Toledoth Yeshu: A Jewish Critique of the Gentile Christian Transformation of Jesus Christ

The essay deals with the so-called “Toledoth Yeshu,” one of the most cryptic stories about Jesus Christ from Middle Ages. They referred to some stories of the Gospels of the New Testament and rearranged them again in order to set up a counter story. The thesis of the paper is that these counter stories did not aim at the New Testament as such, but at the Christological dogmatic that stripped Jesus of his Jewishness and turned him into a figure similar to pagan deities opposing and damaging Jewish tradition mainly by exercising magic. At the end, “Toledoth Yeshu” told a story claiming that Yeshu was sentenced to death only by Jewish authorities, because he practiced the blasphemous act of magic of God’s name, seduced his followers by doing so and, therefore, damaged the faith in the One God. That is why I consider “Toledoth Yeshu” a strong and self-conscious Jewish polemic not against the Jewish roots of Christianity, not even against the Jewish Christians that long have perished, but against Gentile or pagan Christianity and its successful attempt to turn Christ into a paganized divine being acting out magic instead of observing the Torah.