Judaism

Judaism's strongest case against Jesus is the unfinished messianic work, and it turns on the resurrection. The Oral Torah's claim to come from Sinai in detail, and the short traditional chronology, fail on the evidence. Most Jews do descend largely from the ancient Levant. Several Christian proof-texts and claims of unwritten tradition fail the same tests.

By AI (Claude Opus 5.5, thinking level unavailable) Draft:  October 2026

"The central criterion for evaluating a Messiah must therefore be a single question: Has the Messianic age come?" — David Berger and Michael Wyschogrod, 19781

"The position of neither the Sadducees nor the Pharisees should be confused with the later rabbinic doctrine of “the Oral Torah,” a phrase and a concept that do not appear in any text of the Second Temple period." — Shaye J. D. Cohen, 20142

"These results cast light on the variegated genetic architecture of the Middle East, and trace the origins of most Jewish Diaspora communities to the Levant." — Doron Behar and colleagues, Nature, 20103

Summary

Judaism is the faith of the Hebrew Bible as the rabbis read it, and the faith in which Jesus and his apostles lived;  this series tests four questions about it that evidence can reach.  The strongest Jewish argument against Jesus is the plainest one:  the prophets describe a Messiah who rebuilds the Temple, gathers the exiles and brings peace, and Jesus did none of these in his lifetime.  The Christian answer, that the Messiah comes twice, is as old as the debate and has real footholds in the Hebrew Bible and even in the Talmud, but it stands or falls with the resurrection, which these articles do not try to settle.  Two claims that rabbinic Judaism makes about its own past do not survive the evidence:  that the detailed law of the Mishnah was given to Moses at Sinai, and that the Persian empire lasted 52 years, which would put the fall of Solomon's Temple near 423 BC instead of 587 or 586 BC.  Both have a modest form that does survive:  an ancient, inherited way of keeping the written law, and the plain fact that the Bible itself gives no total for the Persian period.  The claim that today's Jews, or the Ashkenazim at least, are not really descended from ancient Israel also fails:  most Jewish communities carry a large share of ancient Levantine ancestry, and the Khazar theory fails every genetic test so far.  The same tests cost Christians something, and the articles say so:  Catholic and Orthodox claims of unwritten apostolic tradition fail the test the Oral Torah fails, several favourite Christian proof-texts fail in their own settings, two Christian chronologists cut the Persian period to fit Daniel 9 by the same method as the rabbis, and the church's long persecution of the Jews is a record to confess.  What finally divides the two faiths is one historical question, whether Jesus rose from the dead.

The four articles under this heading:

  1. Why Judaism Rejects Jesus The job list, a Messiah judged by public results, is the strongest argument in the debate. The theological objections turn on prior commitments, the verse-by-verse arguments are mostly a draw, and the Talmud's Jesus passages are late polemic. The question reduces to whether Jesus rose from the dead.
  2. Is the Oral Torah from Sinai? Oral legal traditions existed by the second century BC, and the written Torah cannot be kept without some. But no source before about AD 200 says they came from Sinai, nearly half the Mishnah's legal paragraphs record a named disagreement, and only the weakest form of the claim, a God-given authority to interpret, survives, as a claim of faith.
  3. Are Today's Jews Descended from Ancient Israel? Yes, in large part, for most communities. Ashkenazim are roughly half Levantine and half European, Ethiopian and Indian Jews are mostly local by ancestry, and the Khazar theory fails. Genetics detects Levantine ancestry, not Israelite descent as distinct from Canaanite, and never membership of the covenant.
  4. Traditional Jewish Chronology Seder Olam's 52-year Persian period is a second-century reading of Daniel, held in good faith. Tablets, inscriptions, papyri and 38 observed eclipses support 207 years, and Alexander Hool's defence, the fullest modern one, fails on documents he cites himself. No source shows that the count was built to avoid Jesus.

Several related articles stand under History.  The proof-texts that Why Judaism Rejects Jesus leaves to others are taken up in Isaiah 53, Messianic Prophecy:  An Overview, Messianic Birth Texts, Second Temple Messianic Expectations and Daniel 9 and the Seventy Weeks.  The world in which Judaism and Christianity grew up and then parted is the subject of Intertestamental Judaism and The Jewish Revolts and the Parting of the Ways, and the place of Israel in Christian hope of Eschatology and Israel.  Of these, only Isaiah 53 and Daniel 9 are written so far.

What Judaism is

Judaism and Christianity share a Bible.  The Jewish Bible, the Tanakh, takes its name from its three parts:  the Torah, or five books of Moses;  the Prophets;  and the Writings.  It holds the same books as the Protestant Old Testament in a different order, and the Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments add several more.  Jesus was a Jew, and so were all his first followers.  He walked in the Temple at "the feast of the dedication", Hanukkah, a festival the Torah does not command,4 and he told his hearers, "The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat: All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works".4  Acts reports that on Paul's last visit to Jerusalem there were "many thousands of Jews there are which believe; and they are all zealous of the law" (Acts 21:20).

This section treats Judaism with respect.  It is the faith in which Jesus and the apostles lived and worshipped, and the church received its Old Testament from it.  The tests used here are the ones this site applies to Christianity:  when a claim is first recorded, compared with the events it describes;  whether a tradition's own record shows disputes and later additions;  whether a verse is read in its own setting;  and whether a source good enough to convict is also good enough to acquit.  Each article states the Jewish position first, from its own texts and its best defenders, and each then turns its test on Christian claims.  None of the four tests Jewish doctrine as doctrine.  That God is one, or that he chose Israel, is not something a historian can check.

How rabbinic Judaism formed.  In the time of Jesus, Judaism had several parties.  Josephus wrote that the Pharisees "have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the laws of Moses", and that the Sadducees held binding only the observances that "are in the written word".5  The sect of the Dead Sea Scrolls claimed a hidden revelation of its own.  In AD 70 the Romans destroyed the Temple, and with it the sacrifices and the priestly base of the Sadducees.  Shaye Cohen of Harvard sums up what followed:  "The Pharisees disappeared too, but they transformed themselves into rabbis."2  Most of the sages named in the Mishnah taught at Yavneh, about AD 80 to 120, or at Usha, about 140 to 180.2  Prayer took the place of sacrifice, on the strength of Hosea 14:3:  "So will we render for bullocks the offering of our lips."6  The rabbis' teaching was written down in the Mishnah, "completed around the year 200 CE", then in the Jerusalem Talmud, "completed around 360-400", and the Babylonian Talmud, "completed around the year 500 (but still being edited two or three centuries later)".2  Rabbinic Judaism holds that this body of law is the Oral Torah, given to Moses at Sinai beside the written one.  Its great medieval code is the Mishneh Torah of Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), which still frames the standard Jewish definition of the Messiah.7  A minority, the Karaites, have rejected the Oral Torah since the eighth century.

