Jesus' Burial in a Garden:
The Strange Growth of the Tradition
Robert M. Price
The Garden‑Burial in the New Testament
Like
many other narrative details in the gospels, the place of Jesus' burial appears
differently in different texts, appearing to grow in the telling. In Acts
13:29, we may find preserved a fragment of early tradition according to which
Jesus' enemies buried him in an unknown
location. Mark 15:46 describes the burial place of Jesus simply as "a tomb which had been hewn
out of the rock," while Matthew
27:60 makes the tomb that of Joseph of Arimathea ("his own new tomb"), supplying this detail as the
requirement of Isaiah 53:9, a text he
regards as a prophecy of Jesus' burial. Luke knows nothing of this but makes it "a rock‑hewn
tomb, where no one had ever been
laid" (Luke 23:53), recalling the donkey "on which no one has ever yet sat" (Luke 19:30; cf. also 1
Samuel 6:7, where the Ark of the
Covenant is borne by cattle "upon which there has never come a yoke"). But it is only in the latest
of the four gospels, John, that we hear of Jesus' being interred in a tomb
"in a garden" (John 19:41).
John tells us that Jesus' body was placed there in haste, and only
temporarily, because of the lateness of the hour, with the start of the Sabbath impending (19:42). So when Mary
Magdalene visits the tomb early Sunday
morning and finds it empty, there is no mystery. She simply assumes the
gardener has already removed Jesus for
permanent reburial elsewhere (20:2, 15). These Johannine details are quite
interesting, especially in view of the possibilities they (perhaps unwittingly)
raise.
Later Jewish tradition (to be examined presently) makes much of the
Johannine scenario, suggesting that Jesus' body actually was removed by the gardener, and that the resurrection faith of the
disciples was simply a gross error. Hans von Campenhausen once suggested1 that just as
Matthew's tomb guards (Matthew 27:62‑66; 28:4, 11‑15) were added by
that evangelist as a kind of co‑opting
rebuttal of a Jewish charge that Jesus' disciples stole his body, even
so John's garden and gardener details represent an attempt to anticipate and
refute another anti‑Christian slur, namely that a disinterested third party, the gardener, removed the body.
His suggestion has met with mixed responses,2 but thus far no one seems to have traced out the
fascinating history of the charge that the body was removed by the gardener.
Actually in one form or another, this reading of the garden burial story occurs
several times over the next several centuries in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim
sources. I propose to survey the evolution of this tradition, a study at least
as fascinating for the light it sheds on the development of Jewish and
Christian counter‑polemics as for the help it may provide in
understanding John's gospel. It is with the Gospel of John that we must
begin since even if John is replying to a prior charge, John's own account
would be the earliest extant attestation of it. We must ask whether, as it
stands, the Johannine account seems to be apologetical in intention.
If the details about the garden location of the tomb are meant as an apologetical device, we
must admit that John is a singularly poor apologist. If one approached this
text already suspecting that a gardener had innocently removed the body for
reburial or simply because it did not belong in his garden, would one come away
in any measure convinced that one's suspicions were groundless? I think most
definitely not. Rather, this story would tend to raise such suspicions in a
mind not already harboring them! The reader must notice how in John 19: 42 the
burial is expected to be only temporary and how in 20:15 Mary reasonably
supposes that the unfamiliar figure before her is the gardener who has emptied
the tomb. What if, the reader may wonder, she were right the first time?
Perhaps, like Celsus suggested, Mary was too excitable and jumped to wish‑fulfilling conclusions!3 Modern skeptics have not been slow to frame such a
hypothesis, and the text of John does nothing, really, to stop them.4 If this story is
intended as an apologetical device it is a poor one. Matthew's intent to defend resurrection
faith, by contrast, is at least clear.
If no apologetical intention is evident in John's garden tomb story,
does any other purpose make itself known? Yes indeed. As Raymond E. Brown has pointed out, we should
most likely view the detail of Mary
mistaking the Risen Christ for the gardener as another instance of the gospels'
tendency to make the post‑resurrection Jesus hard to recognize (Luke 24:15‑16; Markan
appendix 16:12).5
This device prepares the way for a dramatic
recognition scene just as the frequent
element of the skepticism of the bystanders in pre‑resurrection miracle stories (Mark 4:38; 5:31, 40; 6:37;
8:4) prepares the way for the awed acclamation of the witnesses later (Mark
4:41; 5:42). The garden‑gardener scenario is simply a convenient
circumstance in which to have Mary
mistake Jesus for someone else who might plausibly be present on the scene.
