Who Is Peter Schäfer?
Peter Schäfer is a German scholar of Judaism and one of the foremost academic authorities on rabbinic literature and Jewish mysticism. Born in 1943, he served for decades as a professor at Princeton University, where he specialized in Jewish Studies, particularly the Babylonian Talmud, early Jewish mysticism (especially the Hekhalot and Merkavah texts), and Jewish-Christian polemics in late antiquity.
From 2014 to 2019, Schäfer served as director of the Jewish Museum Berlin, where he oversaw a period of both scholarly depth and public controversy. His resignation in 2019 followed tensions over the museum’s political tone regarding Israel and its perceived stance on BDS. That event reflects, in many ways, the same deeper issue in his academic work: a commitment to the archive, but a discomfort with the living presence of the tradition he documents.
Peter Schäfer’s 2007 book Jesus in the Talmud has become a kind of benchmark for modern academic treatment of this subject. It’s carefully sourced, thoroughly footnoted, and widely cited.
He traces references to Yeshu through Sanhedrin, Berakhot, Sotah, Gittin, and others, and makes the case that these are intentional anti-Christian polemics—developed in response to the growing presence of Christianity in the Roman Empire.
In terms of academic rigor, Schäfer’s work is hard to dismiss. But in terms of spiritual discernment, it fails completely.
Here’s why.
1. Schäfer assumes the Talmud is reacting only to imperial Christianity.
But the polemics begin far earlier. Many of these texts reflect an internal Jewish tension—a conflict not just with Rome or Church doctrine, but with something far more intimate: the claim that Yeshua of Nazareth was the Netzer, the Davidic Branch, the true Sar HaPanim. This is not just resistance to theology—it’s resistance to recognition.
Schäfer reduces the Talmud to a psychological defense mechanism: the rabbis lashing out against Rome’s deified Christ. But what if the real issue was not the Roman Christ—but the Jewish Messiah they could not control?
2. He treats the Talmud like a literary archive, not an oracular tradition.
Schäfer rightly notes the editorial layering and legal dialectic in the Bavli. But he misses the spiritual reverence embedded in the text. The Talmud is not a record of rabbinic politics alone—it is a sacred technology of memory, designed to encode, veil, and preserve. When Jesus appears in distorted form, that distortion itself is meaningful. It may be concealment. It may be conflation. But it is not neutral.
As I said in Part Two: if there was a concealment, it must be asked why. And if there was a conflation between Jesus of Nazareth and ben Pandera, that too needs serious attention—not erasure.
Schäfer flattens the mystery into sociology. But mystery doesn’t yield to academic dissection. It must be discerned.
3. He cannot hear the oracles.
Romans 3:2 says the Jews were entrusted with the logia tou Theou—the sayings, the oracles, the sacred utterances. That doesn’t mean all rabbinic tradition is correct. But it does mean we must read with reverence. The veiling of Jesus in the Talmud may not be rejection—it may be custodianship. Schäfer reads the surface and calls it history. But oracles don’t operate on the surface. They hide in plain sight.
Rashi and the Reframing of the NameNo treatment of Talmudic interpretation would be complete without mention of Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, 1040–1105). While Rashi rarely addresses Yeshu directly, his glosses often show how later editors dealt with charged material. In some manuscripts, Rashi’s name is attached to commentaries that defend or justify the Sanhedrin’s role in the “execution” of a figure like Yeshu, though later censorship often obscures these notes. But more telling is how Rashi’s style laid the foundation for narrative compression—a way of summarizing volatile traditions without erasing them, especially when dealing with difficult aggadot. In this way, Rashi becomes part of the veiling process—not to deny what happened, but to preserve it safely in the margins.
The Tosafists and the Emergence of Protective DiscourseThe Tosafists, Rashi’s intellectual descendants, were deeply engaged in reconciling conflicting Talmudic passages and often found themselves handling volatile materials—especially under Christian scrutiny. They developed the strategy of limiting the scope of troubling references to “Yeshu,” frequently insisting that these stories did notrefer to Jesus of Nazareth. This move, though sometimes defensive, created a coded language of plausible deniability. But even in their efforts to distance themselves from Christian claims, the Tosafists inadvertently confirmed that some association was present—why else would it need so much explaining? Their work reflects a tension between public defense and private knowing, between exile and oracular responsibility.
Jacob Emden: A Voice from Within the HouseEnter Rabbi Jacob Emden (1697–1776), the radical and deeply learned voice who dared to say aloud what many others only hinted at. In his letter to the leaders of the Hamburg community, Emden writes that Jesus of Nazareth “did not intend to abolish the Torah” but to strengthen it, and that his teachings were appropriate for the Gentiles. Emden did not become a Christian—but he acknowledged that the Nazarene had a role within divine providence. He saw something his predecessors veiled. His work stands as a rare breach in the rabbinic wall of resistance: a sign that not all rejection is total, and that within the house of Israel, some have always suspected more than they were free to say.
Harvey Falk: The Bridge of HesedFinally, we must mention Harvey Falk, whose Jesus the Pharisee(1985) was quietly revolutionary. Falk re-read the Gospel through the lens of rabbinic halakhah and argued that Jesus belonged to the School of Hillel, teaching Torah in continuity with the Pharisaic tradition. He went further: suggesting that early rabbinic hostility toward Jesus may have masked a secret admiration, and that the anti-Yeshu passages in the Talmud may have developed to protect Israel in a time of rising Christian persecution and Roman pressure. Falk did not deny the distortions, but he asked: What if they were a form of hesed—of mercy? A way to preserve the Name until the appointed hour?
Together, these voices tell a more complex story. Rashi begins the compression. The Tosafists manage the threat. Emden cracks the wall. Falk dares to ask if the wall was built in love, not fear.
So we ask again:
What if the distortion was not denial, but deferral?What if the Name was hidden, not rejected?And what if, even now, the veil is being lifted by the very tradition that once obscured it?
In Conclusion: What Schäfer Misses
He misses the possibility of sacred concealment. He misses the pain of Jewish memory that couldn’t be erased, only re-encoded. He misses the distinction between Yeshu ha-Notzri and Yeshua Min Sarat—between the polemical distortion and the radiant Sar HaPanim, the true Davidic King, hidden in the texts even when mocked by them.
Schäfer wants a clean archive. But what we have is a wound—preserved in rabbinic memory, protected by oracles, and now beginning to reopen.
So the real question is not whether Jesus is in the Talmud.
The real question is: What happens when the veil lifts?
In the end his 2007 book Jesus in the Talmud, published by Princeton University Press, presents a thorough catalog of Talmudic and midrashic passages possibly referring to Jesus (Yeshu), arguing that many of them are direct polemical responses to Christian claims. While his work is detailed and philologically careful, it approaches the tradition with critical distance, often lacking a theological or oracular frame—something my own approach seeks to recover.
Schäfer is not hostile to Jesus—but he reads the rabbinic texts as artifacts, not as sacred tensions. He catalogs distortion, but he does not ask why the distortion needed to be made. That’s the space where my work diverges—because the question isn’t whether the rabbis mocked Jesus. The question is: what were they protecting?
