man who spoils his dish, having committed some sexual misdemeanour that has prohibited his wife from sharing his bed, and sullied both his and her reputation. What’s worse is that he has transgressed in public.

Understood in this wider context, Rav Hisda’s exposition of the verse from Psalms seems arranged to arrive at the polemical conclusion that the most catastrophic “plague” that could visit a man’s tent is to have a son or disciple who like Jesus leads the life of a public lothario, whereby he besmirches the honour of himself and his wife. As Schafer observes,

It is hardly by coincidence that this interpretation comes from the same Rav Hisda who told us that Jesus’ mother had a husband as well as a lover and that Jesus was the son of her lover. Now we learn: this Jesus isn’t any better than his mother—it’s in his blood. He is so spoiled that he has become the proverbial son or disciple who is unfaithful to his wife and a disgrace to his parents or his teachers. (Jesus, p. 28)

As Rav Hisda’s confabulations in Shab were meant to vitiate the Gospel doctrine of the Virgin Birth, so here the purpose of his exegesis of Psalm 91:10 is to undercut the Gospels’ pretensions about Jesus’ lifelong chastity.

 

Schafer postulates that, in fact, Rav Hisda has a more specific New Testament locus in mind: the incomparable story in Luke (7:36-50) of the “woman who was a sinner” (identified in later Christian tradition with Mary Magdalene) who, finding Jesus dining at the house of a Pharisee, washes his feet with her tears, wipes them with her hair, kisses them, and anoints them with myrrh. The Pharisees who are present know her as a prostitute, and conclude from the fact that Jesus allows her to touch him that he must be unaware of who she is, and therefore “no prophet”. But, recognizing in her the inner sanctity and repentance of which the Pharisees’ outward piety of gesture is a travesty, Jesus publicly forgives her, giving further scandal to his hosts.

The indictment of Jesus for lewdness in our passage may thus be an attempt to invert the New Testament narrative, insinuating that Jesus did indeed recognize Mary Magdalene as a prostitute when she came to honour him, and forgave her not because her repentance was genuine or in order to unmask the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, but because he had been one of her clients. Rav Hisda and the Rabbis may have hatched this allegation out of their own Pharisaically puritanical but nonetheless sexually-obsessed imaginations; or–like certain contemporary anti-Christian polemicists (see below)–they may have taken their inspiration from a misreading of a related tradition in the Gnostic Gospels.

In the second-century Gospel of Mary in the Nag Hammadi Library, a jealous Peter doubts whether the risen Saviour would have “[spoken] privately to a woman [Mary Magdalene] and not openly to us [the disciples]”. His anger is rebuked by Levi, who explains, “the Saviour made her worthy”, wherefore “he loved her more than us” (17-18). The Gospel of Philip (late-third century) dilates upon this theme:

And the companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalene. But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on her mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” (63-4)

The salacious implications of this text may have proven irresistible to the Rabbis, as they have proven irresistible to the popularly acclaimed authors of such contemporary anti-Christian polemics as Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and The Da Vinci Code. Posing as the tireless, scholarly discoverers of an archaeological treasure-trove of historical “realities” and “truths” that the Church has conspired for two millennia to suppress, Beigent, Leigh, Lincoln, and Dan Brown, as everyone knows, have confabulated Jesus’ secret love affair with, and marriage to, that woman of dubious character, Mary Magdalene. But, as with most of their claims to piercing originality, Brown et al. are here merely plagiarists with a penchant for stealing from obscure sources, and misunderstanding them at that.

As anyone with the slightest knowledge of the Gnostic religion would know, these texts hardly point to an ordinary sexual relationship (let alone marriage) between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The central doctrine of Gnosticism is the inherent evil of the material world and the flesh; its extreme asceticism is one of the imperatives that the early Christians condemned as heretical. It is the height of absurdity to imagine a Gnostic Redeemer who so enjoyed the pleasures of coitus that he married a prostitute in order to spend the rest of his life in transports of sybaritic bliss.