Thus John's story can be explained perfectly adequately without
reference to any prior anti‑Christian polemic. In addition, John's story
is perfectly capable of inadvertently suggesting
an anti‑resurrection polemic, as
we have seen. Our next task will be to examine the development of that polemic,
that the gardener actually did remove the body of Jesus, and therefore that the
resurrection was a faulty inference from the empty tomb.
Tertullian and Pseudo‑Bartholomew
The
earliest extra‑biblical occurrence of the garden‑burial tradition
is in Tertullian's De Spectaculis,
XXX, where the late‑second-century theologian is wistfully envisioning
his Christ‑rejecting Jewish opponents' terror at the Parousia of Christ:
"This is he whom his disciples have stolen away secretly, that it may be
said he is risen, or the gardener
abstracted that his lettuces might not be damaged by the crowd of
visitors!" Thus we can be certain that by about a century after John's
gospel was written Jews offered these two alternative theories on why Jesus'
tomb might have been found empty. Is
there anything in the charge as Tertullian recounts it that could not have been
derived from John? If there is, then we must reckon with the possibility that
Tertullian's debating partners had knowledge of an independent and thus
possibly prior form of the charge. But
there is nothing new here. The one apparently new detail, the specific motive
for removing the body, is probably just an inference from John's story. If Mary
were correct and the gardener had moved the body, why would he have done it?
Had he known a crowd of mourners were likely to come to see the resting place
of the messianic pretender Jesus, he
might indeed have been concerned about the
fate of his lettuce crop.
Remember, it is not John but Matthew who makes the tomb that of Joseph of Arimathea, so an ancient
reader of John's gospel would not assume
any gardener to be an employee of Joseph and knowing of his master's wishes
that Jesus be buried there. And though
most probably a garden in which a tomb was built would have been a flower garden as in a modern cemetery,
this detail, would be easy to confuse, especially if the reader wanted to create a motive for the
gardener moving the body. So probably the understanding of the garden as a bed
of vegetables is a polemically motivated reinterpretation of John's original
story. We will see it again.
The garden tomb and the gardener appear again in another Christian
source a few centuries later. In the apocryphal Book of the Resurrection attributed pseudonymously to the apostle
Bartholomew, apparently written somewhere in the fifth, sixth, or seventh
centuries, we discover that there actually was
a gardener involved. His name is
Philogenes, and he is the man mentioned in Mark 9:17ff, the father
of the boy whose demon the disciples
could not cast out. In this legendary embellishment of the canonical gospels,
it is Mary the mother of Jesus, not Mary Magdalene, who visits the tomb,
because of someone's confused reading of John. Mary approaches the tomb
expecting to find the body of Jesus and finds instead that the tomb is empty.
As in John, she asks the gardener about it, only this time it really is the
gardener, Philogenes. He explains that
For at the moment
when the Jews crucified Jesus, they set out seeking a safe sepulchre wherein
they might lay Him, so that His disciples might not come and carry Him away
secretly by night. And I said unto them, "There is a tomb quite close to
my vegetable garden, carry Him hither and lay Him in it, and I myself will keep
watch over it." Now I thought in my heart saying: When the Jews have gone away [from the tomb] and have
entered their houses, I will go to the
tomb of my Lord, and I will carry Him away, and I will give Him spices, and a
large quantity of sweet‑smelling
unguents. And [the Jews] brought Him, and laid Him in the tomb, and they set
a seal upon it, and they departed to
their houses. [When Philogenes returns, he finds all the hosts of heaven
assembled at the tomb.] "And the Father came forth out of the
height.... and He came to the tomb of
the Savior, and raised Him up from the dead. All these glorious things did I
see, O my sister Mary.”6
This is surely a remarkable text. It has Jesus buried by his enemies as
in Acts 13:29, the enemies being concerned to secure his tomb against violation as in Matthew 27: 64,
and Mary (albeit the wrong one) visiting
the garden tomb as in John 20:1. The women have not come to anoint the body as
they do in Mark and Luke, but neither have Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea
done it as in John. We may even catch an echo of the Gospel of Peter in the
note that "the Jews... departed and entered into their houses" (cf.