The movements today.  The modern branches differ most in how much weight they give rabbinic law, halakha, and in what they believe about God.  In Pew Research Center's survey of American Jews in 2020, 37% identified with Reform Judaism, 17% with Conservative and 9% with Orthodox, and 32% with no branch at all;  4% chose smaller branches such as Reconstructionist or Humanist Judaism.8  Of the Orthodox, 83% called observing halakha essential to being Jewish, against 15% of American Jews as a whole.8  And 93% of the Orthodox said they believe in the God of the Bible, against 37% of Conservative Jews, 18% of Reform Jews and 12% of those with no denomination.8  The young lean Orthodox:  17% of Jewish adults under thirty, against 7% of those older.8  Israeli Jews describe themselves by four Hebrew words instead:  Haredi, usually translated "ultra-Orthodox", 9%;  Dati, "religious", 13%;  Masorti, "traditional", 29%;  and Hiloni, "secular", 49%.  The first two are generally counted as Orthodox.99

How many Jews there are.  Pew counted 14.8 million Jews in 2020, about 0.2% of the world's people, and fewer than the 16.6 million alive in 1939, before the Holocaust.10  Israel and the United States are the only countries with millions of Jewish residents, about 6.8 million and 5.7 million, and together they hold 85% of the world's Jews.10  The count depends on who is counted.  Israel's figure follows Jewish law, which counts the children of Jewish mothers and recognised converts;  elsewhere Pew counts people who give Judaism as their religion.  On a broader definition, which adds people who are Jewish by family or culture but not by religion, the United States alone had 7.5 million.10  Who counts as a Jew is a question of law and identity, and the ancestry article treats genetics as a separate question.

Part 1: Why does Judaism reject Jesus?

The question.  Maimonides gave the classic Jewish test in the twelfth century.  A king of David's line who "builds the Temple in its place, and gathers the dispersed of Israel, he is definitely the Mashiach";  but "If he did not succeed to this degree or was killed, he surely is not the redeemer promised by the Torah."7  David Berger and Michael Wyschogrod, writing for Jews drawn to Messianic Jewish groups, reduced it to one question:  "Has the Messianic age come?"1  Behind this job list stand a theological objection, that God is one and is not a man, and two thousand years of argument over single verses and over the church's treatment of the Jews.  The article states the Jewish case from Maimonides, Nachmanides at the Disputation of Barcelona in 1263, the Karaite Isaac of Troki, and the modern writers Aryeh Kaplan, Gerald Sigal, Tovia Singer, Berger and Wyschogrod.  It takes the Christian reply from Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho, about AD 155, to the Messianic Jewish scholar Michael Brown.

The verdict.  Judaism's case is strong where it is narrow and weak where it is broad.  The job list is the strongest argument in the debate, and the Christian answer, that the Messiah comes twice, postpones it rather than defeats it.  That answer is ancient and has real footholds:  Isaiah 53, Zechariah 12:10, Daniel 9:26, and the Talmud's own slain Messiah, "Messiah ben Yosef who was killed".11  But no prophet says the Messiah will come twice, and a test that can be passed only in the future has not yet been passed.  The theological objections come down to prior commitments:  the Hebrew Bible forgives the repentant without blood, yet the Talmud teaches that "the death of the righteous atones",12 and the Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin argues, against other specialists, that the ideas of Trinity and incarnation, "or certainly the germs of those ideas, were already present among Jewish believers well before Jesus came on the scene".13  The Talmud's passages about Jesus are late Babylonian polemic, in Peter Schäfer's words "a daring and powerful counter-Gospel to the New Testament", not independent history.14

The strongest points each way.  For Judaism, the plain sense of the prophets:  the Temple was not rebuilt, the exiles were not gathered, and the world did not learn war no more.  On Jeremiah's new covenant, too, the Jewish reading is stronger, since the covenant is made with Israel and Judah and the claim that the church replaced Israel contradicts it.  For Christianity, the suffering and slain figures in the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud, and Brown's argument from timing, that Haggai 2:9, Malachi 3:1 and Daniel 9:26 required a divine visitation to the Second Temple:  "If it did, then the Messiah must have come before the Temple was destroyed in 70 c.e.; if not, God's Word has failed."15  The article judges that argument real but no stronger than its weakest reading.  Brown's own objection to the job list is also fair as far as it goes:  "But who says your description is right? That is the crux of the problem."15

So the question reduces to one event.  If Jesus rose from the dead, the job list is unfinished, not failed, and the Christian reading of the suffering texts is vindicated.  If he did not, Maimonides' rule applies to him as to every other claimant.  The prophecies cannot decide between these, and the article does not pretend that they can.  → Why Judaism Rejects Jesus

Part 2: Is the Oral Torah from Sinai?

The question.  The Mishnah's tractate Avot opens with a chain of custody:  "Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly."16  Rabbinic Judaism teaches that God gave Moses two Torahs, one written and one spoken, and that the spoken one reached writing in the Mishnah and the Talmuds.  The claim comes in three strengths, and Jewish tradition itself holds all three.  Moshe Halbertal of the Hebrew University calls them the retrieval, cumulative and constitutive views.  On the first, "Moses received the entire Law, both written and oral";  on the second, Maimonides' view, the sages added "novel interpretations of the Torah of their own invention alongside the received tradition from Moses";  on the third, the sages' reasoning does not retrieve the law but actually constitutes it.17  The strongest form appears in the Jerusalem Talmud:  "Even what a competent student will discover before his teacher was said to Moses on Sinai."16  This is Judaism's counterpart of the hadith question in Islam:  a body of law that claims to reach back, by a chain of teachers, to the founding prophet.

