Mary in the Talmud

In this post I will be excerpting references from Peter Schäfer’s book Jesus in the Talmud, published by Princeton University Press in 2007, in respect to what the Babylonian Talmud claims about the holy and blessed Mother of Christ.

Here is what Schäfer writes regarding the names the rabbis employed for Christ, which at first glance do not seem to be speaking about Jesus at all:

Schäfer then goes on to quote what the Talmud says about Mary, who was given the name Stada by certain rabbis:

Here are the actually citations from the Talmud itself:

Schäfer explains the significance and meaning of all that the Talmud states in reference to Jesus and his blessed Mother. One thing that the readers should note is that the Talmud argues for Jesus being the illegitimate son of a man named Pandera, and who is said to be a Roman Soldier in sources outside of the Talmud.

In other words, Mary committed adultery with a Gentile pagan soldier who got her pregnant with Jesus!

With the foregoing in view, I now cite from Schäfer’s work. All emphasis will be mine.

First, Rav Hisda (a Babylonian amora of the third generation and an important teacher at the academy of Sura; d. 309 C.E.) suggests that the person in question had, as it were, two “fathers” because his mother had a husband and a lover,¹⁷ and that he was called “son of Stada,” when referring to the husband and “son of Pandera,” when referring to the lover. Against this, an anonymous author comes up with a different solution: No, he argues, his mother’s husband was not some “Stada” but rather Pappos b. Yehuda, a Palestinian scholar (not portrayed as a sage and without the title “Rabbi”) of the first half of the second century C.E., and in fact it was his mother who was called “Stada.”¹⁸ If this is so, the last step of the mini-discourse in the Bavli continues, we need to explain this strange name “Stada” for his mother. The answer: His mother’s true name was Miriam, and “Stada” is an epithet which derives from the Hebrew/Aramaic root satah/sete (“to deviate from the right path, to go astray, to be unfaithful”). In other words, his mother Miriam was also called “Stada” because she was a sotah, a woman suspected, or rather convicted, of adultery. This anonymous explanation is located in Pumbeditha, Sura’s rival academy in Babylonia.

Hence, it becomes clear that both explanations begin with the assumption that our hero’s mother had both a husband and a lover, and that they only disagree about the name of the husband (Stada versus Pappos b. Yehuda). The name Pandera for the lover is made explicit only by Rav Hisda but seems to be accepted in the Pumbeditha explanation as well, because it presupposes the mother’s adultery and does not suggest another name for the lover. That Pappos b. Yehuda is identified as the husband originates from another story in the Bavli, transmitted in the name of R. Meir, that Pappos b. Yehuda, when he went out, used to lock his wife in their house—obviously because he had reason to doubt her fidelity (b Git 90a). This behavior on the part of Pappos b. Yehuda is quite drastically compared to that of a man who, if a fly falls into his cup, puts the cup aside and does not drink from it any more—meaning that Pappos b. Yehuda not only locks away his wife so that she cannot go astray but that he also refrains from intercourse with her because she has become doubtful. (Ibid., pp. 17-18)

The dubious reputation of our hero’s mother is further emphasized by the statement that she grew her hair to a great length. Whatever the original meaning of the odd phrase,¹⁹ the context in Shabbat 104b/Sanhedrin 67a clearly suggests that Miriam’s long and apparently unfastened hair was indicative of her indecent behavior. Another passage in the Talmud (Er 100b) describes the epitome of a “bad woman” as follows:

Similarly, the story in Gittin continues with a “bad man who sees his wife go out with her hair unfastened²¹ and spin cloth in the street with her armpits uncovered and bathe with (other) people”—such a man, it concludes, should immediately divorce his wife instead of continuing to live with her and having intercourse with her. A woman who appears bareheaded and with long hair in public, this seems to be presupposed here, is prone to all kinds of licentious behavior and deserves to be divorced.²²

If the Bavli takes it for granted that our hero’s mother was an adulteress, then the logical conclusion follows that he was a mamzer, a bastard or illegitimate child. In order to be put in this mamzer category it did not matter whether his biological father was indeed his mother’s lover and not her legal husband—the very fact that she had a lover made his legal status dubious. Hence the uncertainty that he is sometimes called Ben Stada and sometimes Ben Pandera. But nevertheless, the Talmud seems to be convinced that his true father was Pandera,²³ his mother’s lover, and that he was a bastard in the full sense of the word.

