CHAPTER NINE
trusting “like a child” –
Jesus was announcing that he would come back in this “little one" -
his “second coming” -
his “other messiah” -
the world to come – see the Marcionite version of the Beatitudes
p. 64
He says so in the text –
deliberately confessed himself to be something he wasn’t –
Jesus knew that the Father –
p. 65
was a prophet, powerful in word –
p. 66
I was a small bald headed man - Jones Paul and Thecla Chapter 1. Cf Schaff Philip, History of the Christian Church, (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.) 1997. This material has been carefully compared, corrected¸ and emended (according to the 1910 edition of Charles Scribner's Sons) by The Electronic Bible Society, Dallas, TX, 1998 “This is from the tradition preserved in the apocryphal Acts of Thecla. See the description quoted above, p. 282. Other ancient descriptions of Paul in the Philopatris of pseudo-Lucian (of the second, but more probably of the fourth century), Malala of Antioch (sixth century), and Nicephorus (fifteenth century), represent Paul as little in stature, bald, with a prominent aquiline nose, gray hair and thick beard, bright grayish eyes, somewhat bent and stooping, yet pleasant and graceful. See these descriptions in Lewin’s St. Paul, II. 412. The oldest extant portraiture of Paul, probably from the close of the first or beginning of the second century, was found on a large bronze medallion in the cemetery of Domitilla (one of the Flavian family), and is preserved in the Vatican library. It presents Paul on the left and Peter on the right. Both are far from handsome, but full of character; Paul is the homelier of the two, with apparently diseased eyes, open mouth, bald head and short thick beard, but thoughtful, solemn, and dignified. See a cut in Lewin, II. 211. Chrysostom calls Paul the three-cubit man (oJ trivphcu" a[nqrwpo", Serm. in Pet. et Paul.). Luther imagined: "St. Paulus war ein armes, dürres Männlein, wie Magister Philippus "(Melanchthon). A poetic description by J. H. Newman see in Farrar I. 220, and in Plumptre on Acts, Appendix, with another (of his own). Renan (Les Apôtres, pp. 169 sqq.) gives, partly from Paul’s Epistles, partly from apocryphal sources, the following striking picture of the apostle: His behavior was winning, his manners excellent, his letters reveal a man of genius and lofty aspirations, though the style is incorrect. Never did a correspondence display rarer courtesies, tenderer shades, more amiable modesty and reserve. Once or twice we are wounded by his sarcasm (Gal. 5: 12; Phil. 3:2). But what rapture! What fulness of charming words! What originality! His exterior did not correspond to the greatness of his soul. He was ugly, short, stout, plump, of small head, bald, pale, his face covered with a thick beard, an eagle nose, piercing eyes, dark eyebrows. His speech, embarrassed, faulty, gave a poor idea of his eloquence. With rare tact he turned his external defects to advantage. The Jewish race produces types of the highest beauty and of the most complete homeliness (des types de la plus grande beauté et de la plus complète laideur); but the Jewish homeliness is quite unique. The strange faces which provoke laughter at first sight, assume when intellectually enlivened, a peculiar expression of intense brilliancy and majesty (une sorte d’éclat profond et de majesté).” Compare various descriptions of the Christian messiah as ugly too. The similarities between the false historical person of “Paul” and “Jesus” are too obvious to ignore cf Harwood, “Was Jesus a real person?” who begins by noticing how Jesus was reported as ugly from the start: “The authors of Luke-Acts and John both equated Jesus with the suffering slave of Isaiah 53:1-12. Deutero-Isaiah had written of his hero, “Having neither proper shape nor beauty, lacking good looks that would have attracted him to us.... We regarded him as someone plagued and afflicted by the gods.” Even allowing that John used Luke as a source, why would either author have equated Jesus with such an unfortunate creature? The answer that springs to mind is that they were putting the best possible spin on the reality that the physical description of Isaiah’s suffering slave matched the physical description of Jesus. By c 178 CE, the pagan writer Celsus was able to say of Jesus, “Surely a god would never have such a body as yours, that is so contemptible, being subject to such numerous and considerable imperfections.” A generation later, in his Contra Celsum, the Christian apologist Origen did not dispute the accuracy of Celsus’s description. Rather, he argued that Celsus “cannot deny that if our liberator was born as we say he was, that then his body had in some sense a stamp of divinity on it.” (ch. 59) Since Origen offered rationalizations of all of Celsus’s other anti-Christian arguments, his failure to dispute that Jesus’ body was so stricken with “imperfections” as to be “contemptible” is most reasonably interpreted as an admission that the description was accurate. Tertullian in 207 CE similarly conceded that Jesus was misshapen: “His body was not even of honest human shape.” Clement of Alexandria described him as having “a