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>Things were not any better when Martin Luther got his hands on the story, as he used it to help slander Jews with anti-Semitic tracts. Many Christians, including Martin Luther, used the Toledot story to stir up anti-Semitism, typically leaving out the part about Yeshu living in a different century. It should perhaps be no surprise then that Judaism before the late twentieth century had evolved into a religion with collective amnesia when it came to Jesus
>Indicative of the suffocating nature of the censorship, there were notes discovered hidden within two copies of the Toledot, originally written in Slavic Hebrew and then translated into German, that warns its Jewish readers that because of the Christian ban on the Toledot, it was to be copied only by hand and never printed. Neither should it be read in front of Christians or anyone frivolous enough to gossip about it. Rabbinic writings from the 1100s to 1900s confirm that the Talmud and Toledot were censored by the Church to keep Christians from learning about this other Jesus. So, as sensationalist as it sounds, the story of the first century BCE Jesus is a full-on Da Vinci Code-style conspiracy theory. That does not necessarily make it historically true. Even if the Talmudic tradition is earlier, Jewish Talmudists could possibly have adopted one historically untrue myth only to have it repressed by another historically untrue myth. I will go more into what I think is historically true of the first century BCE Jesus later. But it does go to show that we should not take the unpopularity of an idea on its face if there had to be a lot of repression to make the idea unpopular