Searching for evidence outside the rabbinic corpus, scholars have long pointed to a remarkable parallel in the pagan philosopher Celsus’ polemical treatise Alethe¯s Logos, written in the second half of the second century C.E.²⁴ and preserved only in quotations in the Church Father Origen’s reply Contra Celsum (written ca. 231–233 C.E.). There, Celsus presents a Jew²⁵ as having a conversation with Jesus himself and accusing him of having “fabricated the story of his birth from a virgin.” In reality, the Jew argues,

In another quotation Celsus repeats these allegations put into the mouth of a Jew and even communicates the name of Jesus’ father:

This story has much in common with the short discourse in the Talmud: the hero is the son of an adulteress, he returned from Egypt with magical powers and, most important, the name of his mother’s lover (his father) was Panthera. The only difference between the versions in the Talmud and in Celsus is the fact that Celsus makes it explicit that the child, born from the poor Jewish adulteress and the soldier Panthera, was the very Jesus whom the Christians regard as the founder of their faith, whereas the Talmud keeps silent about the proper name of the child.²⁸ But this does not pose a real problem because the Talmud, as we have seen, is not concerned about the identity of the child but about the strange phenomenon of two different names used for his father. Moreover, several rabbinic sources do mention Jesus as the son of Pandera,²⁹ and it can be safely assumed, therefore, that the Talmud presupposes the knowledge of this identity. The punch line of this attribution, of course, is the fact that Jesus, through his father Panthera/Pandera, becomes not only a bastard but even the son of a non-Jew.³⁰

1. Jesus “returns” from Egypt as a magician. In the New Testament, Jesus’ parents Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt with the newborn infant because King Herod threatens to kill the child (Mt. 2:13ff.). Herod had heard about Jesus from the magicians who came from the East to pay tribute to Jesus as the newborn King of the Jews (Mt. 2:2). Egypt was regarded in antiquity as the classical land of magic,³⁵ and Jesus is portrayed in the New Testament³⁶ as well as in rabbinic sources³⁷ as someone with supernatural powers (healing, commanding the demons, etc.). That Jesus is labeled a magician in a derogatory sense is, therefore, an inversion of the New Testament, which connects him (positively) with magicians, with Egypt, and with healing powers.
2. Celsus portrays Jesus’ parents as poor: his father was a carpenter and his mother a poor countrywoman who earned her living by spinning. The New Testament does not say anything about Mary’s family background, but it mentions explicitly that Joseph, her betrothed, was a carpenter (Mt. 13:55).³⁸ The Talmud remains silent about his parents’ means—unless one wants to see in the strange epithet megadla neshayya given to his mother an allusion not to her long hair but to her profession as a manual worker (the Aramaic word megadla can mean “plaiting” but also “weaving”).
3. The most pungent counterargument against the evangelists’ narrative is, of course, the assertion of Jesus’ illegitimate birth from an adulterous mother and some insignificant lover. It parries the claim of Jesus’ noble Davidic lineage to which the New Testament attaches such great value: Matthew starts with his genealogy (Mt. 1) which leads back directly to David and calls him, as well as his “father” Joseph, “son of David” (Mt. 1:1, 20; Lk. 1:27, 2:4); he is born in Bethlehem, the city of David (Mt. 2:5f.; Lk. 2:4), and hence is the Davidic Messiah (Mt. 2:4; Lk. 2:11). No, the Jewish counternarrative argues, this is all nonsense; he is anything but of noble origins. His father was by no means a descendant of David but the otherwise unknown Panthera/Pandera (just a Roman soldier, according to Celsus, in other words a non-Jew and a member of the hated Roman Empire that so visibly and horribly oppressed the Jews).