very ugly face.” Cyril of Alexandria echoed that description, while Andrew of Crete declared that he had “eyebrows which meet.” Those descriptions prove only that, from about eighty years after his alleged death, Jesus was believed by Christians and non-Christians alike to have existed and to have been deformed and ugly. But did such a description exist early enough for it to have had a factual basis? There is good reason to believe that it did. The earliest hint of Jesus’ physical imperfections was written within twenty years of his death by Paul of Tarsus. Jesus, according to Paul (Philippians 2:6-7), “did not exhibit the shape of a god because he considered it larceny to be equal to a god. Rather, he degraded himself by taking the shape of a slave.” Note that Paul did not say that Jesus adopted the “status” of a slave. He wrote that Jesus had the shape/form/morphe¯ of a slave, in other words a body more appropriate for a slave than a king. It is not credible that second-century Christian apologists invented the deformed Jesus that remained undisputed until the sixth century. More likely, they were quoting from an older source, and there is reason to believe that the source was Josephus. As quoted by Robert Eisler (p. 467) Josephus’s Halosis described Jesus as follows: “a man of simple appearance, mature age, small stature, three cubits high [4 ft 6 in; 137 cm], hunchbacked, with a long face, long nose, and meeting eyebrows, so that they who see him might be affrighted, with scanty hair (but) with a parting in the middle of his head, after the manner of the Nazirites, and with an undeveloped beard.” While it is not impossible that the Josephus passage is a forgery, in order for Christian theologians to accept the description as accurate someone of comparable reputation must have written it. Such a description could only have been written down and accepted at a time when dispute would have been impossible because people were still alive who had seen Jesus preach and knew that he was as ugly as the writer claimed. Josephus wrote at a time that fits that specification. Had the description of a deformed Jesus originated as late as the time of Celsus, Origen could simply have painted an alternative Jesus, more like the Adonis that he became after Josephus was expurgated and the Mandylion of Edessa, on which all future depictions of the Christian junior god were based, was painted. Origen did not dispute Celsus’s description, because the unexpurgated Josephus still existed, and any contradictory description would not have been believed. The Jesus of history was deformed.” Of course it seems more probably to me that the in fact it was the “savior” of the Galilean religion who was so described – the “Christ” of the period – who later became equated with either “Paul” or “Jesus” in the new Catholic faith.
an “abortion” born out of time -I was born from a disgraced marital union - The earliest anti-Jewish polemics against the Christian messiah as a bastard do not mention the name Jesus cf. Mead Did Jesus live in 100 B.C. Chapter 9 “X THE TALMUD MARY STORIES.”It is in vain to seek for any historical element in the Talmud Mary stories, for they revolve entirely round the accusation of her unfaithfulness to her husband … But how far back can we push the first circulation of this startling belief? … there is a passage in the Talmud which deserves our careful attention. It is interesting in other respects, but chiefly because it is found in the Mishna (iv. 3), and therefore puts entirely out of court the contention of those who assert that what is generally regarded as the oldest and most authoritative deposit of the Talmud contains no reference whatever to Jesus; and not only is it found in the Mishna, but it purports to base itself on a still older source, and that too a written one. This remarkable passage runs as follows: "Simeon ben Azzai has said: I found in Jerusalem a book of genealogies; therein was written: That so and so is a bastard son of a married woman."[Jebamoth," 49a] This Simeon ben Azzai … may be placed at the end of the first and the beginning of the second century. He was one of the famous four who, according to Talmudic tradition, "entered Paradise"; that is to say, he was one of the most famous mystics of Israel … and remained a celibate and rigid ascetic till the day of his death … It is exceedingly difficult to classify these Mamzer legends or to treat them in any satisfactory chronological fashion, but it is remarkable that in them there seem to be two deposits of tradition characterised by different names for Jeschu—Ben Stada and Ben Pandera, names which have given rise to the wildest philological speculation, but of which the current meaning was evidently simply "son of the harlot," whatever may have been their line of descent. Ben Stada occurs exclusively in the Talmud, where it is the most frequent designation of Jeschu, though Ben Pandera is also found; Ben Pandera is found in the Toldoth Jeschu, and as we have seen in the Church Fathers, while Ben Stada is never met with in these sources. The Ben Stada stories are mostly characterised by anachronisms which are as startling as those of the Ben Perachiah date, but which are its exact antipodes. They are further generally characterised by either distinct references to Lud, or by the bringing in of the names of the most famous Rabbis of this famous school of Talmud study. I would suggest, therefore, that these legends might be conveniently called the Lud stories. The Mishna School at Lud (Lydda) is said to have been founded by E. Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, the teacher of E. Akiba,[1] and it was doubtless the great reputation of Akiba as the most implacable foe of Christianity which, in course of time, connected the name of Mary with stories of Akiba which originally were perfectly innocent of any reference to the mother of Jesus. Thus, in later times, we find tradition bringing Akiba and Miriam together in personal conversation, we find it still later giving her one of Akiba's contemporaries as a husband, and finally we meet with a curious legend in which Miriam is made the contemporary of a Rabbi of the fourth century! But to consider these fantastic developments of Talmudic tradition in greater detail. The following is the famous academical discussion on the refinements of bastardy, which in course of time supplied the Ben Pandera legend with some of its most striking details, as we still find them in various forms of the Toldoth Jeschu. "A shameless person is, according to E. Eliezer, a bastard; according to E. Joshua, a son of a woman in her separation; according to E. Akiba, a bastard and son of a woman in her separation. Once there sat elders at the gate when two boys passed by; one had his head covered, the other bare. Of him who had his head uncovered, E. Eliezer said, 'A bastard!' R. Joshua said, 'A son of a woman in her separation !' R. Akiba said, 'A bastard and son of a woman in her separation !' They said to R. Akiba, 'How has thine heart impelled thee to the audacity of contradicting the words of thy colleagues?' He said to them, 'I am about to prove it.' Thereupon he went to the boy's mother, and found her sitting in the market and selling pulse. He said to her,' My daughter, if thou tellest me the thing which I ask thee, I will bring thee to eternal life.' She said to him, 'Swear it to me!' Thereupon E. Akiba took the oath with his lips, while he cancelled it in his heart. Then said he to her, 'Of what sort is this thy son?' She said to him, 'When I betook myself to the bridal chamber I was in my separation, and my husband stayed away from me. But my paranymph [That is, the bridegroom's best man] came to me, and by him I have this son.' So the boy was discovered to be both a bastard and the son of a woman in her separation. Thereupon said they,' Great is R. Akiba, in that he has put to shame his teachers.' In the same hour they said, 'Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, who has revealed His secret to R. Akiba ben Joseph,'"["Kallah,” 18b] Eliezer, Joshua and Akiba were contemporaries, but Akiba was by far their junior; for Eliezer ben Hyrcanus was Akiba's teacher, while Joshua ben Chanania was a disciple of Jochanan ben Zakkai, who died about 70 A.D.; Akiba was put to death in 135 A.D. The setting of the story, therefore, places us somewhere about the end of the first century. We may pass over the strange ascription of an act of heartless perjury to Akiba as the means whereby he extorted the confession from the boy's mother, and the far more curious addition at the end of the passage which blesses the God of Israel for revealing "His secret" after the use of such questionable means, with the remark that it would be interesting to know whether Talmud apologetics prefer to abandon the reputation of the Talmud or of its great authority Akiba in this instance, for here there is no third choice. What is most striking in the story is that neither the name of the boy nor that of his mother is given. Laible supposes that the story originally contained the names of Jeschu and Miriam, but that the compiler of the Gemara struck them out, both because the mother is described as a pulse-seller, while elsewhere in the .Talmud she is called Miriam the women's hair-dresser, and also because of the startling anachronism of making Miriam and Akiba contemporaries. He holds that the story itself is of early origin, and was originally a Jesus story. To this we cannot agree, for if it had been originally intended, as a Jesus story its inventors could not possibly have been so foolish as to introduce Rabbis of the beginning of the second century among the dramatis persona;. This would have been really too inane even for the wildest controversialists at any date even remotely approaching the time when Jews and Jewish Christians were still in contact. The main intention of the story is evidently to enhance the reputation of R. Akiba, to display the depth of his penetration and his fine appreciation of the subtlest shades of bastardy, a subject of great importance in Rabbinical law. It was then presumably a tradition of the Lud school, and at first had no connection whatever with the Jeschu stories. In course of time, when the Mamzer retort to the virgin-birth dogma was popularised in legend and folk-tale, the details of this other