La confusión como estrategia retórica: María y Jesús en b Shabat 104b y b Sanedrín 67a

Abstract

Discussions around Jesus´ family have led to animated debates both in Antiquity and in contemporary historiography. Due to the paucity of sources, historians have resorted to the wide range of materials available on that subject, including the tale about Maria in the Babylonian Talmud found in Shabbat 104b and in Sanhedrin 67a. Throughout the 20th century, scholars have sought to understand the role of prominent figures, such as Ben Stadá, Pantira or Pappos ben Yehuda, in those texts; some of them have even tried to find trails of the historical Jesus. Recently, however, other historians have focused the analysis not on the historical Maria, but on Maria´s image in the Bavlí, its motivations and its aims. Nevertheless, most scholars have held that the confusion that appears in the Talmudic text when explaining Jesus´ family was the result of rabbinical ignorance.In this paper, we seek to demonstrate that the confusion apparent in b Shabbat 104b and in b Sanhedrin 67a is not a consequence of ignorance. It is, in fact, a discursive device oriented to: 1) Desacralize Maria´s figure and, accordingly, that of Jesus; 2) Invert the accusations of carnality and impudicity that had constructed the Adversus Iudaeos? literature. Such position implies rabbinical knowledge of the Christian narrative, not only through the New Testament but also through direct interaction. This view is supported by the existence of an important degree of contact between Jews and Christians in the formative centuries of both talmudim, in agreement with current studies on the relations between both religious communities in the east of the Roman Empire and in the Sasanian Empire during Late Antiquity.