"... and many returned to their homes; the feast was over. We, the twelve
disciples of the Lord, wept and were grief‑stricken. Each, grieving at
what had happened, returned to his own house." Peter 58‑59)
One might conceivably argue that the Book of the Resurrection has
preserved an independent tradition here, but it seems overwhelmingly more
probable that we are dealing instead with a folk‑embellishment of the
traditional gospel stories as half‑remembered by people who did not have
private copies to check and could not keep the
details straight (any more than many moderns can). What has popular
tradition, as crystallized in the Book of
the Resurrection, preserved concerning the garden tomb? Astonishingly, this
Christian text actually admits that the gardener, himself a disciple of Jesus,
had intended to remove the body secretly! This version of the story certainly
shows awareness of the anti‑Christian polemics as it combines both major
charges: the disciples stole the body, and the gardener moved the body from his
vegetable garden. Now the gardener is
a disciple! And though the text does
not do a very effective job of rebutting these charges (an opponent would no
doubt consider the ensuing resurrection‑appearance claim as begging the
question), it is hard to deny a polemical intent here. In this Bartholomew
pseudepigraphon we have evidence of what was not apparent in the original
Johannine passage: an apologetical intent.
'Abd al‑Jabbar's "Gospel" Source
It is
difficult, probably impossible, to date our next occurrence of the garden‑burial
theme. It is imbedded in a polemical writing by 'Abd al‑Jabbar, a Muslim
apologist, dated at 995 C.E. 'Abd al‑Jabbar is seeking to demonstrate by a convoluted
argument, the details of which need not
concern us here, that the Qur'an is correct in denying that Jesus really died on the cross. In the
course of his argument he quotes
substantial sections of what he believes to be one of the New Testament gospels, without saying which
he thinks it is. In fact, it is none of them. S.M. Stern and F.F. Bruce seem to
consider the interesting document an apocryphal Christian gospel.7 However, a close
reading makes it absolutely clear that the text is in reality an early (at
least pre‑995 C.E., but undatable) specimen of a Jewish anti‑Christian
polemical literature whose more famous later examples are known as Toledoth Jeschu (more about these below). This is evident from the
way Jesus is described as in uncontrollable hysterics before Herod and Pilate.8 No Christian (or
Muslim) would have depicted Jesus in this manner. The narrative never shows
Jesus in a particularly sympathetic or noble light.
Here are the passages relevant to our inquiry: "Pilate then
returned him to Herod saying: 'I found in this man nothing which was said about
him [i.e., previous accusations, as in the gospels] and there is nothing good
in him.'" The death of Jesus is described in a particularly startling way:
"Then at the end of the day they whipped him and brought him to a field of melons and vegetables and
crucified him..." "Judas
Iscariot met the Jews and asked them: 'What have you done with the man whom you
took yesterday?' They answered: 'We have crucified him.' He was greatly
astonished by this, but they said: 'We have verily done so, and if you want to
know this for certain, go to that field of melons. 'He went there, and when he
saw him he said: 'This is innocent blood, this is blameless blood.' Then he
cursed the Jews. He took the thirty silver pieces which they had given him as wages for his betrayal, and
threw them into their faces. Then he went to his house and hanged
himself."
The reader will hardly have failed to notice what Stern calls "the
curious detail that the cross was erected in a field of melons."9 Of course this
detail comes from the garden‑burial tradition, especially in its anti‑Christian
form, but why does the crucifixion
take place there? I believe there is a
satisfying solution to this puzzle, but I must be allowed an apparent
digression before providing it. It is
well known that early Christians had a large stock of testimonia,
or proof‑texts, for use in debate with Jews.10 These were, of course, passages from the Jewish
scriptures, which on the Christian
interpretation were seen as prophetic predictions of Jesus as the Messiah. Such texts might be chosen from
whichever Hebrew text‑form or even whichever translation in which the
wording seemed best to tally with the events of Jesus' life. To take one famous
example, Matthew chooses Isaiah 7:14 according to the Greek Septuagint to proof‑text
the virgin birth, since only the Greek text contains a reference to a virgin.