famous story of bastardy were added to the originally vague Mamzer legends of Jeschu, and to this source we may conjecture, with high probability, is to be traced the origin of the coarse details of Miriam's unfaithfulness to her husband as found in the various forms of the Toldoth Jeschu. The link was simply the word "bastard"; the rich gain to the legend material finally entirely outweighed the inconvenience of the wild anachronism. The story is introduced by the commission of a shocking act of disrespect on the part of one of the boys, for according to Rabbinical law and custom, a teacher was to be treated as worthier of greater honour than all others, even than one's parents. To go uncovered in the presence of a teacher was thus thought to be an act of utter shamelessness…The following story is a good instance of this method of conflation. "There is a tradition, Rabbi Meir used to say : Just as there are various kinds of taste as regards eating, so there are also various dispositions as regards women. There is a man into whose cup a fly falls and he casts it out, but all the same he does not drink it (the cup). Such was the manner of Paphos ben Jehudah, who used to lock the door upon his wife and go out. And there is another who, when a fly falls into his tumbler, throws it out and drinks it, and this is the way of men generally. When she is speaking with her brothers and relatives, he does not hinder her. But there is also the man, who, when a fly falls into a dish, sucks it (the fly) out and eats it (the dish). This is the manner of a bad man, who sees his wife going out bareheaded and spinning in the street and wearing clothes slit up on both sides and bathing together with men." ["Gittin," 90a.] R. Meir was a pupil of Akiba and Paphos (or Pappos) ben Jehudah was Akiba's contemporary. It is not necessary to enter into a consideration of the details of Rabbinic metaphor with regard to the "various dispositions." All we learn from this passage directly with regard to Paphos ben Jehudah is that he locked up his wife; we are, however, led to conclude, indirectly, that she ultimately proved unfaithful to her tyrannical spouse. What, then, more simple than for a storyteller to connect this with the details of unfaithfulness found in his Jeschu repertoire. The erring wife was just like Miriam; before long she actually became Miriam, and finally Paphos ben Jehudah was confidently given as Miriam's husband ! So they had it in later times, had it, we may suppose, at Lud, that most uncritical of legend factories, and finally we find even so great a commentator as Rashi (b. 1105 A.D.) endorsing with all confidence this hopeless anachronism, when he says: "Paphos ben Jehudah was the husband of Miriam, the women's hairdresser. Whenever he went out of the house into the street, he locked the door upon her, that no one might be able to speak to her. And that is a course which became him not; for on this account there arose enmity between them, and she in wantonness broke her faith with her husband." But even eight or nine centuries before Rashi's time the Babylonian Rabbis had found the Ben Stada Lud developments a highly inconvenient overgrowth of the earlier Ben Perachiah date, as we shall see later on, and it is strange to find Rashi so ignorant of what they hid to say on the subject. Startling, however, as is the anachronism which we have been discussing, it is but a mild surprise compared with the colossal absurdity of the following legend, if we interpret it in the traditional fashion. "When Rab Joseph came to this verse (Prov. xiii. 23), 'But there is that is destroyed without judgment,' he wept. He said: Is there really someone who is going (away), when it is not his time? Certainly (for) so has it happened with Rab Bibi bar Abbai; the angel of death was found with him. The former said to his attendant, Go, bring me Miriam the women's hairdresser. He went and brought him Miriam the children's teacher. The angel of death said to him, I said Miriam the women's hair-dresser. The messenger said to him, Then I will bring her [the other] back. The angel of death said to him, Since thou hast brought her, let her be reckoned (among the dead)." Rab Joseph bar Chia was born at Still, in Babylonia 259 AD; he was head of the famous Babylonian Rabbinical School at Pumbeditha. The only R. Bibi we know of flourished in the fourth century, and that this Bibi was believed to have been the seer of the death-bed vision is quite evidemt from the following note of the Tosaphoth on the passage: "'The angel of death was found with him, who related what had happened to him long ago, for this story as to Miriam the women's hair-dresser took place in the time of the second temple, for she was mother of that so and so [i.e., Jeschu], as is related in (treatise) Shabbath [104b]." It is by no means clear what the writer of the Tosaphoth meant precisely by " the time of the second temple” He probably, however, meant the time before the new and splendid edifice of Herod replaced the second temple proper, the meagre building that had become gradually overlooked by the gorgeous Greek palaces of the nobles of Herod's days. It must be remarked, however, that