The verdict.  The existence of ancient Jewish legal traditions is well supported, and some are older than 150 BC.  The claim that they came from Sinai is not.  Every witness before AD 70 calls them ancestral:  Josephus says the Pharisees received them "by succession from their fathers",5 and Shaye Cohen finds the phrase "Oral Torah" and the idea itself in no text of the Second Temple period.2  The Mishnah reads like the debates of a school.  By a count made for the article, nearly half of its 4,050 legal paragraphs record a named disagreement, and more than a quarter do even on the strictest rule,18 and it says that the laws of the Sabbath, among others, "are as mountains hanging by a hair, for they have scant scriptural basis but many halakhot".16  The sweeping form of the claim first appears among the students of the Mishnah's editor, after the Mishnah was written.19  Maimonides' middle version fails a test it sets itself.  His first example of an explanation from Moses that no sage ever disputed is "an eye for an eye" meaning money,16 but Josephus read the law as a real penalty that the injured man might take in money instead,5 and Rabbi Eliezer in the Talmud said it meant "an actual" eye.16  Zvi Lampel, an Orthodox defender of the tradition, calls the claim that Sinaitic laws were never forgotten or disputed "simply untrue."20

The strongest points for the claim.  The written Torah cannot be kept as written.  It forbids work on the Sabbath without defining work, and some unwritten practice had to exist from the start.  A Dead Sea Scroll, 4QMMT, shows that rulings later found in the Mishnah were already in dispute in the second century BC.  Even the Karaites, who reject the Oral Torah, ended with traditions of their own that their scholar Elijah Bashyatchi called "the burden of inheritance".21  And the weakest version, that God gave Israel's judges authority to interpret and decide, is close to the Bible's own picture of priests and judges and cannot be refuted by history.  It is a claim of faith, and the article leaves it there.  → Is the Oral Torah from Sinai?

Part 3: Are today's Jews descended from ancient Israel?

The question.  Jews have always described themselves as the children of Jacob, scattered among the nations.  Two modern claims deny it for the largest group, the Ashkenazim of central and eastern Europe.  Arthur Koestler suggested in 1976, and the geneticist Eran Elhaik argued in 2013, that they descend mainly from the Khazars, a Turkic people whose rulers converted to Judaism in the early Middle Ages.2223  The historian Shlomo Sand argued in 2009 that mass conversion, not descent, made most Jewish communities.24  The creationist geneticist Robert Carter takes a middle line:  "There is no ‘Jewish gene’, although there are certainly genes common to Jews," but "as a Middle Eastern tribal community, they should have Middle Eastern genetic roots, and the evidence tells us they certainly do."25

The verdict.  For most Jewish communities the answer is yes, in the one sense genetics can test.  A genome-wide survey of fourteen diaspora communities found that "Most Jewish samples form a remarkably tight subcluster that overlies Druze and Cypriot samples but not samples from other Levantine populations or paired Diaspora host populations," while Ethiopian and Indian Jews cluster with their neighbours.3  Ashkenazim are roughly half Levantine and half European;  published estimates of the European share run from about 35 to 67 percent, depending on which living populations stand in for the ancestors.2627  About 46 percent of Jewish priests carry one Near Eastern father line, J-P58, and an extended form of it, the "Cohen modal haplotype", is found in 29.8 percent of priests, Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi alike, and in 1.5 percent of other Jews.2828  The Khazar theory fails:  when peoples from the Khazar heartland were added to the comparison, "No particular similarity of Ashkenazi Jews with populations from the Caucasus is evident, particularly with the populations that most closely represent the Khazar region."29  And the growth it was meant to explain, from about 10,000 Jews in Poland-Lithuania in 1495 to 750,000 in 1765, fits ordinary natural increase, "somewhere between 15 to 20 per thousand annually."3030

The limits, and the point in dispute.  No ancient Israelite genome has been read, and the Israelites were genetically much like their Canaanite neighbours.  So every "Levantine" share rests on stand-ins, and the authors of the main ancient-DNA study say that their figure "does not mean that any these present-day groups bear direct ancestry from people who lived in the Middle to Late Bronze Age Levant".31  The Ashkenazi mother lines are disputed:  one team reads the four founding women as Near Eastern, another concludes that "at least 80% of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry is due to the assimilation of mtDNAs indigenous to Europe, most likely through conversion."32  Carter's summary holds in outline, but several of his figures are wrong, and his spoken slogan that there is no specific Jewish DNA misses a real group-level signature.  Genetics never measures membership of the covenant.  The Bible counts converts as Israel:  Ruth the Moabite became David's great-grandmother.  → Are Today's Jews Descended from Ancient Israel?

Part 4: Traditional Jewish chronology

The question.  The Jewish calendar counts years from creation, and its year 5787 began in September 2026.33  The count comes from Seder Olam Rabbah, a chronology of the second century AD that the Talmud credits to Rabbi Yose ben Halafta.34  Mitchell First, an Orthodox scholar who wrote the standard study of the problem, sets out the gap.  In Seder Olam the Persian period "encompassed 52 years and spanned the reigns of three Persian kings";  for historians it "encompassed 207 years (539 to 332 BCE)" with "more than ten Persian kings".35  The difference moves the fall of Solomon's Temple from 587 or 586 BC to about 423 BC.  The total comes from Daniel:  Rabbi Yose counts the seventy weeks as 490 years "from when the First Temple was destroyed until the Second Temple was destroyed, 70 years in its destroyed state and 420 years in its built state."35  First also notes that the count "is viewed by all authorities as implicit in the accepted Jewish count from creation".35

The verdict.  The Persian period lasted about 207 years, and the First Temple fell in 587 or 586 BC.  Babylonian business tablets are dated up to year 36 of Darius I, year 41 of Artaxerxes I and year 46 of Artaxerxes II.363636  Artaxerxes III carved his descent in stone, through six generations of kings from Darius I to himself.37  Babylonian scribes recorded 38 lunar eclipses under the Persian kings.  At the conventional dates all 38 fall on a real eclipse visible from Babylon, and moved 165 years later, none does.38  On the other side stands no record at all.  First:  "There is no evidence that any type of system of reckoning was used by the Jews during the Persian period that would have enabled an accurate record of the length of the Persian period to have been kept and passed down."35

The strongest defence.  Alexander Hool's The Challenge of Jewish History (2014) is the fullest defence of the short count, and the article answers it from his own text, argument by argument.  Hool grants the documents:  the astronomical texts "match precisely with Ptolemy's chronology."39  He holds instead that the records were altered after 160 BC, and he moves the later Persian kings 171 years, to stand beside the Greek kings.  His best argument is real and his arithmetic is right:  15 of 19 double-dated papyri from the Jewish garrison at Elephantine in Egypt fit his dates to the day, against 9 of 19 on the conventional dates.  But about one shift in sixteen does as well by chance, the fit needs a 43-day jump in the Egyptian calendar that the Canopus Decree of 238 BC excludes, and a papyrus he cites himself is addressed "To our lord Bigvai, governor of Judaea" in the seventeenth year of Darius, which on his dates is 236 BC, a century into Greek rule.3840  Four of his points are narrowed but still open, and the article says what would settle each.