Schäfer goes on to show how the Talmud ridicules the Virgin Birth story, likening it to a mule giving birth which in itself is improbable. The rabbis even mock Jesus' teaching on salt losing its savor, thereby becoming useless:

These brief stories center around the well-known fact that mules, the offspring of a cross between a male donkey and a female horse, almost always are sterile. Both play with a double element of surprise: in the first case the allegation that a mule not only can give birth to a cub, but that a particular cub was even born with a debt document bound around its neck; and in the second case that salt not only can become unsavory, but that it can regain its flavor with the afterbirth of a mule. This, of course, has nothing to do with Jesus. But why the strange idea of a sterile mule giving birth, coupled with the not-less-strange idea of unsavory salt, that is, presumably salt that lost its taste? One could argue that what we have here are remnants of some kind of an early “scientific” discourse about the sterility of mules, and this is probably the easiest answer. But still, the connection of the miraculous offspring of a sterile mule with the salt regaining its taste by the afterbirth of a mule is suspicious. With regard to the unsavory—most likely insipid—salt one immediately thinks of Jesus’ famous dictum in the Sermon on the Mount:

Jesus addresses here his disciples as the salt of the earth, more precisely as the new salt of the earth because there is some other salt that has lost its saltiness and hence it taste. This other salt, with no taste anymore, can easily be understood as the people of the old covenant which is “no longer good for anything,” “thrown out,” and “trampled under foot.” If we take this saying of Jesus as the foil against which our Bavli story was construed, the brief tale turns into a pungent parody of the New Testament claim of Jesus’ followers as the new salt of the earth: these Christians, it argues, maintain that the salt of the old covenant has become insipid, and hence useless, and that its taste was restored by the people of the new covenant—through the afterbirth of a mule! But we all know that there is no such thing as the afterbirth of a mule because the mule does not give birth, as much as we know that salt does not lose its taste.

On this background, the miraculous offspring of the mule in the first story (and the afterbirth in the second one) gets an even more significant meaning. It can well be understood as a parody of Jesus’ miraculous birth from a virgin: an offspring from a virgin is as likely as an offspring from a mule.⁴⁷ The Christians’ claim of Jesus’ birth from a virgin and without a father belongs to the category of fiction stories, fairy tales just for fun. Moreover, this is the punch line of the second story: Jesus’ followers, who claim to be the new salt of the earth, are nothing but the afterbirth of that imagined offspring of the mule, a fiction of a fiction. Read this way, our two little Bavli stories become indeed much more than an amusing exchange between the rabbis and the Greek Sages; rather, they offer another biting ridicule of one of the cornerstones of Christian theology. (Ibid., pp. 22-24)

9. ela hu ela immo in Ms. Munich is clearly a dittography; the other Mss. of Shab 104b read as follows:

• Ms. Oxford 23: “the husband was this Pappos ben Yehuda, and rather his mother was Stada and his father Pandera”;
• Ms. Vatican 108: “the husband [variant reading: the cohabiter] was Pappos ben Yehuda, (and) his mother was Stada [addition: (and) he is Jesus the Nazarene]”;
• Ms. Vatican 487: after the name “Ben Siteda” the following part is missing; printed edition Soncino: “the husband was Pappos ben Yehuda and his mother was Stada.”

The Mss. of Sanh 67a: Ms. Munich 95: “the husband was Pappos ben Yehuda, but rather say: Stada was his mother”;

• Ms. Firenze II.1.8–9: “the husband was Pappos ben Yehuda, but rather say: his mother was Stada”;
• Ms. Karlsruhe (Reuchlin 2): “the husband/cohabiter was Pappos ben Yehuda, but rather say: his mother was Stada”;
• Ms. Yad ha-Rav Herzog 1: “the husband was Pappos ben Yehuda, but rather say: his mother was Stada.”

10. “Miriam” in most manuscripts and printed editions, but in Ms. Munich only in Sanh 67a.—Ms. Vatican 108 has the unique and strange addition: his mother was Miriam “and his father (? avoyale?) Prince/Nasi (? nas´i/nes´iya?).” (Ibid., p. 149)

28. Only Ms. Vatican 108 identifies the child as “Jesus the Nazarene” (see above, n. 9). (Ibid., p. 151)

Further Reading

The Talmud: Jesus is Burning in Dung!