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>Sepher Toledot Yeshu: The Anti-Gospel
>Sepher Toledot Yeshu, or “Book of the Generations of Jesus”
>The Talmud passages do not provide very much information about Yeshu other than to say that he was an a student of Yehoshua ben Perachiah as well as a memzer of “illegitimate birth”, he was taken to Egypt in his youth, and that he later turned to idolatry and became a magician with five disciples. But his story is further elaborated on in a series of Jewish anti-gospels collectively referred to as the Sepher Toledot Yeshu, or Toldoth Jeschu. Two of these Toledot anti-gospels have been translated into English and titled: 1) The Jewish Life of Jesus and 2) The Jewish Life of Christ. The Jewish Life of Jesus appears to be the earlier version of the two. Rather than it being a Jewish satire of the Greek gospels, Life of Jesus appears to be a very short, early gospel about the first century BCE Jesus that has been altered to put him in a negative light. Life of Christ looks like a sister text to Life of Jesus that has been edited up to be harmonized with one of the Greek canonical gospels, perhaps Matthew
>Many scholars have often dated the Toledot Yeshu stories very late, often from the sixth century or the medieval period, but there is very compelling evidence that the story elements come from a tradition that is earlier than the canonical gospels. Did Jesus Live 100 BC? (1903) by the English historian and theosophist G.R.S. Mead, and The Jesus the Jews Never Knew (2003) by Frank Zindler are two extremely thorough investigations that conclude that the Yeshu tradition was earlier than the Jesus tradition. But whereas Mead left the question as to whether the original Jesus lived in the first century BCE or not open, Zindler came to the conclusion that the Yeshu references began as anonymous aphorisms and then slowly built up knowledge as information after proto-Christians invented a first century BCE Christ figure from the dying-and-rising god mystery religions