What it does not show.  No source shows that the rabbis shortened the count to move Daniel 9 away from Jesus.  Christians have made the same kind of cut.  Martin Anstey in 1913 and Philip Mauro in 1923 removed about 80 years from the Persian period so that Daniel's weeks would end at the crucifixion, and Mauro held that "there is no chronology in existence of the period from Cyrus to Christ except in the Bible".41  The Bible itself gives no total for the Persian period, so nothing in Scripture is lost by the conventional dates.  Rabbi Shimon Schwab, who proposed in 1962 that the sages had hidden the missing years on purpose, withdrew the proposal in 1991:  "I would rather leave a good question open than risk giving a wrong answer."42  → Traditional Jewish Chronology

Part 5: What the four findings add up to

Article Claim tested Verdict Strongest point for the claim The same test on Christian claims
Why Judaism Rejects Jesus Jesus is not the Messiah, because he did not do the Messiah's work The strongest argument in the debate; the question reduces to the resurrection The plain sense of the prophets, and Maimonides' rule Isaiah 7:14, Hosea 11:1, Jeremiah 31:15 and "Nazarene" are not predictions in their own settings, and a "Talmud" quotation in apologetics books cannot be found
Is the Oral Torah from Sinai? The Mishnah's detailed law was given to Moses at Sinai Not supported; only the untestable weak version survives The written Torah cannot be kept without tradition Catholic and Orthodox unwritten tradition fails the same test; Protestants rely on the church's reception for their list of books
Are Today's Jews Descended from Ancient Israel? Ashkenazi Jews descend from Khazars or converts, not from Israel Fails; most communities carry large Levantine ancestry Ashkenazim are about half European, and most of their mother lines may be European A creationist geneticist's figures needed correcting; the Bible itself counts converts as Israel
Traditional Jewish Chronology The Persian period lasted 52 years 207 years; the Temple fell in 587 or 586 BC Hool's fit of 15 of 19 Elephantine papyri Anstey and Mauro cut the Persian period to fit Daniel 9 by the same method

On the Jewish side, the claims that fail are claims about origins.  The Sinai origin of the Mishnah's detail and the 52-year Persian period were both set down in the generations that produced the Mishnah and the Talmuds, more than a century after the Temple fell, and neither cites a record from the period it describes.  What holds is older and plainer:  that the Jewish people descend in large part from the ancient Levant, that an inherited way of keeping the law goes back at least to the second century BC, and that a Messiah should be judged by whether the messianic age has come.  Much of the work behind these verdicts was done by Jewish scholars and defenders of the tradition themselves:  Shaye Cohen on the Pharisees, Peter Schäfer on the Talmud's Jesus, David Halivni on the growth of the Sinai claim, Zvi Lampel on forgotten laws, Mitchell First and Rabbi Schwab on the chronology, and the geneticists, many of them Israeli, who tested the Khazar theory.

On the Christian side, the same tests remove a set of popular arguments.  The series' rule is that a source good enough to convict is good enough to acquit, and the four articles applied it:

  1. Proof-texts read outside their settings. The Catholic scholar Raymond Brown: "In summary, the MT of Isa 7:14 does not refer to a virginal conception in the distant future."43 The evangelical Craig Blomberg: "Hosea 11:1 is a reference to the exodus, pure and simple."44 "Pierced" in Psalm 22:16 stands in no manuscript, and Josh McDowell's "Rabbi Rachmon" quotation, "Woe unto us, for the scepter has departed from Judah", is in no rabbinic text yet found.45 Christians should drop them.
  2. Replacement of Israel. Jeremiah's new covenant is made "with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah", and Paul wrote of Israel that "the gifts and calling of God are without repentance" (Romans 11:29). The claim that the church replaced Israel contradicts both.
  3. Unwritten apostolic tradition. The Council of Trent taught that saving truth is "contained in the written books, and the unwritten traditions which, received by the Apostles from the mouth of Christ himself, or from the Apostles themselves, the Holy Ghost dictating, have come down even unto us, transmitted as it were from hand to hand".46 That claim has the structure of the Oral Torah and fails the same test, though over two or three centuries instead of fifteen.
  4. A chronology cut to fit a prophecy. Anstey and Mauro did to the Persian period, for Daniel 9, what Seder Olam did.
  5. The church's record. Its persecution of the Jews is real, Christian writers concede it, and it refutes Justin's boast that Christians "have each through the whole earth changed our warlike weapons,--our swords into ploughshares".47
  6. Creationist genetics. Robert Carter's account of Jewish ancestry is right in outline, but several of his figures are wrong, and the ancestry article corrects them one by one.

What survives on the Christian side is narrower.  The two-comings answer has real footholds, and a slain messiah and atonement through a righteous death are not foreign to Judaism.  Counter-missionary writers are wrong that Christians invented the "virgin" of Isaiah 7:14, since the Jewish translators of the Septuagint already wrote parthenos, and wrong that Hebrews altered Jeremiah, since it quotes the same Greek.  The Protestant dependence on tradition concerns which documents count, and the Gospels and Paul's letters were written within one lifetime of the events, where the Oral Torah's content is first written down about fifteen centuries after Sinai.  None of this proves the Christian claim.  It leaves the debate where Why Judaism Rejects Jesus leaves it, on the resurrection.

Where two of the articles meet:  Daniel 9.  Michael Brown argues that Daniel 9:26, with Haggai and Malachi, required the Messiah to come before AD 70.  Why Judaism Rejects Jesus answers in part with the rabbinic reading of Daniel's seventy weeks as the 490 years between the two destructions, which counter-missionaries still use:  Bentzion Kravitz of Jews for Judaism reads them as "490 years that span from the destruction of the First Temple to the Destruction of the second Temple".48  Traditional Jewish Chronology shows that this reading fails.  From 587 or 586 BC to AD 70 is about 655 years, not 490.  The difference, about 165 years, is the whole gap between Seder Olam and the documented dates, and most of it lies in the Persian period.  Kravitz grants "a discrepancy in chronology between the Jewish and secular Gregorian calendars of 166 years" and answers that "Jewish record keeping is more reliable".48  So that Jewish answer to Brown should be dropped.  It does not follow that Daniel 9 points to Jesus.  Brown concedes that "scholars disagree as to when this chapter was actually composed",15 the critical reading makes the anointed one the high priest Onias III, murdered in 171 BC, and the arithmetic of the weeks is argued in Daniel 9 and the Seventy Weeks and When Was the Book of Daniel Written?.  Brown's argument loses one reply, and remains, as the Jesus article says, no stronger than its weakest reading.