As Schafer summarizes the consensus of serious Gnostic scholarship on the passage from the Gospel of Philip:

Within the context of the gnostic writings it isn’t very likely…that a plain conjugal relationship is at stake here. Rather, it seems that the “companion” (koinonos, a Greek loanwrd in the Coptic text) refers not to “spouse” in the technical sense of the word but to “sister” in the spiritual sense of the gnostic fellowship, just as the “kiss” does not refer to a sexual relationship but to the kiss of fellowship. Yet one can easily see how this reading of the New Testament narrative could be turned—not only in modern fiction but already in the source used by the Talmud—into a tradition about Jesus being married to Mary Magdalene. (Jesus, p. 29)

In misreading, or deliberately perverting, their Gnostic sources along with the Rabbis, Dan Brown et al. are in interesting company.

Jesus the Impossible Offspring of a Mule

In the previous installment of this essay, I outlined the early rabbinic confabulation according to which the Virgin Birth was a hoax, contrived so that Joseph, Mary, and the Evangelists might conceal the embarrassing truth that Mary was a notorious adulteress, and that the “Son of God” was the product of her shameful union with a Roman soldier. The Jewish counter-narrative was the source of a similar allegation that soon entered the arsenals of the pagan anti-Christian controversialists. It was also the source – mediated, apparently, by two thousand years of faithful oral transmission – of the crude mockeries of my teenage Jewish friends in the Manor, who assured me that the Virgin Birth was an invention meant to cover up the fact that Mary had gotten “knocked up”.

Other passages from the Bavli (the Babylonian Talmud) refer derisively to the Virgin Birth, including one that calls Jesus’ followers “the afterbirth of a mule”—an insult that is the ancient Hebrew equivalent of the modern scatological expletive, although one wonders precisely which one. The curious dialogue is supposed to have taken place in Athens between the early second century Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananya and certain unnamed Greek philosophers, for the purpose of determining whose wisdom was superior, that of the Greeks or the Rabbis. There is, of course, no question of the historicity of this debate, since its presumptive subjects are so homely and trivial that one can hardly imagine their being of interest to the likes of Plutarch, Albinus, Apuleius, or Numenius–even if they are entirely typical of the Talmud.

Asked, during the conversation, to furnish an example of a “fictional tale”, R. Yehoshua submits the following:

There was this mule which gave birth, and round its neck was hanging a document upon which was written, “there is a claim against my father’s house of one hundred thousand Zuz”.

They [the Athenian Sages] asked him: “Can a mule give birth?” He answered them: “This is one of these fiction stories.”

Again, the Athenian Sages asked: “When salt becomes unsavory, wherewith is it salted?”

He replied: “With the afterbirth of a mule.”

[The Sages]: “And is there an afterbirth of a mule?”

[R. Yehoshua]: “And can salt become unsavory?” (b Bekh 8b)

The ostensible cleverness of R. Yehoshua turns on the well-known fact that a mule is congenitally sterile (i.e., a mule that has given birth is the Rabbi’s example of a “fiction story”). Thusfar, the passage has no apparent relevance to Jesus. But the connection between the miraculous offspring of a mule and the Virgin Birth emerges in the ensuing dialogue. The Sages test the Rabbi’s wisdom by asking him if he knows of anything that can restore the savour to salt that has lost its taste. His answer, “the afterbirth of a mule”, is immediately challenged because, as he has already declared, there can be no “afterbirth” of an animal that is incapable of bearing offspring. The Sages think they have “got” him. But he turns the tables on them, with a rhetorical question of his own: “And can salt become unsavory?” Of course not. This, as the wise Rabbi sarcastically implies, is another of those “fiction stories”.

The Talmud here derides Jesus’ famous proclamation from the Sermon on the Mount:

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. (Matt. 5:13)

With these words, Jesus addresses his disciples as the new salt of the earth, inasmuch as the old salt has lost its savour. The old salt is the Old Law which, no longer spiritually efficacious, must be cast aside and trampled under foot.

