Lost and Hostile Gospels. Baring-Gould Sabine
is perhaps worthy of remark that St. Epiphanius, who wrote against heresies at the end of the fourth century, gives the genealogy of Jesus thus:80
Jacob, called Panther, married to ?
Offspring:
Mary, married to Joseph
Offspring:
Jesus
Cleophas
It shows that in the fourth century the Jewish stories of Panthera had made such an impression on the Christians, that his name was forced into the pedigree of Jesus.
Had any of the stories found in the Toledoth Jeschu existed in the second century, we should certainly have found them in the book of Celsus.
Origen taunts the Jew with knowing nothing of Christ but what he had found out from the Gospels. He would not have uttered that taunt had any anti-Christian apocryphal biographies of Christ existed in his day. The Talmud, indeed, has the tale of Christ having studied magic in Egypt. Whence this legend, as well as that of Panthera, came, we shall see presently.
IV. The Talmud
The Talmud (i. e. the Teaching) consists of two parts, the Mischna and the Gemara.
The Mischna (i. e. δευτέρωσις, Second Law, or Recapitulation) is a collection of religious ordinances, interpretations of Old Testament passages, especially of Mosaic rules, which have been given by various illustrious Rabbis from the date of the founding of the second Temple, therefore from about B.C. 400 to the year A.D. 200. These interpretations, which were either written or orally handed down, were collected in the year A.D. 219 by the Rabbi Jehuda the Holy, at Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, into a book to which he gave the name of Mischna, the Recapitulation of the Law. At that time the Jewish Sanhedrim and the Patriarch resided at Tiberias. After the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, the Sanhedrim, which consisted of seventy-one persons, assembled at Jamnia, the ancient Philistine city of Jabne; but on the insurrection of the Jews under Barcochab, A.D. 135, it took up its quarters at Tiberias. There the Sanhedrim met under a hereditary Patriarch of the family of Gamaliel, who bore the title of Nasi, Chief, till A.D. 420, when the last member of the house of Gamaliel died, and the Patriarchate and Sanhedrim departed from Tiberias.
The Mischna is made up of six Orders (Sedarim), which together contain sixty-three Tractates. The first Order or Seder is called Iesaïm, and treats of agriculture. The second, Moed, treats of festivals. The third, Naschim, deals with the rights of women. The fourth, Nezikim, or Jechnoth, treats of cases of law. The fifth, Kodaschim, of holy things. The sixth, Taharoth, of impurity and purifications.
The Orders of Kodaschim and Taharoth are incomplete. The Jerusalem Talmud consists of only the first four, and the tract Nidda, which belongs to the Order Taharoth.
Now it is deserving of remark, that many of the Rabbis whose sayings are recorded in the Mischna lived in the time of our Lord, or shortly after, and yet that not the smallest reference is made to the teaching of Jesus, nor even any allusion to him personally. Although the Mischna was drawn up beside the Sea of Galilee, at Tiberias, near where Jesus lived and wrought miracles and taught, neither he nor his followers are mentioned once throughout the Mischna.
There must be a reason why the Mischna, as well as Josephus and Justus of Tiberias, is silent respecting Jesus of Nazareth. The reason I have already given. The followers of Jesus were regarded as belonging to the sect of the Essenes. Our Lord's teaching made no great impression on the Jews of his time. It was so radically unlike the pedantry and puerilities of their Rabbis, that they did not acknowledge him as a teacher of the Law. He had preached Essene disengagement from the world, conquest of passion. Only when Essene enthusiasm was thought to threaten the powerful families which held possession of and abused the pontifical office, had the high-priest and his party taken alarm, and obtained the condemnation and death of Jesus. Their alarm died away, the political situation altered, the new Essenianism ceased to be suspected, and Nazarene Christianity took its place among the parties of Judaism, attracting little notice and exciting no active hostility.