Objections and responses

  1. "A Christian site testing Judaism is a missionary exercise, and the history of such exercises is ugly." The history is ugly, and Why Judaism Rejects Jesus says so: the persecution record is real, and Christians should confess it rather than explain it away. But the tests here are not aimed at Jews. Each article turns its test on Christian claims as well, and Part 5 lists what that costs Christian apologetics. One of the four articles defends the Jewish people's own account of their descent against the Khazar theory, whose genetic form, the historian Shaul Stampfer notes, "has become rather popular in some anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist circles, but this proves nothing about its truth."49 Motives settle nothing either way.
  2. "Judaism is a way of life, not a set of propositions. Testing it misses the point." Much of Judaism is practice, and practice is not tested here. The series tests only claims that Jewish authorities make in a form that can be checked: Maimonides' test for a Messiah, the chain from Sinai in Avot with Maimonides' statement that the explanations Moses received were never disputed, Seder Olam's 52 years, and the people's descent from Jacob. Whether God is one, or chose Israel, is left alone.
  3. "The scholars cited are secular critics hostile to the tradition." Most of the verdicts rest on Jewish scholars, and several of the most damaging admissions come from defenders of the tradition. Zvi Lampel, an Orthodox writer, calls the claim that Sinaitic laws were never forgotten or disputed "simply untrue."20 Rabbi Schwab withdrew his own defence of the short count. Alexander Hool grants that the astronomical texts "match precisely with Ptolemy's chronology."39 David Halivni, who affirms a revealed oral law, traces the sweeping Sinai claim to the generation after the Mishnah.19
  4. "If the Oral Torah fails, Christianity fails too, since it also rests on tradition." Part of the Christian claim to tradition fails with it. A Catholic or Orthodox Christian who accepts customs as apostolic on the church's word cannot consistently reject the Oral Torah because its Sinai origin is first claimed centuries later. Protestants reject unwritten tradition but rely on the early church for their list of books, and the first list of exactly the twenty-seven New Testament books comes from AD 367.50 The comparison fails for the New Testament's content, which was written within a lifetime of the events and can be tested by ordinary historical methods.
  5. "If the Gospel writers misused Isaiah 7:14 and Hosea 11:1, the argument from prophecy is finished." The argument from prediction loses those verses, and Christians should say so. Matthew's use of them is typology, a pattern repeated, which Blomberg defends as "double fulfillment";44 it is not the modern apologist's argument from prediction. Isaiah 53 remains real but inconclusive evidence. The series leaves the Christian case resting on the resurrection, not on a list of fulfilled predictions.
  6. "The rabbis shortened the chronology to hide Daniel's pointer to Jesus." No source shows it. The earliest form of the charge found is from the tenth century, and it ran both ways. Mitchell First, answering a Jewish version of the idea, found "no evidence in SO to suggest that preventing messianic calculations was a concern of this work."35 The short count is a mistaken but honest reading of Daniel 9 and 11, and two Christian chronologists later made the same move in the other direction.
  7. "Genetics proves that today's Jews are Israel, so the rest follows." Genetics measures ancestry from the ancient Levant. It cannot tell an Israelite ancestor from a Canaanite one, and it never measures membership of the covenant. Jewish law admits converts, and in 1973 Israel's Sephardi Chief Rabbi, Ovadiah Yosef, "publicly declared the Beta Israel to be Jews according to halacha",51 though they are mostly Ethiopian by ancestry. The ancestry article answers a question of history, not of politics or theology.
  8. "A young-earth site that rejects a traditional chronology is inconsistent." The Persian-period question lies inside written history, where dated tablets, papyri and observed eclipses decide it, and the Bible states no total for the period, so the short count is a reader's sum, not a verse. The young-earth case rests instead on the numbers Genesis 5 and 11 do state, and it has to meet the evidence on its own terms. It is argued in The Genesis Genealogies and Gaps and the site's dating articles, not here.

Issues and unanswered questions

  1. What the series does not cover. Five further Jewish topics were proposed and not yet chosen: Jesus in the Talmud and Toledot Yeshu, Atonement Without a Temple, The Messiah After Jesus, Two Powers in Heaven, and Christian Antisemitism. The series also does not test the popular Jewish argument from a national revelation at Sinai witnessed by the whole people, which the Aish article lists among its four reasons,52 nor Kabbalah, Messianic Judaism or Zionism.
  2. Key sources were not obtained. Volumes 2 to 5 of Michael Brown's Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, which hold his fullest answers on the Shema, Isaiah 7:14 and Jeremiah 31. Chaim Milikowsky's critical edition of Seder Olam and his study of how its 52 years were reached, and Chaim Heifetz's Hebrew article. Shmuel Safrai's chapter "Oral Tora" in the first part of The Literature of the Sages. The main text of Behar's 2010 paper, and the studies that would settle the Samaritan priestly line.
  3. No ancient Israelite genome exists. Every "Levantine" share rests on Canaanite or modern stand-ins, and the dispute over the Ashkenazi mother lines waits on ancient genomes from Roman-era Italy and the Levant. Nobody has simulated how small a Khazar share could hide below detection.
  4. Hool's open points. Four of his observations are narrowed, not closed: the 34 years that end at year 36 of Darius I, the unidentified "Nidin-Bel" of the Uruk King List, the leap years of Darius I, and one receipt dated three months into Xerxes' reign. Nobody on this project has seen a legible photograph of the Uruk tablet, and the chronology article's latest revision on these points has not yet had an independent check.
  5. Daniel 9 is treated in two articles that do not cross-refer on one point. Why Judaism Rejects Jesus offers the rabbinic destruction-to-destruction reading as a Jewish answer to Brown without noting that Traditional Jewish Chronology finds it fails. Part 5 above settles the point, and the Jesus article's Part 2 should say so in a sentence.
  6. Two articles could be split. The Talmud section of Why Judaism Rejects Jesus could become the not-yet-chosen article on Jesus in the Talmud, and Part 6 of Traditional Jewish Chronology, which answers all 33 of Hool's arguments about the Persian period, is longer than the rest of that article and would stand as its own child.

Verdict

Judaism's case against Jesus is strong where it is narrow.  The prophets describe a Messiah who restores Israel and brings peace, and Jesus did not do that in his lifetime.  The Christian answer, a second coming, is ancient, coherent and rooted in texts that show a suffering or slain figure, but a test that can be passed only in the future has not been passed yet.  The theological objections and the war over single verses mostly cancel out, and the question comes down to whether Jesus rose from the dead.

Rabbinic Judaism's claims about its own origins fare worse.  An inherited way of keeping the law is ancient, and no one can keep the Torah without one.  But the claim that the Mishnah's detail came from Moses at Sinai first appears around AD 200, against a Mishnah in which nearly half the legal paragraphs record a named disagreement and several laws are credited to later sages as their own enactments.  The 52-year Persian period is a second-century reading of Daniel, and dated documents and 38 eclipses put the fall of the First Temple in 587 or 586 BC.  Both were held in good faith, and Jewish scholars have done much of the work of correcting them.