Similarly, to construct the scene of Matthew 27:3‑10, the evangelist has
combined the Hebrew of Zechariah 11:12, in which the prophet is told to cast
the thirty silver sheckels "to the potter," and the Syriac of the
same verse, in which the command is to cast the coins "into the
treasury." I want to suggest that
the Jewish text cited by 'Abd al‑Jabbar
is similarly constructed, at least as to certain interesting details,
from a Rabbinic, anti‑Christian, reading of a scriptural text interpreted
as a prediction of Jesus as a false messiah embraced by pagans. The text so
used would have been Jeremiah 10:1‑5.
1. "Hear the word which the LORD spoke to you, O house of
Israel.
2. Thus says the LORD: 'Learn not the way of the nations, nor be
dismayed at the signs of the heavens
because the nations are dismayed at them,
3. for the customs of the peoples are false. A tree from the forest is
cut down, and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman.11
4. Men deck it with silver and gold; they fasten it with hammer and
nails so that it cannot move.
5. Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field, and they cannot
speak; they have to be carried, for they cannot walk. Be not afraid of them,
for they cannot do evil, neither is it in them to do good." (RSV)
I suggest that a rabbi seeking
scriptural condemnation of the false religion of the Gentiles with their
crucified false messiah would very likely have noticed the utility of this text
when interpreted in the manner I will propose.
Verses 1‑3a would be seen as a
warning to Jews not to succumb to Christian/Gentile preaching about Jesus.
Verse 3b would be referred to the preparation of the cross. Verse 4b would
envision the nailing of Jesus to the cross so that he could not escape. Verse
5b shows the futility of elevating the dead Jesus to godhood, as Gentiles have
done. Once there existed an alternate form of this text, attested both in the
LXX and in Qumran (4Q Jerb)12
which transposed
verse 5 after verse 9, omitting some other wording. The Jerusalem Bible's reconstruction of the text reflects the
result: "they dress them up in violet and purple; they fix them with nail and hammer to prevent
them from falling. Scarecrows in a melon patch, and dumb as these, they have to
be carried, cannot walk themselves. Have no fear of them: they can do no
harm--nor any good either!" We saw that Christian testimonia might be drawn from the most promising textual tradition
or translation. Might not the same have held true for anti‑testimonia? If
our rabbinic exegete had available the
LXX/Qumran textual tradition as well as the Masoretic Text,13
the oracle would
even have seemed to predict the Roman guards'
dressing Jesus in purple robes prior to his crucifixion (Mark 15:1
6ff)! If so much of Jeremiah 10:1‑5
seemed to predict the death of the false
prophet Jesus, perhaps a polemicist would (like the evangelist Matthew: recall Joseph of Arimathea's own
tomb and Judas' throwing the silver to
the treasury and, indirectly, to the
potter) go on to add new details to
the "fulfillment" from the
"prediction. " I believe that
the writer of the anti‑gospel quoted by 'Abd al‑Jabbar did
just that. He saw in the crucified Jesus
Jeremiah's scarecrow in a melon patch.
Thus the crucifixion as we read it in 'Abd al‑Jabbar's source.
Not only that, but the Jeremiah text
would also explain why Pilate is
pictured not only echoing Luke 23:4/John 19:6 ("I find no crime in this man"/"l find no crime in
him") but also adding "and there is
nothing good in him." Compare Jeremiah 10:5c: "they cannot do
evil, neither is it in them to do
good" (RSV).
So the garden‑burial becomes a garden‑crucifixion in the
Jewish anti‑gospel used by 'Abd al‑Jabbar,
apparently under the influence of an
anti‑Christian "tesimonium" exegesis of Jeremiah 10 :1‑5
. The document used by 'Abd al‑Jabbar
contains the only instance in the whole
tradition of the crucifixion occurring in the garden. This, too, would imply
that instead of drawing on common Jewish tradition, it is citing the special
exegesis of an individual. Another, much simpler, occurrence of the garden‑burial tradition, perhaps more‑or‑less
contemporary with 'Abd al‑Jabbar's undatable source, meets us in the Epistola contra Judaeos of Amulo,
Archbishop of Lyons (ninth century). He merely quotes the familiar Jewish tradition that Jesus' tomb was
"in a certain garden full of
cabbages."
