Seite - 39 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 05/01

escaping to Galilee. There he starts gathering disciples, baptizing them with the mysterious “waters of Bolet”, which prevent their hair from growing, so that they can be recognized as “Jesus’ men” – an evident pun on the clerical ton- sure. In the course of their adventures, Jesus and his closest disciples get lost in the desert. Starving and exhausted, they have to beg for water and bread. The people they come across mock the pretended wonder-maker who cannot “do a miracle to save [him]self and to find water”. A man asks Jesus to dance in exchange for some bread as well as his donkey – and Jesus complies. At every stage of his career, Jesus thus appears as a pitiable loser, eliciting more ridicule and scorn than admiration. Consider the following episode, where Jesus, Peter and Judas eventually find a hostel in the middle of the desert and ask the hostess for food: The landlady said, “I do not have anything but a roast goose.” Jesus took the goose, put it before them, and said, “This goose is not enough for three people. Let us go to sleep and the one who will dream a good dream shall eat the goose.” They lay, and at midnight Judas rose up and ate the goose. They rose up in the morning and Peter said, “I dreamed that I sat near the throne of the son of God Almighty.” And Jesus said, “I am the son of God Almighty, and I dreamed that you were sitting with me, and look, in my dream, I am better than (you in) yours, so the goose is mine to eat.” And Judas said, “I, in my dream, ate the goose.” Jesus looked for the goose and did not find it because Judas had eaten it.47 It is difficult not to read this episode as a joke. Yet it aroused the ire of the pious editor of the text (i.e. Huldreich), who in all seriousness commented: “This fable is utterly inept and worthy of its [anonymous] author”, who thus turned the New Testament account of the feeding of the many into a “tasteless story in which it is figured that Jesus was not even able to quench the hunger of three men with a whole goose”.48 CONCLUSION: REPLACING TOLEDOT YESHU IN ITS CONTEXTS For all its mockery and wit, Toledot Yeshu does offer a serious attack on the Christian myth, and on the fundamental tenets of Christianity. Mockery is in- deed a powerful form of polemic. The conception narrative thus rebuffs the claim that Jesus was the son of God born from an unsullied virgin. The descrip- tion of his would-be miracles as mere magical tricks denies his alleged divine 47 Meerson/Schäfer, Toledot Yeshu, vol. 1, 312 (English) and vol. 2, 245–246 (Hebrew), and see the refer- ences in vol. 1: 38, 36n: the episode is inspired by the medieval Gesta Romanorum. Huldreich translates the “goose” (here written אזווא) by anserculus, “gosling,” which would indeed make more sense in the context. 48 Huldreich 1705, 53–54, 1n. Some Remarks on Toledot Yeshu | 39www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1