The Jesus The Jews Never Knew

Sepher Toldoth Yeshu and the Quest of the Historical Jesus in Jewish Sources
by Frank R. Zindler

An appendix contains the entire text of the 1982 AAP book (ISBN 0-910309-02-7) The Jewish Life of Christ, Being the Sepher Toldoth Jeshu, by G.W. Foote and J.M. Wheeler (1896), with an introduction by Madalyn Murray O'Hair.

The ancient Jews never heard of Jesus of Nazareth. That is the startling conclusion of a comprehensive investigation of Jewish records surviving from antiquity. Every literary source ever advanced by serious scholars as being a reference to the historical Jesus is examined and found to be nothing of the sort - except for the latest layers of the Babylonian Talmud. Clearly, those references were reactions to Christianity, not to Christ.

But what of the Sepher Toldoth Yeshu ("The Book of the Genealogy of Jesus")? Does that Jewish satirical antigospel reflect echoes of ancient arguments between Jesus of Nazareth and his Jewish brethren? Can the Jesus of that tale - a man portrayed as the bastard son of a soldier named Panther, a magician, and the aerially sodomized victim of a flying Judas - provide information about a historical Jesus? Of course not, but it does provide a fascinating insight into the world in which the gospels were invented.

"The historical Jesus has always been made to stand on two legs: the New Testament and Jewish literature. The New Testament leg I consider to have been sawed off long ago. Amputation of the Jewish leg has been, I hope, the achievement of this book. With both his legs missing, the figure of Jesus must now either hover in the air - like the god he started out as in the Christian mysteries or like the Yeshu he became in the Toldoth - or he must fall to earth like a deflated balloon."

544 pages. Paperback ISBN 1-57884-916-0