The Toledoth Jeschu
Our
next stop on the journey is the fourteenth century Jewish anti‑gospel, the Toledoth Jeschu
("Generations of Jesus" ), the edition of Wagenseil.14 Here Jesus is
pictured as a magician and false prophet (cf. Bar‑Jesus in Acts 13:6),
who gains the power to work miracles through the divine Tetragrammaton, the
secret name of God. He is leading many Jews astray, proclaiming his own
divinity. The Jewish elders meet in counsel and at length an elder named Judas
volunteers to learn the divine name so as to gain powers to rival those of
Jesus. He does, and an aerial battle (obviously borrowed from the Peter vs.
Simon Magus legends) ensues. It proves inconclusive, but eventually Judas
contrives to rob Jesus of his powers. Jesus tells his disciples of his plan to
go to Jerusalem for the Passover and there relearn the divine name and so
regain his powers. Judas overhears this and warns the elders. Jesus walks into
an ambush in the temple, and Judas
points out Jesus to the soldiers. He is stoned to death and his corpse is then
hung on a tree. Then "they buried the Fatherless [i.e., Jesus] in the
place where he was stoned. And when midnight was come, the disciples came and
seated themselves on the grave, and wept and lamented him. Now when Judas saw
this, he took the body away and buried it in his garden under a brook. He
diverted the water of the brook elsewhere; but when the body was laid in its
bed, he brought its waters back again
into their former channel.
"Now on the morrow, when the
disciples had assembled and had seated themselves weeping, Judas came to them
and said, Why weep you? [= John 20:13]. Seek him who was buried [= Mark 16:6;
Matthew 28: 5]. And they dug and sought, and found him not, and all the company cried, He is not in the
grave; he is risen and ascended into
heaven, for, when he was yet alive, he said, He would raise him up [= Matthew 27:63], selah!" The rumor of the resurrection spreads, and
the elders try to find the body of Jesus. The Queen has threatened to execute
them as killers of the true Christ if they cannot prove by producing the corpse
that the resurrection is all a mistake. But Jesus' corpse is not to be found.
In despair one of the elders, Tanchuma, happens upon Judas "sitting in his
garden." Tanchuma explains the reason for his dejection: "Jeschu the Fatherless is the
occasion, for he was hung up and buried on the spot where he was stoned; but
now he is taken away, and we know not
where he is gone [= John 20:13]. And his worthless disciples cry out that he is
ascended into heaven. Now the Queen has condemned us Israelites to death unless
we find him."
Judas offers, "It was I who
took the Fatherless from his grave. For
I feared lest his disciples should steal him away [= Matthew 27:64], and I have hidden him in my garden and led a
water brook over the place." The resurrection is exposed, but of course,
this leads only to greater persecution of the Jews by the Christian
authorities, the very bitterness which eventually gave birth to anti‑gospels
like this one. It is clear that the author of the Wagenseil Toledoth Jeschu was at least somewhat
conversant with the canonical gospels, as he
refers to them again and again, albeit confusedly and out of
context. But the most extravagant
instance of such confused reference is the burial of Jesus in Judas' own
garden. Surely there is no gospel precedent for this detail? Surprisingly, it
seems that the anti Christian polemical tradition has unconsciously melded the
harmonized Judas stories of Matthew and Acts with John's gardener, because Acts
says Judas "bought a field with the reward of his wickedness" (1:18).
Judas' "Field of Blood" was readily confused with the garden burial
place
of Jesus since the latter had for centuries been understood by Jewish polemicists as a vegetable garden or
cultivated field. Thus Jesus comes to
be buried in the garden of Judas!
Conclusion
We can
trace the tradition no further, but through the long process of its evolution we have determined
that far from influencing the Gospel of
John, the subsequent anti‑Christian garden‑burial tradition has repeatedly been influenced,
modified, and reinterpreted in the light
of various biblical texts. The process whereby the garden‑burial
tradition mutated proved to be not unlike the way in which various biblical stories themselves
evolved, i.e., the reinterpretation, conflation, extrapolation, and
harmonization of earlier biblical texts
and traditions. Like a tomb, the tradition I have examined hides many old
secrets, which I have tried to bring to light, and like a garden, the tradition has proved surprisingly
fruitful with new embellishment and
embroidery.
.................................................................................
1. Hans von Campenhausen, Der Ablouf der Osterereignisse und das leere Grab, S. H. A. phil.‑hist
Kl (Neidelberg: C. Winter, 1958 ), p.
32. Von Campenhausen did not base his suggestion on primary study of the Jewish
traditions themselves but on S. Kraus, Das
Leben Jesu nach judischen Quellen (1902), pp. 170ff. Von Campenhausen seems later to have backed off
from the suggestion.