The Bavli dialogue attempts to undercut such Christian claims. Christians pretend that the salt of the Old Covenant can no longer satisfy the hunger of the spirit, and must be rejected. They affect that only they can restore its savour. But the Old Law has not lost its taste, any more than salt can lose its taste. The Christian claim is another “fiction story”. And by what means do Christians affect to be able to restore its savour to the Law? By the afterbirth of a mule! – another impossibility inasmuch as the mule cannot give birth any more than salt can lose its taste.

Once again, it is the deliberate and ingenious vulgarity of the Talmudic polemic that shocks the civilized sensibility. Jesus is the “divine child” of a mule. (This, of course, constitutes a concomitant insult to Mary who, like the proverbial mule, is stupid and stubborn – her refusal to admit her indiscretions? – and the product of miscegenation.) That Jesus has been miraculously born of a Virgin who conceived of the Holy Spirit is as impossible as that a mule has been delivered of a cub. As the offspring of Jesus, the disciples are the mule’s “afterbirth”. Both the Virgin Birth and the pretensions of the New Covenant to supercede the Old are risible myths.

The following discussion relies almost entirely upon Peter Schafer’s Jesus in the Talmud, which I have chosen for three reasons. First, it is accessibly short (under two hundred pages) and written for the non-specialist; second, it is recent (2007), conveniently summarizing the long history of scholarship on the subject; third, there cannot be the least suspicion that it was motivated by anti-Semitism. The fact that the dust-jacket includes tributes from Elie Wiesel and Rabbi Visotzky (of the Jewish Theological Seminary) makes that clear enough; that it lists, amongst Schafer’s other works, the title Judaeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World, puts it beyond doubt. I also follow Schafer’s order and division of the topic, although my headings are somewhat more forthrightly worded.

 

Jesus the Bastard Son of an Adulteress

Along with the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the Gospels’ account of Jesus’ ancestry and birth is one of the foundational narratives of Christianity. The Evangelists are, accordingly, very careful to establish Jesus’ messianic pedigree. He was born, as they relate, in Bethlehem (the city of David) to Mary and her husband (or betrothed) Joseph, a carpenter from Nazareth. Through his father Joseph, Jesus descends (in the twenty-eighth generation, in Matthew’s genealogy) in direct line from David, thus fulfilling the ancient Jewish prophecies of the coming of a Messiah out of the royal house of Jesse.

Whether she was already married or merely espoused to Joseph, the Evangelists insist that Mary was still a virgin when, through the afflatus of the Holy Spirit, Jesus was conceived. Being a “just man”, and “not willing to make her a public example” – to expose her to gossip and ridicule –, Joseph “was minded to put her away privily” when he found her with child. But while he deliberated, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, telling him to fear not, for the child in Mary’s womb was conceived of the Holy Ghost, and would be born in fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, “Behold, a virgin shall be with child…” (Matt. 1:18-23)

Evidently familiar with the Gospel narrative and the tone of high moral and theological sanctity in which it is retailed, but determined to impugn it as part of a general campaign to discredit the nascent faith (which they regarded as heretical), the Rabbis tell a rather different story.

 

The Rabbis’ version is alluded to in several passages in the Babylonian Talmud (the Bavli), which did not reach its final form until the seventh century. For this reason, it might be tempting to dismiss its allusions to Jesus and Christianity as hopelessly late. This, however, as Schafer and other scholars have insisted, would be a mistake. First, the Bavli is a compilation of traditions, oral and written, that go back to the early fourth century. Secondly, because of the easy familiarity presumed by the interlocutors in these passages, it is highly probable that a rabbinic counter-narrative of Jesus’ lineage and birth had coalesced in a very early age, and had thus been in broad circulation for several centuries before being formally recorded.

