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>Many Biblical scholars have attempted to assume that the Greek gospels were based on earlier Aramaic gospels. Other Biblical scholars have criticized this assumption because there is little to no proof. Yet the supreme irony is that there always were Aramaic writings about Jesus, reasonably early and available in the most popular Jewish theological work after the Bible, and yet no leading New Testament scholar of the twentieth century ever considered analyzing them beyond a superficial glance for historical purposes. Even among Talmudic scholars and Biblical scholars who advocate looking for a more “Jewish” Jesus, the Talmud and Toledot are in general silently dismissed. Many scholars, including Zindler, point to the fact that there are variations of the text that leave out the name of Yeshu, indicating it was inserted in later. However, there is a long Jewish tradition of leaving out the name of a heretic or an enemy so that his name would vanish from history. Whether the name was inserted or taken out, there were some ancient Jews who knowingly dated Jesus to the first century BCE
>The fact that almost no Talmudic scholars accept the Yeshu statements to relate to the historical Jesus, does tarnish the credibility of a historical Jesus based on the Talmud and Toledot. But this does not appear to have been the case before modern times. The 1887 book, Medieval Jewish Chronicles, by Adolph Neubaueri, quotes a twelfth-century Spanish historian named Abraham ben Daud as saying not some but all the Jewish history writers of the time identified Jesus as the student of Joshua ben Perachiah and said that he lived during the time of Alexander Jannaeus. The reason this is not the case today can be attributed not to an accident of history but a purposeful censorship by the Roman Catholic Church. Along with censorship, Christian repression also led many Jewish copyists to self-censor, and so many copies of the Talmud have the passages missing
