For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[EGross]

After running an errand, I though about my post about the use of Hebrew names and thought I would post it in a more clear explanation, since using terms like "kametz katan" and things like that may be confusing.

In the story about Moses, we read of a fellow named Hosea who was his servent. Later on, Moses adds a letter "yud" (sort of like a "Y") to the front of his name. And when you add a yud (י) as a prefix, it gets a half-beat count, like a short "eh". This device is called a "sh'vah", and very often causes the lengthening of the next to the last vowel of a word. And so Ho-shay-ah becomes Ye-ho-shoo-ah, or, in English, "Joshua".

(It is interesting to note that Esubius writes that the early church fathers were not sure if they "Hoshea" or "Yehoshua" sould be the name of Jesus. The meanings vary depending on your intent.)

So you have a Christian cult who took "Joshua" and just turned the "J" into a "Y" sound. (I cringe when I see this done with Isaiah by Christians to be "Yishiah"), so you have Yoshua, and because they want the prefix to be about god ("ya") you end up with "Yashua" by the messianic christians.

But when the Rabbis wanted to mock Christianity they did a very cute thing. First of all Y'ShU, a 3-character name cannot be found anywhere in all of Rabbinical writings unless it is mocking Christianity. It is not a real name, nor even a nick name. There is no root in it for anything. I have run a scan against my database of hundreds of Rabbinical writings and that is the way it is. Early Rabbis made up a polemical acronym that also has the same gematria as ריק (Riq - empty and void). Gematria is the prodess of converting letters to numbers and providing a bit of hidden meaning.

So Orthodox Jews all over the world, at least three times a day, originally had, concerning the Christians, an affirmation to god in the midst of their praises: "For they (the nations) bow to vanity and (riq) emptiness, one who cannot give them salvation." When the Church got wind of this, it was censored, but in the past few decades it has been reinserted, since it is safe to say it. Some communities, like those in England (the yekkies) won't say it, while the Chareidim (black hatters) certainly will say so, and with great fervor.

All of it is polemical. The Rabbis made up a fake name to insult Christians in multiple ways, the Church picke a related name that they like as a reference after some debate, but stayed with the Greek/Roman variant "Jesus", which, while it relates to either Hoshea or Yehushua, certainly doesn't have any connection to the modern cultic fiction "Yashua".

By the way, some Chareidim have a strange practice to learn "Toldot Yeshu" on Christmas morning, as a way of descrating what they see as a "holiday of idolotry". (I always felt it was weird to focus on Jesus on Christmas, and would learn something else that day).

So that's it. There is no "Jesus" in any Rabbinical writings. The three-letter name that has no root within it was assiged to be one of mockery and insult and was done centuries after those who lived during that time had remained silent about it were long dead.

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There are also many discussions about this article - Refuting Missionaires by Hayyam ben Yehoshua . The article isn't very helpful because the author just provided a short list of books for further reading without saying which book he got the following information from -
[snip]

I read his page and found errors from the beginning. (Saying that Christians were always called "notzrim", which means he never really studied the last "book" in his list, or he would have known that they were initially called "minim" as an insult ("a species") as talmidai Yeshu ("the students or followers of Yeshu"), and that "notzrim" was a name that came a bit later. I believe I read that the Jews that gave up on Judaism gave themselves that name, and it stuck.

His work isn't scholarly and his cut and paste of the "ben Pandeira" story incorrectly assigns it as being talmudic, when it is really outside of those texts and came many centuries later. My guess is that he compiled different ideas from different anti-missionary web sites since they don't have a lot of cohesiveness.

He also seems to combine the bereitas, which contain nothing of this story and were quite early un their unedited form with the writings of the tosaphists that occured 600 or so years ago.

This would explain his lack of citing any real sources because it would have required some real work.

A scholarly exposition on this very topic was written in Tarbiz, a publication by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which analyzes the earlier fragments as uncovered in the Cairo Geneiza, that seems to imply that this story may not have originated in 12th century Spain, but around the 8th century. It's quite a long piece and not in English, but it is very good. Given that a genaiza is a trash depository, the explanation for these peices are under debate.

But that is the difference between someone who has made a study of this and can cite references, and someone who does no research and pulls inverified details together.

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It's unlikely that Paul taught about the virgin birth if he never mentioned it but how far can we rely on him where the beliefs of the original sect are concerned? If he decided to start his own religion, could he have adapted some things to appeal to pagans? It's unlikely that pagans would have cared about legal problems any more than the Christians who invented the virgin birth did.

Actually, there were lots of Virgin Birth stories already existing. One might have thought that Paul, if he was who he said he was and was marketing his religion to slaves and women (according to one Christian marketing book I read, it was the best marketing plan - give it to the women and let them convert their men folk! Give it to the slaves and let them convert their masters). Tammuz, Bacchus, Dyonisius are thee similar stories that come to mind that he might have adapted. But it doesn not appear that he was familiar with the gospels or with the pagen stories either, or just didn't care about them.