“Yeshu ben Pandera” figure is the most interesting because it aligns with a lot of curious historical remnants:
The Yeshu ben Pandera of the Talmud.
The statue of a (Syrian?)-Roman soldier with the name “Pantera” from the same time as Jesus of Nazareth: Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera.
“The True Word” by Celsus (which I think was based on what he learned from a Jewish person) which says Jesus’ father was actually a Roman soldier named Pantera.
The Talmud’s mention of a Yeshu who performed magic he learned in Egypt and when Celsus says that Jesus of Nazareth was a sorcerer who learned his magic from the Egyptians.
One of the passages in question:
On the eve of Passover Yeshu was hanged. For forty days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried, ‘He is going forth to be stoned because he has practised sorcery and enticed Israel to apostacy. … ‘ But since nothing was brought forward in his favour he was hanged on the eve of Passover.
Despite the differences with the canonical accounts, this is an intriguing passage because of the similarities. However, it could simply be a bit of polemic or counter apologetic, a deliberate effort disparage the Jesus movement. There are problems seeing the Talmudic references as historical. According to Ehrman (https://ehrmanblog.org/do-any-ancient-jewish-sources-mention-jesus-weekly-mailbag/):
In contrast to pagan sources, we have very few Jewish texts of any kind that can be reliably dated to the first century of the Common Era. There are references to Jesus in later documents, such as those that make up that great collection of Jewish lore and learning, the Talmud. This compilation of traditions was preserved by rabbis living in the first several centuries of the Common Era. Some of the traditions found in the Talmud may possibly date back to the period of our concern, but scholars have increasingly realized that it is difficult to establish accurate dates for them. The collection itself was made long after the period of Jesus’ life; the core of the Talmud is the Mishnah, a collection of rabbinic opinions about the Law that was not written until nearly two centuries after his death. Moreover, Jesus is never mentioned in this part of the Talmud; he appears only in commentaries on the Mishnah that were produced much later. Scholars are therefore skeptical of the usefulness of these references in reconstructing the life of the historical Jesus.
In his book, Jesus, Nativity, Passion and Resurrection, Geza Vermes notes:
The idea of the virginal conception and the mention of Joseph’s worry about Mary’s pregnancy soon produced a very much down-to-earth negative offshoot. Jews hostile to the Jesus movement saw in the birth story a deliberate cover-up in vented by the early Christians to conceal the fact that Jesus was illegitimate. The scandalmongers of Palestine must have had a field day. They demanded a more convincing explanation than some fairy-tale story about an angel informing Joseph in a dream of how his fiancée had got in the family way. Traces of the rumour are concealed under the surface of the New Testament itself. The allegation of illegitimacy probably underlies the altercation, reported in the Gospel of John, between Jesus and his Jewish critics. When his opponents protested that they were not born of fornication, they were tacitly insinuating that Jesus was (Jn 8:41).
And later:
Clear evidence of Jewish attempts to impugn the reputation of Jesus by attributing to him illegitimate birth may be found in the Acts of Pilate, a Latin New Testament apocryphon dating in its present form to the fourth century, but probably going back to the second. In it the Jews decry Jesus as one born out of adultery (Acts of Pilate 2:3). The same charge is reported by the Church Father Origen, who states that according to the late second-century pagan writer Celsus, hostile Jews depicted Mary as a poor country woman who was forced to earn her living by spinning after her carpenter husband had divorced her for being convicted of an affair with a soldier called Panthera (Against Celsus 1:28, 32).10 Another Church Father, Tertullian, alludes to a hearsay propagated by Jews at the end of the second century about the mother of Jesus being a prostitute (De spectaculis 30:6). The same calumnious charge is conveyed in a variety of forms in rabbinic tradition too. In the Talmud, Miriam, the mother of Jesus, was a hairdresser, the wife of a man called Stada, but she also had a lover by the name of Pandera. Hence Jesus was variously known as the son of Stada or the son of Pandera. For other rabbis Stada was the nickname of the mother and derived from an Aramaic phrase sotat da, roughly translatable as ‘that adulteress’ (Tosefta Hullin 2:23; Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 104b).
Look at the following:
Daniel Boyarin’s review of Jesus in the Talmud, “Nostalgia for Christianity: Getting Medieval Again.”
Lieu, Judith, John North, and Tessa Rajak, eds. The Jews Among Pagans and Christians; in the Roman Empire. London; New York- Routledge, 1992.
Neusner, Jacob. Aphrahat and Judaism- the Christian-Jewish Argument in Fourth Century Iran. Leiden- Brill, 1971.
Rubenstein, Jeffery. The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud. Baltimore- Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Schiffman, Lawrence. Who was a Jew? Rabbinic and Halakhic Perspectives on the Jewish Christian Schism. Hoboken- Ktav, 1985.
Secunda, Shai. The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context. UPenn Press 2013
Smallwood, E. Mary. The Jews Under Roman Rule- From Pompey to Diocletian. Leiden- E.J. Brill, 1981, c. 1976.
Stemberger, Günter and Hermann Strack. Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash. Trans., ed. Markus Bockmuehl. Edinburgh- T & T Clark, 1996.
Wilkin. Robert. The Land Called Holy- Palestine in Christian History and Thought. New Haven- Yale University Press, 1992.
Goldenberg, D. (1982). Once More: Jesus in the Talmud [Review of Jesus von Nazareth in der talmudischen Überlieferung, by J. Maier]. The Jewish Quarterly Review, 73(1), 78–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/1454463https://www.jstor.org/stable/1454463
Gil Student argues that based on historical references, the Yeshu references can be condensed to two figures, one living ~80BCE and one active ~130BCE, ergo neither refers to Jesus.
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