In the first of these texts (Shab 104b), the story follows upon an exposition of the mishnaic law according to which the writing of two or more characters constitutes “work”, and is thus forbidden on the Sabbath. With typical scrupulosity, the Mishnah lists any and all of the instruments and materials that could conceivably be used for writing (quill, stylus, chisel, paper, wax, clay, stone), and even includes within the Sabbath prohibition the use of one’s own body (i.e., anyone “who scratches [a mark] in his flesh”). This particular mishnah then inevitably engenders a debate about the legal status of tattoos. The principal antagonists are the famous Talmudic sages, Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua.

R. Eliezer argues that tattoos are also proscribed, and in the Tosefta (the Talmudic supplements), he presents before the Rabbis in attendance at the debate the proof: “But did not Ben Satra learn only in such a way?” (t Shab 11:15) Since the infamous Ben Satra used tattoos as an aid to learning, surely they are a form of writing that must be forbidden on the Sabbath. Elsewhere (b Shab 104b), R. Eliezer makes an even more damning argument: “But did not Ben Stada bring forth witchcraft from Egypt by means of scratches upon his flesh?” Yet, in spite of his confidence that the mere mention of the name of Ben Satra/Stada in connection with the practice of tattooing would be enough to demonstrate that it should be forbidden, the Rabbis dismiss Eliezer’s testimony by pointing out that Ben Satra/Stada was “fool”, and that a fool’s behaviour ought not to bear upon so grave a question of rabbinic law.

The text then goes on to pose the question of this notorious “fool’s” parentage:

Was he the son of Stada, and not on the contrary, the son of Pandera?

Said Rav Hisda: the husband was Stada, and the lover was Pandera.

But was not the husband Pappos ben Yehuda and rather his mother Stada?

His mother was Miriam, the woman who let her hair grow long.

This is as they say about her in Pumbeditha: This one was unfaithful to her husband. (Shab 104b)

 

This (so Schafer assures us) is an entirely typical Bavli dialogue, insofar as it attempts to resolve the contradiction between two Talmudic traditions: here, one that holds that the “fool/magician” is the “son of Stada”, and another, according to which he is known as the “son of Pandera”. As Schafer emphasizes, what the Talmud is concerned with is “the problem that the same person is called by two different names, and not about the question of who this person is” (the answer to which, i.e, Jesus the Nazarene, is assumed to be widely known) (Jesus, p. 17). To resolve the conflict, each of the interlocutors in our passage proposes a different solution.

Rav Hisda (a teacher at the academy of Sura, d. 319) explains that the paternity of our “fool” is doubtful, because his mother had both a husband and a lover. Those who thought her husband was the father called him “son of Stada”; those who suspected that her lover was the father called him “son of Pandera”.

Disagreeing, an anonymous interlocutor posits another explanation. The husband’s name, he argues, is not “Stada” but Pappos ben Yehuda (a Palestinian scholar of the first half of the first century); in fact, it was the mother who was called “Stada”. The mother, as he goes on to say, is the notorious Miriam of the long hair—the Miriam who is condemned and convicted in the Pumbeditha (Sura’s rival rabbinic academy in Babylonia) of adultery. “Stada” is thus merely an epithet, deriving from the Hebrew satah/sete (“to go astray; to be unfaithful”). Miriam, that is, is also called “Stada” because she was a sotah, an adulteress.

Both explanations assume, then, that the mother of our “fool” had, at the same time, a husband and a lover, and was thus incontrovertibly guilty of adultery. The dispute is only about the name of the husband (“Stada” or “Pappos b. Yehudi”?). Significantly, the latter is mentioned elsewhere in the Bavli, in an admonitory tale told by R. Meir, according to which Pappos b. Yehudi was so uncertain of his wife’s faithfulness that he used to lock her in his house whenever he went out (b Gittin 90a). In the Rabbi’s account, Pappos is an example of the proverbial chastened cuckold who, when a fly falls into his cup, no longer drinks from it: that is, even while keeping his wife locked up, he regards her infidelity as so inevitable that he refuses to have intercourse with her.