this explanation does great violence to the wording of the story as it is found in the Gemara. Can it be then that some other Bibi was originally referred to, and that the story was subsequently transferred by posterity to his far later but more famous namesake? That the simple words "bastard" and "adulteress”were strong enough indications of suitability for the match-makers of legend to unite in marriage stories otherwise the strongest incompatibility of age and date, we have already seen; that the very common name of Miriam should further expand this family circle of cross-breeds is therefore quite to be expected. And this will doubtless be held by most sufficiently to account for the transference to the address of Miriam the mother of Jeschu of the following two legends, but closer inspection warns us not too lightly to accept this explanation. In one of the tractates of the Palestinian Talmud we are given the story of a certain devout person who was privileged to see a vision of some of the punishments in hell. Among other sights. "He saw also Miriam, the daughter of Eli Betzalim, suspended, as B. Lazar ben Jose says, by the paps of her breasts. E. Jose ben Chanina says: The hinge of hell's gate was fastened in her ear. He said to them [? the angels of punishment], Why is this done to her? The answer was, Because she fasted and published the fact. Others said, Because she fasted one day, and counted two days (of feasting) as a set-off'. He asked them, How long shall she be so? They answered him, Until Simeon ben Shetach comes; then we shall take it out of her ear and put it into his ear."[ "Pal. Chagiga," 77d.] As R. Jose ben Chanina was a contemporary of R. Akiba, E. Lazar ben Jose was presumably a Rabbi of an earlier date, but I can discover nothing about him. The main point of interest for us is the sentence, "until Simeon ben Shetach comes." This can only mean that at the time of the vision Simeon ben Shetach was not yet dead, and therefore this Miriam was at latest contemporary with him and therefore can very well be placed in the days of his older contemporary Joshua ben Perachiah. As to Eli Betzalim,[1] I can discover nothing about him. It is true that a certain Eli is given as the father of Joseph in the genealogy incorporated into the third Gospel, a genealogy which would be quite useless if at the time of its compilation Jesus had not been regarded as the natural son of Joseph, but in the very different genealogy prefixed to the first Gospel, and also purporting to give the descent of Joseph, a certain Jacob takes the place of Eli and the name Eli is not found. But even had the two genealogies agreed, we should not have been helped at all, for they are given as the genealogies of Joseph and not of Mary. It would also be of interest to know in what Simeon ben Shetach had offended, for he is otherwise known as the Rabbinic president of the golden age of Pharisaean prestige in the days of Queen Salome, as we have seen above. In any case the story is an ancient one, for already in the days of Rabbi Lazar and Rabbi Jose there were variants of it … Finally, in these Talmud Mary-legends we come to the thrice-repeated Miriam daughter of Bilga story, which runs as follows: "Bilga always receives his part on the south side on account of Mirian, daughter of Bilga, who turned apostate and went to marry a soldier belonging to the government of Javan,[that is “Greece”] and went and beat upon the roof of the altar. She said to him : 'Wolf, wolf, thou hast destroyed the property of the Israelites and didst not help them in the hour of their distress!'"["Pal. Sukka," 55d, also in substantially identical words, "Bab. Sukka," 56b, and in "Tosephta Sukka," iv. 28] This Miriam of Bilga can hardly be supposed to mean the actual daughter of Bilga of I. Chron. xxiv. 14, the head of one of the priestly courses of the house of Aaron. It must mean simply that Miriam was the daughter of one of the priests of the Bilga course or line of descent, for in the days of Bilga himself we know of no attack on Jerusalem by the Greeks, as the story evidently suggests. In this case, however, it does not seem to be the Talmud or the Jews themselves who connect this story with Miriam, mother of Jeschu, but Dalman, who leaves us to suppose that it is one of the censured passages of the Talmud. What ground, however, Dalman has for bringing this story into relation with the Mary-legends I cannot discover; he seems to depend on Laible who refers to Origen quoting Celsus as making his Jew declare that "Mary gave birth to Jesus by a certain soldier, Panthera." If, because of this, we are to take the above as a Mary story, it should be noticed that the "soldier "is of the" house of Greece," and therefore the date of the incident must be placed prior to the first Roman occupation of Jerusalem by Pompey in 63 B.C.; so that in it, in any case, we find a confirmation of the Ben Perachiah date.This brings us to the end of our Mary stories; our next chapter will deal with the remaining Talmud Ben Stada Jesus stories.
a fornicator –
an adultress –
the very Law itself makes clear their origins from adulteration -
after she was forced out of our home –
