A. Jordan, Jesus the Nazarene:
The Talmud and the Founder of Christianity
Resource Publications (Wipf & Stock), Eugene Oregon.
Paperback. March 2023. 173 pp.
Wipf & Stock publishers have kindly furnished a complimentary copy of the title above for review. I requested the recent book because it expands on the thesis that Yeshu ha-Notsri (“Jesus the Nazarene”) was the founder of Christianity who lived in the early part of the first century BCE, a thesis explored on this website and in the final chapter of my book NazarethGate: Quack Archeology, Holy Hoaxes, and the Invented Town of Jesus (American Atheist Press, 2015).
This series of posts is something more than a book report. It touches on issues such as “Was Jesus a Jew?” “Were there two Jesuses?” “Jesus the magician” and where we are in the year 2024 as regards the thesis that Yeshu ha-Notsri was the founder of Christianity.
About the author
A. Jordan (his first name is nowhere divulged in the book) states that he is a Rabbi, a Conservative Jew (in a “nonpolitical” sense), and a student of the Talmud (p. viii). His FaceBook page is entitled “A Jewish View.” Jordan also maintains a blog with the notice: “I’m an independent scholar, researcher and author interested in a variety of topics: religion, linguistics, and writing fantasy novels.” Interestingly, the URL (www.drajordan.com) redirects to https://yaakovavraham.wordpress.com/.
Jordan received a Ph.D in linguistics in 2017. In the Preface of Jesus the Nazarene he freely states that his book is “in a field that is not my specialty.” That being admitted, as a student of the Talmud and a linguist, he offers a combination of education and interests that sets him apart from typical New Testament scholars who have little interest in rabbinics. IMO, the time has come to expand the tent of Jesus scholarship to include voices such as Jordan’s, and I am pleased to see the appearance of this title which, though flawed in some ways (see below), represents a crack in the wall of tradition and expands on a non-traditional thesis to which I myself subscribe—namely, that “Jesus” was born 100 years BCE.
Presentation
The fifteen chapters of Jesus the Nazarene seem to be a collection of blogposts found on A. Jordan’s website. If so, the posts were not sufficiently vetted before inclusion in the book. Jesus the Nazarene contains various syntactical/punctuation errors, as well as some misspellings and extra or missing words (despite the fact that an editor is named in a footnote on p. 40). These are not a major drawback, but they suggest to me that the author’s mother tongue may not be English but Hebrew.
The poor grammar sometimes leads to obscurity. One example: “The messiah’s family [singular] is his following, as is their [plural] home” (p. 54). Perhaps what the author means to say is: “The messiah’s following serves as both his family and his home.” But I am not sure.
Problems of logic are also evident: “They [the Nasarenes] must have been the first group to reject animal sacrifices and tend towards vegetarianism, although they were not the first” (p. 76). One half of the sentence says they were, and the other half of the sentence says they weren’t…
On the positive side, the backmatter includes two indexes (Subject Index, Scripture Index), a Bibliography, and a Glossary for readers not familiar with Talmudic terminology. This ancillary material enhances the book’s usefulness as a reference in a field unfamiliar to most readers. A minor omission is that the Bibliography does not include page references to modern authors (such as myself) that are discussed in the text. Endorsements on the back cover are by Markus Vinzent, Robert M. Price, and James R. Edwards.
Purpose
The purpose of Jordan’s book is stated at the end of his Introduction:
My argument in this book is that the Rabbis did have a unified and coherent vision of who Jesus was and why they did not accept him as part of their circle. That is to say that Yeshu is Jesus (and Ben Stada is Yeshu). With the assertion that the Rabbis had a coherent vision of who Jesus was, we can compile the references to Jesus in the Talmud and construct this vision. What was Jesus’ name? Who were his parents? What kind of Jew was he? Did he have a teacher? What did he teach? Did he perform miracles? And, why was he executed? (P. 15)
Thus, Jordan is a historicist. He believes that Jesus existed. A novel (and IMO indefensible) aspect of his thesis is that the Christian Jesus of Nazareth and the Talmudic Yeshu ha-Notsri were one and the same person of history—though the ancient texts date them to different centuries. How he arrives at this astonishing (unprecedented?) position will now be explored, but it can be stated at the outset: the attempts to conflate the two figures leads to endless confusion in this book.
Jordan and Salm
In preparing his book, Jordan read the final chapter of NazarethGate (he cites it many times) entitled “In Search of the Rejected Seer” (pp. 402–478). Page 8 of Jesus the Nazarene is devoted to my work. Jordan begins: “René Salm is a modern author who accepts the Talmudic accounts as providing insight into the historical Jesus.” That is true. But then Jordan asserts: “Salm sees Yeshua ben Pantera as the true founder of Christianity…” This is stunningly false, for I have argued in extenso on this website (all of which posts preceded Jordan’s book) that Yeshu ha-Notsri was a pharisaic member of the Hasmonean royal house, the son of Absalom (not of Pantera) and nephew of King Janneus. The royalty of Yeshu’s extended family is a critical element in reconstructing the prophet’s biography and in the dynamics of his excommunication, trial, and eventual execution.