The sexual promiscuity of our fool’s mother is further emphasized in the anonymous speaker’s statement that she let her hair grow long. Schafer cites numerous passages throughout Talmud in which long hair is the scarlet letter of a “bad woman”; indeed, the text about Pappos b. Yehudi in Gittin continues with the admonition that the unfortunate man “who see his wife go out in public with her hair unfastened” should not only refrain from sexual contact with her but immediately file for divorce.

 

Though the passage from Shab leaves the paternity of our fool ultimately in doubt, whether his father was Miriam’s husband or her lover, the fact that she was an adulteress in itself made the child a mamzer (bastard) in Jewish law. Moreover, on the basis of numerous and widespread rabbinic references to him as the “son of Pandera/Panthera”, Schafer concludes that “the Talmud seems to be convinced that his true father was indeed Pandera, his mother’s lover, and that he was a bastard in the full sense of the word” (Jesus, p. 18).

Once again, it must be emphasized that the identities of the bastard son and the adulteress mother in these oblique rabbinic references are not in doubt. For the Rabbis of the Talmud, the son is Jesus, and his mother Miriam is the Miriam (Heb.> Lat. Maria) of the Gospels. But who is her lover “Pandera”?

In attempting to answer this question, Talmudic scholars have for generations adduced a remarkable parallel in a passage from the Alethes Logos (The True Doctrine, preserved in fragments quoted by Origen in his Contra Celsum) of the second-century pagan Middle Platonist philosopher Celsus. In The True Doctrine, Celsus introduces a certain Jew who, supposedly in debate with Jesus, accused him of having “fabricated the story of his birth from a virgin”, whereas, in fact

he came from a Jewish village and from a poor country woman who earned her living by spinning. He [Celsus’ Jew] says that she was driven out by her husband, who was a carpenter by trade, as she was convicted of adultery. Then he says that after she had been driven out by her husband and while she was wandering about in a disgraceful way she secretly gave birth to Jesus. And he says that because he was poor he hired himself out as a workman in Egypt, and there tried his hand at certain magical powers on which the Egyptians pride themselves; he returned full of conceit because of these powers, and on account of them gave himself the title of God. (C.C. I, 28)

In the previous section of this essay, I have already quoted this passage in conjunction with another from Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, but reproduce it here because of its immediate relevance to the rabbinic texts under discussion. A subsequent reference by Origen (C.C. I, 32) places that relevance beyond question:

Let us return, however, to the words put into the mouth [by Celsus] of the Jew, where the mother of Jesus is described as having been turned out by the carpenter who was betrothed to her, as she had been convicted of adultery and had a child by a certain soldier name Panthera.

Between our Talmudic text and the account of Jesus’ parentage and childhood that Celsus has “put into the mouth” of his Jew, the parallels are certainly striking. In both, the child is the son of an adulteress and her lover “Panthera”, and returns from Egypt with certain “magical powers”. The only difference is that Celsus’ Jew identifies him explicitly as Jesus, whereas the Rabbis refer to him offhandedly as the “fool”, without mentioning his proper name. But then, as we have already seen, the interlocutors in the Talmudic dialogue are not concerned with his identity, but the oddity that he is known by two names.

Moreover, as Schafer stresses again, “several rabbinic sources do mention Jesus as the son of Pandera, and it can be safely assumed, therefore, that the Talmud presupposes the knowledge of this identity.” (Jesus, p. 19) The more important inference, in any case, is the one to which the overwhelming congruencies between the two accounts unmistakably point: Those of both the Talmud and Celsus’ Jew evidently depend upon a common source according to which Jesus was the illegitimate son of an adulteress mother and an obscure father, Pandera/Panthera, who was her lover. The fact that Celsus has attributed these innovations to a “Jew”, in conjunction with its similarities to the rabbinic counter-narrative preserved in the Bavli, suggests that the tradition of Jesus’ illegitimate birth was originally Jewish, not pagan. Celsus’ “Jew” may have been a literary invention – rather than an historical personality who actually conversed with Jesus –, but there is no reason not to suppose that he represents a genuine body of Jewish anti-Christian opinion. The polemical Jewish counter-narrative was thus evidently already in circulation in Celsus’ lifetime (late second century), but may indeed have originated as early as the time of Celsus’ Jew (i.e, the time of Jesus).

