Eisler on Jacob of Kephar Sekhanjah as independent witness of a historical Jesus

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Giuseppe
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Eisler on Jacob of Kephar Sekhanjah as independent witness of a historical Jesus

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Among the rabbinical testimonies to Jesus (which have been discussed frequently enough) 2 there is indeed a certain number which have no reference at all to the founder of Christianity, but to namesakes of his, belonging to different periods.3 Yet there is at least one of extraordinary importance. According to this document, a certain Jacob of the hamlet of Sekhanjah states that in his youth he had heard from the mouth of his teacher, Jetu han-nosri,-. i.e. the Nasoraean, a sharp attack on the temple of Jerusalem suggesting that it appeared to him totally defiled by an unworthy venal priesthood. The phraseology of this attack is in very close agreement with the tone adopted by Jesus in the same connexion, according to the synoptical Gospels. It can be shown, moreover, that the quotation cannot very well have been invented by the Christians, for the simple reason that they would not have derived any conceivable benefit from it, and moreover never quote it. Nor can it be a Jewish invention, for, as we shall see later on (p. 593), our Jewish authorities for this passage did not fully understand it.

What gives it such decisive weight in the discussion of the historicity problem is the fact that Jacob of Kephar Sekhanjah quoted it to R. ’Eli'ezer b. Hyrkanos—a witness to the destruction of the temple in a.d. 70—in connexion with an embarrassing problem concocted by himself. R. ’Eli'ezer, then an old man, told it to R. Aqiba in the year a.d. 110. The transmission of the testimony of an eye-witness who saw and heard Jesus is then known in its exact filiation, comprising no more than two generations. The transmitters are well-known historical personages who deserve absolute confidence in such matters, since their unrelenting hostility towards the Christian sect is obvious from the context of the passage. The conclusion is therefore justified that a man called Jesu han-nosri,hated by the rabbis as an agitator and an heretic, did live and interpreted the law in an unorthodox spirit, and that certain sayings of his, in close agreement with passages of the same tendency in the Gospels, were current for some time both among his adherents and among his opponents, and maintained themselves with a tenacity which is typical of Jewish oral tradition.

(p. 8-9, cursive original)



The historicity of Jesus as a heretic teacher of Jewish law is established beyond doubt by the testimony of his disciple Jacob of Kephar Sekhanjah—a man unknown to Christian sources—transmitted through the rabbis 'Eli'ezer b. Hyrkanos and ‘Aqiba (a.d. iio), both of the latter witnesses being decidedly hostile to Christianity

(p. 20)



' R. ’Eli'ezer said to R. ‘Aqiba: “ I once went on the upper street of Sepphoris ; there I met one of the disciples of Jesus the Nasoraean named Ja'aqob of Kephar Sekhanjah, who said to me : ‘ In your law [Dent, xxiii. 19) there is written : Thou shalt not bring a whore’s hire into the house of thy God. Is it permissible to use such hire to make therewith a privy for the high priest ? ’ I did not know what to answer him. Then he said to me : ‘ This is what Jesus the Nasoraean taught me : She gathered it as the hire of an harlot, and they shall return it to the hire of an harlot [Micah i. 7) : it has come from dirt, and to the place of dirt it shall go.’ ” ’2

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