The Jewish people's account of their descent holds.  Most Jewish communities share a large ancestry from the ancient Levant, more with one another than with their neighbours, and the Khazar theory fails.  The Ashkenazim are about half European, and the Bible's own picture, a people descended from Jacob that took in Rahab, Ruth and many others, fits the data well.

The same tests cost Christians a good deal:  favourite proof-texts read outside their settings, a quotation from the Talmud that no one can find, the claim that the church replaced Israel, unwritten apostolic tradition, a chronology cut to fit Daniel 9, and a long record of persecution.  What remains is narrower and should be stated no more strongly than the evidence allows.  Judaism and Christianity share a Bible and a God, and they differ on one event.  These articles show what that event's evidence has to meet, and the evidence itself is to be weighed in The Historical Case for the Resurrection, not yet written.

  1. Isaiah 53, Psalm 22 and Daniel 9 and the Seventy Weeks, the most disputed proof-texts.
  2. Messianic Prophecy: An Overview, Messianic Birth Texts and Second Temple Messianic Expectations, not yet written.
  3. When Was the Book of Daniel Written? and Exile, Babylon, and Persia, the history beneath the chronology.
  4. Intertestamental Judaism and The Jewish Revolts and the Parting of the Ways, not yet written, on how Judaism and Christianity grew up and parted.
  5. Eschatology and Israel, not yet written, on Israel in Christian hope.
  6. Which Hadith Count as Canon, and How Was That Decided?, the same test of an oral tradition applied to Islam.
  7. The Historical Case for the Resurrection, not yet written, where the question these articles reduce to is weighed.

Sources

  1. 1.

    Berger, David, and Michael Wyschogrod.  Jews and "Jewish Christianity".  Ktav.  1978.  A short book by an Orthodox historian of Jewish–Christian debate and a Jewish philosopher, written at the request of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York for Jews drawn to Messianic Jewish groups.  It argues from the Hebrew text of each proof-text and from the biblical picture of the messianic age.

    1. 1a.

      Page 19:  “The central criterion for evaluating a Messiah must therefore be a single question: Has the Messianic age come?” ↩ ↩

  2. 2.

    Cohen, Shaye J. D.  From the Maccabees to the Mishnah.  Westminster John Knox Press.  3rd edition.  2014.  The standard textbook on Judaism from the Maccabean revolt to the Mishnah, by a Harvard professor of Hebrew literature.  Cohen treats the Pharisees' ancestral traditions as real and early, and the rabbinic doctrine of a second Torah from Sinai as a later rabbinic development.

    1. 2a.

      Page 145:  “The position of neither the Sadducees nor the Pharisees should be confused with the later rabbinic doctrine of “the Oral Torah,” a phrase and a concept that do not appear in any text of the Second Temple period.” ↩ ↩

    2. 2b.

      Page 224:  “The Pharisees disappeared too, but they transformed themselves into rabbis.” ↩

    3. 2c.

      Page 212:  “the bulk of the sages named in the Mishnah belong to either the generation of Yavneh (ca. 80-120 CE) or the generation of Usha (ca. 140-180 CE). Relatively little material is ascribed to named figures who lived before the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70.” ↩

    4. 2d.

      Pages 5–6:  “The earliest of these works, completed around the year 200 CE, was the Mishnah.”  “completed around 360-400, and the Talmud of Babylonia (the Babylonian Talmud, or Bavli), completed around the year 500 (but still being edited two or three centuries later).” ↩

  3. 3.

    Behar, Doron M. et al.  “The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people.”  Nature 466:238–242.  Jun 9, 2010.  A genome-wide comparison of 14 Jewish diaspora communities with 69 non-Jewish populations of the Old World, using SNP arrays, principal components and clustering.  It is the widest single survey of Jewish communities, and the source of the finding that most cluster with Levantines while Ethiopian and Indian Jews cluster with their neighbours.

    1. 3a.

      Page 238, section Abstract:  “Most Jewish samples form a remarkably tight subcluster that overlies Druze and Cypriot samples but not samples from other Levantine populations or paired Diaspora host populations. In contrast, Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) and Indian Jews (Bene Israel and Cochini) cluster with neighbouring autochthonous populations in Ethiopia and western India, respectively, despite a clear paternal link between the Bene Israel and the Levant. These results cast light on the variegated genetic architecture of the Middle East, and trace the origins of most Jewish Diaspora communities to the Levant.” ↩ ↩

  4. 4.

    The King James Version of the Bible.  Project Gutenberg.  2024.  The New Testament is quoted in the King James Version.

    1. 4a.

      Section John 10:22–23:  “And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter.”  “And Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon’s porch.”  1 Maccabees 4:59 (4:57 in Brenton's numbering) records that Judas and his brothers ordained that "the days of the dedication of the altar should be kept in their season from year to year by the space of eight days".16. ↩

    2. 4b.

      Section Matthew 23:2–3:  “The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat: All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works”. ↩

  5. 5.

    Josephus, Flavius.  Antiquities of the Jews.  Translated by William Whiston.  c. 94 (edition of 1737).  Josephus's history of the Jews from creation to AD 66, written in Greek in Rome by a priest who had commanded Jewish forces in Galilee and then went over to Rome.  It is the main non-rabbinic source for the Pharisees and Sadducees.  Cited by Whiston's book, chapter and section, with the standard Niese section numbers.  Mirror:  Penelope.uchicago.edu

    1. 5a.

      Section Antiquities 13.10.6 (Niese 13.297):  “the Pharisees have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the laws of Moses”.  “those observances”.  “are in the written word”.  The Greek of the key phrase, ἐκ πατέρων διαδοχῆς, means "from a succession of fathers". ↩ ↩

    2. 5b.

      Section Antiquities 4.8.35 (Niese 4.280):  “He that maimeth any one, let him undergo the like himself, and be deprived of the same member of which he hath deprived the other, unless he that is maimed will accept of money instead of it”.  The Greek begins Πηρώσας πασχέτω τὰ ὅμοια, "Let the one who maims suffer the like". ↩

  6. 6.

    Sigal, Gerald.  The Jew and the Christian Missionary: A Jewish Response to Missionary Christianity.  Ktav.  1981.  A verse-by-verse Jewish handbook against Christian missionary arguments, about three hundred pages, covering the proof-texts of the Hebrew Bible and then the New Testament.  It reads each passage in its Hebrew context and in rabbinic tradition.

    1. 6a.