 

Whatever its age of origin, the purpose of the rabbinic counter-narrative could hardly be clearer: to ridicule and undercut in the most sordid terms and at every juncture the ancient professions of faith upon which the sanctity and authenticity of the New Religion rest. The Evangelists hail Jesus as the “son of David”; the book of Matthew begins with a genealogy that traces his ancestry through the royal line to its founder, on which stands the Christian claim that the new-born child is the long-awaited Davidic Messiah. The rabbinic version parodies Jesus’ pretensions to nobility by making him the son of an unknown Roman soldier—a non-Jew and, worse, a member of a detested nation of oppressors. Hardly from the royal city of Bethlehem, in reality he came from an impoverished country village, the son of manual laborers who provided for him so meagerly that the entire family was forced to seek work outside the country. This was the reason for their “flight into Egypt”, rather than to escape Herod’s Massacre, of which, of course, there was never any threat, there never having been a supernaturally heralded birth of any long-awaited King of the Jews of whom Herod could be afraid.

Most risible of all, according to the Rabbis, is the Gospel’s claim that Jesus’ mother was a virgin from whose immaculate womb he was miraculously born as the son of God. On the contrary, Miriam was a loose woman, a notorious adulteress, whose husband was so habituated to her nocturnal prowlings that he kept her under lock and key. This was the real meaning of Joseph’s decision to “put her away privily”, if it was not because Joseph knew that she was already pregnant with the child of another man.

Far from being the “son of God”, whose father was the Holy Spirit, Jesus was in reality a bastard who issued from the loins of Mary’s clandestine lover. No wonder Joseph was “troubled”, and had to be reassured in a “dream”. The whole fantastic story of Mary’s being with child by the Holy Spirit was a dream indeed – a face-saving concoction meant to cover-up the embarrassing truth that Mary, Joseph’s legally betrothed, had an illicit lover, and that her “divine” child was the product of one their sordid tysts. Joseph’s disquieting suspicions were entirely warranted. Mary had certainly betrayed him. Rather than agreeing to accept her as his legal wife, he ought to have dismissed her immediately, in accordance with Jewish law.

 

This, then, is the Jewish counter-narrative. In the historical context of the sectarian antagonisms of the early Christian centuries, it is perhaps understandable that it attempts to expose as frauds the Gospels’ pious claims that Jesus was descended from David, that his mother was a divinely-elected virgin, that he is the Messiah predicted and expected by the Prophets, and that he is the very son of God. After all, the Jews rejected them while Jesus lived and preached, and there is no reason why they should not continue to reject them vehemently during the decades and centuries in which the Church was establishing herself as the dominant religious community of the ancient world.

Still, even the bitterest pagan opponents of Christianity refuted its theology with reasons and arguments. There are no arguments in the rabbinic polemic. There are only myths and confabulations, erected upon no more solid an empirical-historical foundation than the Gospel narratives themselves. What discredits them, ultimately, is not their falsehood; it is the gratuitous sexual muck-raking and domestic farce into which they so easily and salaciously descend. There is something eerily contemporary about the Rabbis’ cast of mind. It reminds one, in fact, of Dan Brown (whose own scurrilous caricature of the Holy Family owes much, as we will see later, to the Talmudic texts). There has always been, I suppose, a certain kind of mind that sees everything from a worm’s-eye view; that cannot admit the possibility of a world in which such things as love, chastity, and marital fidelity exist, even as ideals, and when confronted by them, does everything in its power to besmirch them.