On the Talmudic Jesus lived 100 years before Pilate

[Giuseppe]

There is a logic in these words:

What’s far more important than the time between the gospels and the Talmud is that the Talmud represents the earliest Jewish response to Christianity. If scholarship does not have anything earlier than the Talmud representing Jews in their own words, then Biblical scholars should not just assume the first century Jews believed in a first century Jesus and then, without any need for an explanation as to why, second century Jews invented a different tradition that made Christianity older and their elders more culpable for Jesus’ death and that this new tradition completely supplanted the earlier, more historical tradition.

http://lost-history.com/introduction.php

But I think that the same scholarship makes yet a good point when it argues that the Talmudic Jesus is an invented Jesus insofar it is a mere fruit of anti-Christian polemic.

I imagine a possible course of events:

1) the early Christians preached a crucified Christ...

2) ...the Jews identified this ''crucified Christ'' with some heretic Jew hang on a tree about 100 years before...

3) ...and after Mark wrote the first Gospel, etc.

Obviously the passage from point 1 to point 2 is made more easy IF the early Christians did consider their Christ lived in the remote past (think about Wells and not Doherty, here), so moving in reaction their Jewish enemies to euhemerize (for uniquely polemical reasons) the first time the mythical Christ under the rule of king Ianneus.

And why just in the time of Ianneus?

The death of Onias III was such a massive historical event that the author of the Book of Daniel produced the earliest known Jewish myth about the End Times occuring immediately following the death of the Messiah, and Daniel identified that Messiah as none other than Onias III!

[Giuseppe]

My point is that when a guy comes on the Web to argue that Jesus really is x lived in the time y and described in the historical source z, then he is doing again and again what already the Talmudic Jews were doing: to euhemerize the Christ of the early Christians (Paul) in the more innocent meaning of the term.

[rakovsky]

There is a logic in these words:

What’s far more important than the time between the gospels and the Talmud is that the Talmud represents the earliest Jewish response to Christianity. If scholarship does not have anything earlier than the Talmud representing Jews in their own words, then Biblical scholars should not just assume the first century Jews believed in a first century Jesus and then, without any need for an explanation as to why, second century Jews invented a different tradition that made Christianity older and their elders more culpable for Jesus’ death and that this new tradition completely supplanted the earlier, more historical tradition.

http://lost-history.com/introduction.php

First Jewish response to Christianity would be mentioned in the NT. Outside that, you have the 1st c. Birkat Ha Minim that I think Rashi and other rabbinical scholars said was directed against Christians.

Main Jewish traditional writing about the 1st c. Is the Talmud. It's not like we have many rabbinical writings before then about their history. So it's not as if silence from before the Talmud on a 1st c. Topic is surprising at all.