The Pantera thesis—namely, that Yeshu was the bastard offspring of Mary and a Roman soldier named Pantera—is clearly a scurrilous canard invented by the ancient rabbis (NazarethGate 426, n. 39). Nevertheless, Jordan cleaves to this hostile thesis throughout his book. The author concludes (p. 27) that the prophet’s name was “Yeshua ben Pantera”—as stated in the Talmud—and that the parents of Yeshu were Miriam and ben Pantera (p. 150). However, the Pantera thesis is a nonstarter. An illegitimate young man would certainly not have accompanied the exalted head of the Sanhedrin, Joshua ben Perachiah, into Egypt.
Jordan writes:
Several of Salm’s assertions formed this reading of Talmudic and Christian sources… He adds some interesting assertions that should be included in our discussion of the historical Jesus.[Yeshu] Salm notes that there are no historical sources, besides Christian texts, that corroborate the existence of Jesus[of Nazareth] (besides the Talmudic record)… (p. 8)
The above passage is Exhibit A of Jordan’s confusing style of writing. I have attempted to clarify it with the superscript words. The first mention of “Jesus” refers to Yeshu ha-Notsri in the time of Janneus. The second “Jesus” refers to Jesus of Nazareth in the time of Herod Antipas. The final words in parentheses do not belong at all—because the Talmudic record does not corroborate the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, but of Yeshu ha-Notsri.
Detering, Zindler, and others have demonstrated the utter lack of independent attestation for Jesus of Nazareth. On the other hand, I devoted many pages in NazarethGate (pp. 453 ff) to evidence for Yeshu ha-Notsri from non-Christian sources—including the Dead Sea Scrolls and Samaritan records. The situation in each case is very different.
Nevertheless, Jordan and I share many points in common. They can be listed here:
1) A single prophet founded the Christian religion. He is named Yeshu ha-Notsri (“Jesus the Nazarene”) in the Jewish Talmud (p. ix). [For Jordan, the Christian records preserve an “alternative” historical tradition about that same prophet (p. viii).]
2) Nazareth “is probably a later misreading of the term Notsri, which might better be related to the word for watchers or guardians, and was likely a sectarian designation” (p. 39).
3) Yeshu ha-Notsri (literally: “Jesus the Nazarene”) lived ca. 100–64 BCE (p. 2). He “was born under the reign of Alexander Jannaeus and died under either the reign of Hyrcanus II or Aristobulus II. He fled to Egypt with Yehoshua ben Perahyah when Alexander began his campaign against the Pharisees” (p. 17).
4) Yeshu received a rabbinic education at the feet of the Nasi, head of the Sanhedrin (p. 96). “He must have known the Torah well and mastered the rabbinic curriculum to have merited a position as a student of Yehoshua ben Perahyah, the leading Rabbi of his age” (p. 150).
5) “If Jesus was a student of the Nasi [,] one of the most well-known rabbis of his age, he could not be a country bumpkin from the middle-of-nowhere town, Nazareth” (p. 39)… “Jesus, being “close to the government” and a student of the Nasi, did not come from the peasant class” (p. 55).
6) Yeshu “broke from his teacher and the rest of the rabbis at some point during his studies and likely in Egypt. He began to teach in Israel and, apparently, had great success, but he was excommunicated by his teacher and later arrested by the Sanhedrin” (p. 121).
7) Gnostic teachings were at the core of Yeshu’s message: “I believe a central issue in his charge by the Sanhedrin [sic] relates to an issue of disputed Gnosticism.” “Jesus’ teaching in the Talmud seems to be associated with some Gnostic ideas, leading to my assertion that he was some form of early Gnostic, as those ideas predated first-century Christianity.” Yeshu “must have run into Gnostic teachers in Alexandria, among all sorts of religious sects.” “[T]he development of Christianity began from pre-Christian Gnosticism in Jewish circles, which must have been taught by Jesus during his earthly life in the first century BCE” (pp. 66, 73, 127, 150, cf. p. 94).
8) “Whatever happened, [Yeshu] was not a part of the rabbinic circle when he returned to Israel. He began teaching against the Rabbis.” “He questioned the foundation of Pharisaic belief by questioning the legitimacy of the Torah itself” (pp. 150, 152).
9) Yeshu/Jesus was not executed by the Romans, but by the Jews: “In Jewish sources, the death of Jesus is remembered as an internal Jewish affair” (p. 115).
10) The sect of the Nasarenes were the first Christians. Jordan writes: “We can also presume that the Nasaraean sect was the ancestor of Nazarene Christianity… Its origins ‘before Christ,’ as Epiphanius[Pan. 29.5.7] describes, allows it to be considered as the possible sect of Jesus. Throughout the Talmud, Jesus is referred to as ‘ha Notsri,’ ‘The Notsri.’ This root is related to the name of the Nasaraeans. It is my contentions that Jesus was a member of this sect and the title ha notsri refers to his identification as a Nasaraean” (pp. 77–78). [Salm: In fact, Yeshu ha-Notsri was the founder of the sect of the Nasarenes, his first followers.]
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