The rabbinic literature is almost completely silent about Jesus’ lineage and his family background. The rabbis do not seem to know—or else do not care to mention—what the New Testament tells us: that he was the son of a certain Mary and her husband (or rather betrothed) Joseph, a carpenter of the city of Nazareth, and that he was born in Bethlehem, the city of David, and hence of Davidic origin. It is only in the Babylonian Talmud, and there in two almost identical passages, that we do get some strange information that may be regarded as a faint and distorted echo of the Gospels’ stories about Jesus’ family background and his parents (b Shab 104b; b Sanh 67a). Since neither source mentions, however, the name “Jesus” but instead resorts to the enigmatic names “Ben Stada” and “Ben Pandera/Pantera” respectively, their relationship to Jesus is hotly disputed. The version of our story in Shab 104b is embedded in an exposition of the mishnaic law, which regards the writing of two or more letters as work and hence forbidden on the Sabbath (m Shab 12:4). The Mishna discusses all kind of materials that might be used for writing, and of objects upon which one might write, and states that the prohibition of writing includes also the use of one’s own body as a writing object.

This is a typical discourse of the Bavli, which tries to clarify the contradiction between two traditions: according to one received tradition, the fool/magician is called “son of Stada” and according to another one he is called “son of Pandera”. First, Rav Hisda (a Babylonian amora of the third generation and an important teacher at the academy of Sura; d. 309 C.E.) suggests that the person in question had, as it were, two “fathers” because his mother had a husband and a lover, and that he was called “son of Stada,” when referring to the husband and “son of Pandera,” when referring to the lover. Hence, it becomes clear that both explanations begin with the assumption that our hero’s mother had both a husband and a lover, and that they only disagree about the name of the husband (Stada versus Pappos b. Yehuda). The name Pandera for the lover is made explicit only by Rav Hisda but seems to be accepted in the Pumbeditha explanation as well, because it presupposes the mother’s adultery and does not suggest another name for the lover. That Pappos b. Yehuda is identified as the husband originates from another story in the Bavli, transmitted in the name of R. Meir, that Pappos b. Yehuda, when he went out, used to lock his wife in their house—obviously because he had reason to doubt her fidelity (b Git 90a). This behavior on the part of Pappos b. Yehuda is quite drastically compared to that of a man who, if a fly falls into his cup, puts the cup aside and does not drink from it any more—meaning that Pappos b.

If the Bavli takes it for granted that our hero’s mother was an adulteress, then the logical conclusion follows that he was a mamzer, a bastard or illegitimate child. In order to be put in this mamzer category it did not matter whether his biological father was indeed his mother’s lover and not her legal husband—the very fact that she had a lover made his legal status dubious. Hence the uncertainty that he is sometimes called Ben Stada and sometimes Ben Pandera. B**ut nevertheless, the Talmud seems to be convinced that his true father was Pandera his mother’s lover, and that he was a bastard in the full sense of the word. **Searching for evidence outside the rabbinic corpus, scholars have long pointed to a remarkable parallel in the pagan philosopher Celsus’ polemical treatise , written in the second half of the second century C.E (John Granger Cook, The Interpretation of the Old Testament in Greco-Roman Paganism, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004, p. 55). There, Celsus presents a Jew as having a conversation with Jesus himself and accusing him of having “fabricated the story of his birth from a virgin.” In reality, the Jew argues,he [Jesus] came from a Jewish village and from a poor country woman who earned her living by spinning. He [the Jew] says that she was driven out by her husband, who was a carpenter by trade, as she was convicted of adultery. Then he says that after she had been driven out by her husband and while she was wandering about in a disgraceful way she secretly gave birth to Jesus. And he says that because he [Jesus] was poor he hired himself out as a workman in Egypt, and there tried his hand at certain magical powers on which the Egyptians pride themselves; he returned full of conceit, because of these powers, and on account of them gave himself the title of God.

In another quotation Celsus repeats these allegations put into the mouth of a Jew and even communicates the name of Jesus’ father: Let us return, however, to the words put into the mouth of the Jew, where the mother of Jesus is described as having been turned out by the carpenter who was betrothed to her, as she had been convicted of adultery and had a child by a certain soldier named Panthera (Eusebius, Eclogae propheticae III:10). Moreover, several rabbinic sources do mention Jesus as the son of Pandera (Hul 2:22 (y Shab 14:4, fol. 14d; y AZ 2:2, fol. 40d); t Hul 2:24) and it can be safely assumed, therefore, that the Talmud presupposes the knowledge of this identity.
These congruencies make it highly probable that both the Talmud and Celsus draw on common sources (most likely originally Jewish sources) that relate that Jesus of Nazareth was a bastard because his mother was an adulteress (Miriam), Tertullian calls Jesus the son of a prostitute (quaestuaria: De Spectaculis, 30) and his father was her lover (Pandera/Panthera). Some scholars, most radically among them Johann Maier, want to conclude from the fact that the name Panthera is relatively common in Latin inscriptions and that the spelling of its equivalent in the Hebrew sources varies considerably, that there must have been some different Jesus with the patronymic Panthera/Pandera/Pantiri (or similar forms) who cannot and should not be traced back to the one and only Jesus of Nazareth (Maier, Jesus von Nazareth, pp. 243, 264ff).

Celsus’ Jew in the late second century C.E. and the Babylonian Talmud in a presumably early fourth-century tradition refer to the same counternarrative of Jesus’ family background, which evidently is an inversion of and polemic against the New Testament narrative of Jesus’ birth. Several motifs are characteristic:

• 1. Jesus “returns” from Egypt as a magician.
• 2. Celsus portrays Jesus’ parents as poor.
• 3. The most pungent counterargument against the evangelists’ narrative is, of course, the assertion of Jesus’ illegitimate birth from an adulterous mother and some insignificant lover.

The talmudic story about the wicked son/disciple is preserved in two different contexts. The first, in Bavli Sanhedrin 103a, presents itself as an exegesis of Psalm 91:10. Another, and slightly different, possible background for the talmudic story could be the tradition preserved in some gnostic texts about Mary Magdalene. This is the tradition that has even made it into recent fiction (Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code), namely that Jesus was indeed married—and to no less a person than Mary Magdalene. The gnostic library from Nag Hammadi contains a “Gospel of Mary Magdalene,” presumably from the second century C.E., in which the jealous apostle Peter addresses her as someone whom Jesus loved more than the rest of women (“The Gospel of Mary (BG 8502,1),” trans. G. W. MacRae and R. McL. Wilson, ed. D. M. Parrott, in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M. Robinson, p. 525 (BG 7, 10:1–3); King, Gospel of Mary of Magdala, p. 15). The “Gospel of Philip” (second half of the third century C.E.?) calls her his “companion”15 and emphasizes that Jesus not only loved her more than all the disciples but that he “[used to] kiss her [often] on her [ . . . ].”16 Unfortunately the last word is missing, but it is highly probable that the word “mouth” must be added.17 Within the context of the gnostic writings it isn’t very likely, however, that a plain conjugal relationship is at stake here. Rather, it seems that the “companion” (koinonos, a Greek loanword in the Coptic text) refers not to “spouse” in the technical sense of the word but to “sister” in the spiritual sense of the gnostic fellowship, just as the “kiss” does not refer to a sexual relationship but to a kiss of fellowship.