Cairo Genizah : Polemic: Toldot Yešu; calendrical

Cairo Genizah

<p style='text-align: justify;'>Recto contains the final passage from Toldot Yešu in Hebrew, featuring Yešu (Jesus, rendered Yešūʿa here) ‘the wicked’, Yoḥanan, Judah ‘the gardener’ (pardasi), and Tiberius ‘the King’. This fragment contains the end of the tale, in which Yoḥanan is tried and hanged, and then Yešū is also hanged from a pole (or tree) and stoned to death (cf. Meerson and Schäfer 2014, I: 92). The inclusion of Yoḥanan’s trial and death and the reference to stoning are, according to Meerson and Schäfer, indicative of the early (i.e. 11-15th century) origin of this tale (2014, I: 89). This manuscript may be the final, missing page of JTS MS 8998. Verso is entitled ‘This is the origin of the account of the divinations, the calculations of the cycles, the Jubilee and the release’ (in Judaeo-Arabic and Hebrew).</p>