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>Six Reasons Why the Talmudic Tradition that Jesus Lived in the First Century BCE is Older Than the Gospel Tradition
>1) In Matthew 28:12, the Jewish chief priests and elders, after hearing the report from the Roman guards that two angels had come down and released Jesus from the tomb, conspire to devise a story about how Jesus’ disciples moved his body to trick everyone into thinking that Jesus rose from the dead and the Toledot story involves Yeshu’s betrayer, a gardener, moving his body to his garden, tricking the disciples into thinking Yeshu rose from the dead. The gospel could only be citing a Toledot or related story. The Toledot tradition that Jesus is buried in his betrayer's garden later caused the betrayer to become associated with a “Field of Blood”. The authors of Matthew 27:6 and Acts 1:18 then invented contradicting explanations for how this “Field of Blood” ended up associated with Judas. Tertullian references a Jewish belief in the early 200s that the betrayer had moved Jesus' body from his garden to stop the followers of Jesus from stepping on his lettuces, just as depicted in the Toledot (De Spetaculis 100.30.3; Mead 182)
>2) In the Gospel of John, Mary Magdalene confuses the gardener with Jesus as if they are twins who looked alike, which is a parallel to the fact that certain dualistic Gnostics like the Sethians and Cainites portrayed Judas as the “twin” of Jesus. The final editor of the Gospel of John appears to have been at particular pains to distinguish Judas Iscariot from Judas Thomas “not Iscariot” (the name Thomas meaning “the Twin”), like in 14:22. Although none of the Gnostic gospels describe Judas as a gardener, the fact that the Toledot identifies Judas with the gardener shows that the gospel scene of Mary Magdalene confusing Jesus for the gardener was inspired by the earlier motif that the “twin”/betrayer of Jesus was a gardener
