19 Facts About Yeshu

The name Yeshu is used in other sources before and after the completion of the Babylonian Talmud.

In 1372, John of Valladolid, with the support of the Archbishop of Toledo, made a similar accusation against the Jewish community; Moses ha-Kohen de Tordesillas argued that the Yeshu narratives referred to different people and could not have referred to Jesus of Nazareth.

Foote and Wheeler considered that the name "Yeshu" was simply a shortened form of the name "Yehoshua" or Joshua.

The word Yeshu is however found as a secondary marginal gloss to the first passage in the Leiden manuscript which together with the Midrashic version show that the account was understood to be about a follower of Yeshu ben Pandera.

Yeshu noted that Hebrew would have represented the sounds correctly if any of these were the origin.

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The Toledot Yeshu narratives contain elements resembling the story of Pandareus in Greek mythology, namely stealing from a temple and the presence of a bronze animal.

Yeshu argues that the name came to be used as a generic term for a betrayer and was borrowed by Hebrew.

Yeshu describes his punishment in the afterlife as boiling in excrement.

In Sanhedrin 107b and Sotah 47a a Yeshu is mentioned as a student of Joshua ben Perachiah who was sent away for misinterpreting a word that in context should have been understood as referring to the inn; he instead understood it to mean the innkeeper's wife.

The story ends by invoking a Mishnaic era teaching that Yeshu practised black magic, deceived and led Israel astray.

In Gittin 56b, 57a it is used for one of three foreign enemies of Israel, the other two being from past and present with Yeshu representing a third not identified with any past or present event.

Menachem Meiri observed that the epithet Ha-Notzri attached to Yeshu in many instances was a late gloss.

Recently, some scholars have argued that Yeshu is a literary device, and that the Yeshu stories provide a more complex view of early Rabbinic-Christian interactions.

Toledot Yeshu are not part of rabbinic literature and are considered neither canonical nor normative.

Richard Bauckham considers this a legitimate, if rare, form of the name in use at the time, and writes that this ossuary shows that the name Yeshu "was not invented by the rabbis as a way of avoiding pronouncing the real name of Jesus of Nazareth".

Name Yeshu has been found in a fragment of the Jerusalem Talmud from the Cairo Genizah, a depository for holy texts which are not usable due to age, damage or errors.

Yeshu is mentioned in Isaac Luria's "Book of the Reincarnations", chapter 37.

Term Yeshu was used in Hebrew texts in the Middle Ages then through Rahabi Ezekiel and Elias Soloweyczyk who identified Jesus with the character of the Toledoth Yeshu narratives.

In Israeli Hebrew Yeshu is used for Jesus of Nazareth as in Aaron Abraham Kabak's novel "On the narrow path" Ba-Mishcol Ha-Tsar.