The Mischna was drawn up at the beginning of the third century, when Christianity was spreading rapidly through the Roman empire, and had excited the Roman emperors to fierce persecution of those who professed it. Yet Jehuda the Holy says not a word about Christ or Christianity.
He and those whose sayings he quotes had no suspicion that this religion, which was gaining ground every day among the Gentiles, had sprung from the teaching of a Jew. Christianity ruffled not the surface of Jewdom. The harmless Nazarenes were few, and were as strict observers of the Law as the straitest Pharisees.
And if Christianity was thus a matter of indifference to the Jews, no wonder that every recollection of Jesus of Nazareth, every tradition of his birth, his teaching, his death, had died away, so that, even at the close of the second century, Origen could charge his Jew opponent with knowing nothing of Jesus save what he had learned from the Gospels.
The Mischna became in turn the subject of commentary and interpretation by the Rabbis. The explanations of famous Rabbis, who taught on the Mischna, were collected, and called Gemara (the Complement), because with it the collection of rabbinical expositions of the Law was completed.
There are two editions of the Gemara, one made in Palestine and called the Jerusalem Gemara, the other made at Babylon.
The Jerusalem Gemara was compiled about A.D. 390, under the direction of the Patriarch of Tiberias. But there was a second Jewish Patriarchate at Babylon, which lasted till A.D. 1038, whereas that of Tiberias was extinguished, as has been already said, in A.D. 420.
Among the Babylonish Jews, under the direction of their Patriarch, an independent school of commentators on the Mischna had arisen. Their opinions were collected about the year A.D. 500, and compose the Babylonish Gemara. This latter Gemara is held by modern Jews in higher esteem than the Jerusalem Gemara.
The Mischna, which is the same to both Gemaras, together with one of the commentaries and glosses, called Mekilta and Massektoth, form either the Jerusalem or the Babylonish Talmud.
All the Jewish historians who speak of the compilation of the Gemara of Babylon, are almost unanimous on three points: that the Rabbi Ashi was the first to begin the compilation, but that death interrupted him before its completion; that he had for his assistant another doctor, the Rabbi Avina; and that a certain Rabbi Jose finished the work seventy-three years after the death of Rabbi Ashi. Rabbi Ashi is believed to have died A.D. 427, consequently the Babylonish Talmud was completed in A.D. 500.
St. Jerome (d. 420) was certainly acquainted with the Mischna, for he mentions it by name.81
St. Ephraem (d. 378) says:
“The Jews have had four sorts of traditions which they call Repetitions (δευτερώσεις). The first bear the name of Moses the Prophet; they attribute the second to a doctor named Akiba or Bar Akiba. The third pass for being those of a certain Andan or Annan, whom they call also Judas; and they maintain that the sons of Assamonaeus were the authors of the fourth. It is from these four sources that all those doctrines among them are derived, which, however futile they may be, by them are esteemed as the most profound science, and of which they speak with ostentation.”82
From this it appears that St. Ephraem was acquainted not only with the Mischna, but with the Gemara, then in process of formation.
Both the Jerusalem and the Babylonish Gemara, in their interpretations of the Mischna, mention Jesus and the apostles, or, at all events, have been supposed to do so. At the time when both Gemaras were drawn up, Christianity was the ruling religion in the Roman empire, and the Rabbis could hardly ignore any longer the Founder of the new religion. But their statements concerning Jesus are untrustworthy, because so late. Had they occurred in the Mischna, they might have deserved attention.
But before we consider the passages containing allusions to Jesus, it will be well to quote a very singular anecdote in the Jerusalem Gemara:83
“It
Adv. Haer. lib. iii; Haer. lxviii. 7.
“Quantae traditiones Pharisaeorum sint, quas hodie vocant δευτερώσεις et quam aniles fabulae, evolvere nequeo: neque enim libri patitur magnitudo, et pleraque tam turpia sunt ut erubescam dicere.”
Haeres. xiii.
Beracoth, xi.