2. Reginald H. Fuller (The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives [New York: Macmillan, 1971], p.
137) rejects von Campenhausen's
suggestion, though he does believe the
Johannine account reflects (and seeks implicitly to refute) the similar Jewish charge that Jesus' disciples made away
with his corpse. Raymond E. Brown (The
Gospel according to John, Xl I I‑XXI [Garden City, New York:
Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1970], p. 990) calls von Campenhausen's theory
"tenuous."
3. "But who saw this? A
hysterical female, as you say, and
perhaps some other one of those who were deluded by the same sorcery,
who... dreamt in a certain state of mind and through wishful thinking had a hallucination due to
some mistaken notion" Origen, Contra
Celsum ( Henry Chadwick, trans. [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980], p. 109).
4. J.N.D. Anderson seeks to
refute such skeptics on this point in
his Christianity: The Witness of History
(London: Tyndale Press, 1969), p. 93. Hugh J. Schonfield advocates a variant of
this theory in his The Passover Plot
(New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1965), pp. 175‑176 . Most recently
John K. Naland suggests that, just as
Mary inferred, the body of Jesus had in fact been removed elsewhere for
permanent burial ("The First Easter: The Evidence for the Resurrection
Evaluated," Free Inquiry,
Spring 1988, p. 18).
5. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel according to John, Vol. II
(Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1970), p. 1009.
6. E.A. Wallis Budge, Coptic Apocrypha in the Dialect of Upper Egypt (London: Longmans and Co., 1913),
pp. 188‑189. The work is very sketchily summarized by W. Schneemelcher in
Edgar Hennecke and Wilhelm Schneemelcher (eds.), New Testament Apocrypha, Vol. I, Gospels and Related Writings (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963), p. 507, and summarized somewhat
more fully by M.R. James in his Apocryphal
New Testament (Oxford at the Clarendon
Press, 1972), pp. 181‑186. The relevant portion of
Philogenes' report to Mary is quoted in
Schonfield, The Passover Plot, p.
171.
7. S.M. Stern,
"Quotations from Apocryphal Gospels in 'Abd al‑Jabbar," Journal of Theological Studies, New Series Volume XVIII, Pt. 1, April, 1967, p. 40; F.F. Bruce, Jesus and Christian Origins outside the New
Testament (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1974), pp. 179‑182.
8.
Stern, p. 43.
9. Stern, p. 45.
10. See the classic
discussion, C.H. Dodd, According to
the Scriptures: The Substructure of New
Testament Theology (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), especially
Chapter 11, "Testimonies," pp.
28‑60; also Krister Stendahl, The
School of St. Matthew and Its Use of the
Old Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968); Richard N. Longenecker, Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,
1975), Chapter III, "Early
Christian Preaching and the Old Testament," pp. 79‑103.
11. From the reference to the
tree being "cut down and worked with an axe by the hands of a
craftsman" (Jeremiah 10:3b), I am tempted to see a rabbinic application to
the strange Christian legend that
"Joseph the carpenter planted a garden because he needed the wood for his
trade. It was he who made the cross from the trees which he planted. His own offspring
hung on that which he planted. His offspring was Jesus and the planting was the
cross" (Gospel of Philip, 73:9‑15). There is even another connection
between Jesus crucifixion and a garden here! There is no other known
attestation of this legend, however, so we cannot assume it was widespread,
though it may have been.
12. See Frank Moore Cross,
Jr., The Ancient Library of Qumran (Garden City, New York: Doubleday &
Company, Inc., 1961 ), p. 187; also see
William L. Holladay, Jeremiah 1
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1 986),
pp. 324‑326.
13. The later we imagine our
rabbinic exegete the less likely this becomes, given the standardization of the Masoretic Text between 90 and 100 C.E.,
but we have no way of dating 'Abd al‑Jabbar's source, much less the exegetical resources
upon which it may have drawn.
14.
A good synopsis including
extensive quotations of the most important portions, as well as a discussion of
the Toledoth Jeschu in its various versions, may be found in Sabine Baring‑Gould,
Lost and Hostile Gospels; An essay on the
Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and
Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of which Fragments Still Remain (London: Williams and
Norgate, 1874). The material quoted in our discussion may be found on pages 77‑89. =============
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