      Page 13:  “The idea that prayer takes the place of animal sacrifices is clearly expressed in Hosea 14:3: 'So will we render for bullocks the offering of our lips.'” ↩

  7. 7.

    Maimonides, Moses.  “Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings and Their Wars, chapters 11–12.”  Sefaria.  Translated by Eliyahu Touger.  c. 1180 (edition of 2026).  Maimonides' code of Jewish law, the work that still frames the standard Jewish definition of the Messiah.  Chapter 11 gives the test for a messianic claimant and, in the uncensored text, applies it to Jesus.  The Hebrew on Sefaria is the Torat Emet text with the passage restored;  the English is Touger's.  Sefaria splits chapter 11 into nine segments, and the Jesus passage that most writers cite as 11:4 is Sefaria's segments 6 to 8. ↩

    1. 7a.

      Section Kings and Wars 11:4, Sefaria segments 4 and 5:  “If he succeeds in the above, builds the Temple in its place, and gathers the dispersed of Israel, he is definitely the Mashiach.”  “If he did not succeed to this degree or was killed, he surely is not the redeemer promised by the Torah.” ↩

  8. 8.

    Pew Research Center.  Jewish Americans in 2020, chapter 2:  Jewish identity and belief.  May 11, 2021.  The belief and identity chapter of Pew's national survey of American Jews.  It reports which branch of Judaism American Jews identify with, what they say is essential to being Jewish, and what they believe about God, broken down by branch.

    1. 8a.

      Section Identification with branches of American Judaism:  “More than half of U.S. Jews identify with the Reform (37%) or Conservative (17%) movements, while about one-in-ten (9%) identify with Orthodox Judaism. One-third of Jews (32%) do not identify with any particular Jewish denomination, and 4% identify with smaller branches – such as Reconstructionist or Humanist Judaism – or say they are connected with multiple streams of U.S. Judaism.”  “Jewish adults ages 18 to 29 are particularly likely to identify as Orthodox (17%), compared with those who are 30 and older, of whom 7% are Orthodox.” ↩ ↩

    2. 8b.

      Section chapter introduction:  “more consider “having a good sense of humor” to be essential to being Jewish than consider following halakha (traditional Jewish law) essential (34% vs. 15%).”  “they are the only subgroup in the survey who overwhelmingly feel that observing halakha is essential to their Jewishness (83%).”  The second sentence is about Orthodox Jews. ↩

    3. 8c.

      Section Three-quarters of Jews believe in higher power of some kind:  “Nine-in-ten Orthodox Jews (93%) say they believe in the God of the Bible, compared with 37% of Conservative Jews, 18% of Reform Jews and 12% of Jews with no denomination.” ↩

  9. 9.

    Pew Research Center.  Israel’s Religiously Divided Society.  Mar 8, 2016.  The overview of a survey of 5,601 Israeli adults, interviewed face to face in Hebrew, Arabic and Russian from October 2014 to May 2015.  It sorts Israeli Jews by the four labels they use of themselves and compares their beliefs, practice and politics.

    1. 9a.

      Section Deep gulfs among Jews:  “Nearly all Israeli Jews identify with one of four categories: Haredi (commonly translated as “ultra-Orthodox”), Dati (“religious”), Masorti (“traditional”) or Hiloni (“secular”).”  “Haredi and Dati Jews (both generally considered Orthodox)”. ↩

    2. 9b.

      Section Self-categorization of Jews in Israel:  “Haredi (9% of Jews, 8% of all Israeli adults)”.  “Dati (13% of Jews, 10% of all Israeli adults)”.  “Masorti (29% of Jews, 23% of all Israeli adults)”.  “Hiloni (49% of Jews, 40% of all Israeli adults)”. ↩

  10. 10.

    Pew Research Center.  How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020.  Jun 9, 2025.  A demographic report that estimates the religious makeup of 201 countries and territories in 2010 and 2020 from more than 2,700 censuses and surveys.  For Jews it uses Israel's population register, which counts by Jewish law, and elsewhere self-identification with Judaism as a religion, drawing many country figures from Sergio DellaPergola's "World Jewish Population" series.  Used here for how many Jews there are and where they live.

    1. 10a.

      Page 10:  “The number of Jews worldwide grew by nearly 1 million, reaching 14.8 million.”  “In percentage terms, Jews were the smallest group in the study, representing about 0.2% of the world’s population.”  Page 85:  “That’s fewer than the estimated 16.6 million Jews who were alive in 1939, prior to the Holocaust.” ↩

    2. 10b.

      Page 88:  “Israel and the United States are the only countries with millions of Jewish residents; 85% of Jews worldwide live in one of these two countries.”  The table on the same page gives Israel 6,780,000 Jews, 77.0% of its population and 45.9% of the world's Jews, and the United States 5,730,000, 1.7% and 38.8%. ↩

    3. 10c.

      Page 84:  “The number of Jews around the world depends largely on one’s definition of Jewishness.”  “there were an estimated 7.5 million Jews of all ages in the U.S. in 2020”.  The 7.5 million counts people who are Jewish by religion or who consider themselves Jewish for reasons of ancestry, culture or family;  the report's own figure counts Jews by religion only. ↩

  11. 11.

    Sefaria.  Babylonian Talmud, William Davidson Edition:  Sanhedrin 97a–99a, Sukkah 52a, Avodah Zarah 9a, Yoma 39b;  with the Jerusalem Talmud, Taanit 4:5, Guggenheimer edition.  2026.  The Talmud's main discussions of the Messiah.  In the Koren Noé English of the Babylonian Talmud, bold type translates the Aramaic and plain type is the translators' explanation;  Heinrich Guggenheimer's English of the Jerusalem Talmud has no such marking.  Cited by folio and Sefaria's segment number.

    1. 11a.

      Section Sukkah 52a:2:  “One said that this eulogy is for Messiah ben Yosef who was killed in the war of Gog from the land of Magog prior to the ultimate redemption with the coming of Messiah ben David.”  Section Sukkah 52a:3:  “And they shall look unto Me because they have thrust him through; and they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for his only son”.  The Aramaic of the first view is "for Messiah ben Yosef who was killed";  the war of Gog and the coming of Messiah ben David are the translators' explanation. ↩

  12. 12.

    Sefaria.  Babylonian Talmud, William Davidson Edition:  Berakhot 28b–29a, Moed Katan 28a, Yoma 85b–86a, Niddah 61b;  with Midrash Rabbah and the Targums.  2026.  Talmud passages on prayer, atonement and the commandments in the age to come.  In the Koren Noé English, bold type translates the Aramaic and plain type is the translators' explanation.

    1. 12a.

      Section Moed Katan 28a:4:  “Just as the red heifer atones for sin, so too, the death of the righteous atones for sin.”  Rabbi Ami's teaching.  The Aramaic for the last clause is "the death of the righteous atones";  "for sin" is the translators'. ↩

  13. 13.

    Boyarin, Daniel.  The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ.  The New Press.  2012.  A short book by a Berkeley professor of Talmudic culture, himself an observant Jew who does not accept Jesus.  It reads Daniel 7, the Similitudes of Enoch and the Gospels of Mark and John to argue that a divine-human Messiah and a suffering Messiah were Jewish ideas before Jesus.  Its thesis is contested by other specialists, and its evidence for a suffering Messiah leans partly on rabbinic texts later than Jesus.

    1. 13a.

      Page 102:  “The ideas of Trinity and incarnation, or certainly the germs of those ideas, were already present among Jewish believers well before Jesus came on the scene to incarnate in himself, as it were, those theological notions and take up his messianic calling.” ↩

  14. 14.

    Schäfer, Peter.  Jesus in the Talmud.  Princeton University Press.  2007.  The standard modern study, by a Princeton historian of ancient Judaism.  It reads every rabbinic passage that has been linked to Jesus, accepts that most of them mean him, and argues that the explicit ones are Babylonian, no earlier than the late third century, and written as deliberate parodies of the Gospels, especially John.  It treats them as evidence of how rabbis answered Christianity, not as evidence about the historical Jesus.

    1. 14a.

      Page 129:  “Taken together, the texts in the Babylonian Talmud, although fragmentary and scattered, become a daring and powerful counter-Gospel to the New Testament in general and to John in particular.” ↩

  15. 15.

    Brown, Michael L.  Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, vol. 1: General and Historical Objections.  Baker Books.  2000.  The first of five volumes in which a Messianic Jewish scholar with a doctorate in Near Eastern languages answers, one by one, the objections Jewish people raise to Jesus.  This volume takes the general objections and the historical ones:  why there is no peace, why most Jews do not believe, and the church's record against the Jews.  It quotes the rabbinic sources it argues from.

    1. 15a.

      Page 78:  “I ask you, did this happen? If it did, then the Messiah must have come before the Temple was destroyed in 70 c.e.; if not, God's Word has failed.”  After Brown's readings of Haggai 2:9 and Malachi 3:1;  Daniel 9 follows on pages 78 to 80. ↩

    2. 15b.

      Page 69:  “But there is actually a serious flaw to the very premise of the objection: The reasoning is circular. It states what it wants to prove.”  Page 70:  “But who says your description is right? That is the crux of the problem.”  “In fact, nowhere in our Scriptures does it explicitly say, 'When the Messiah comes there will be peace on earth.' Rather, it speaks of an era of peace at the end of the age (see Isaiah 2:1-4, without any mention of a Messianic figure there), tying this in with the reign of a descendant of David”. ↩

    3. 15c.

      Page 78:  “While scholars disagree as to when this chapter was actually composed, everyone understands the historical background presupposed by the text.” ↩

  16. 16.

    Sefaria.  Mishnah, Tosefta, Talmud, midrash, Hebrew Bible and medieval texts on the Oral Torah.  2026.  The rabbinic sources of the doctrine, read in Hebrew with English translations:  the Mishnah (edited about AD 200) in Joshua Kulp's Mishnah Yomit translation;  the Babylonian Talmud (completed about AD 500 to 600) in the Koren Noé translation, where bold type translates the Aramaic and plain type is the translators' explanation, so only the bold words are quoted here;  the Jerusalem Talmud (about AD 400) in Heinrich Guggenheimer's translation;  the Sifra and Sifrei (third century) in Shraga Silverstein's and Martin Jaffee's translations;  the Hebrew Bible in the JPS translation;  and Maimonides (twelfth century) in Eliyahu Touger's and Francis Nataf's translations.

    1. 16a.

      Section 1 Maccabees 4:57 in Brenton's Septuagint numbering:  “the days of the dedication of the altar should be kept in their season from year to year by the space of eight days”. ↩

    2. 16b.

      Section Mishnah Avot 1:1:  “Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly.” ↩

    3. 16c.

      Section Jerusalem Talmud Peah 2:4, Sefaria segment 9:  “Even what a competent student will discover before his teacher was said to Moses on Sinai.”  Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, a third-century teacher in the land of Israel. ↩

    4. 16d.

      Section Mishnah Chagigah 1:8:  “[The laws concerning] the dissolution of vows hover in the air and have nothing to rest on. The laws concerning Shabbat, hagigot, and trespassing are as mountains hanging by a hair, for they have scant scriptural basis but many halakhot. [The laws concerning] civil cases and [Temple] worship, purity and impurity, and the forbidden relations have what to rest on, and they that are the essentials of the Torah.” ↩

    5. 16e.

      Section Maimonides, Introduction to the Mishnah, Sefaria 8:13 and chapters 9–14:  “the explanations that were transmitted from the mouth of Moshe have no disagreement about them in any way. As behold, from then until now, we have not found a disagreement occur among the sages at any time, from the days of Moshe and until Rav Ashi, such that one say, "They take out the eye of one who has taken out the eye of his fellow, as it is stated (Deuteronomy 19:21), 'an eye for an eye'"”.  Francis Nataf's translation (2017).  Written about 1168.  The five divisions are set out in chapters 9 to 14 of Sefaria's text. ↩

    6. 16f.

      Section Babylonian Talmud Bava Kamma 84a, Sefaria segments 19–20:  “Rabbi Eliezer says:”.  “An eye for an eye”.  “an actual”.  “Can it”.  “enter your mind”.  Rabba and Rav Ashi then explain that Rabbi Eliezer meant only a different way of assessing the money. ↩

  17. 17.

    Halbertal, Moshe.  People of the Book:  Canon, Meaning, and Authority.  Harvard University Press.  1997.  A study of how Jewish texts became canonical and how their authority was understood, by an Orthodox-trained philosopher of Jewish law at the Hebrew University.  Its second chapter sets out three medieval Jewish accounts of how the Oral Torah relates to Sinai.

    1. 17a.

      Page 54:  “Moses received the entire Law, both written and oral, and at its source it was complete and perfect. All of the Halakhah was then transmitted to us through a continuous chain of scholars.”  Page 59:  “He is the first to claim that the Sages introduced novel interpretations of the Torah of their own invention alongside the received tradition from Moses.”  Page 63:  “According to the constitutive view, interpretation and legal reasoning do not retrieve a given lost body of knowledge, nor do they derive new norms from a fixed body of transmitted tradition; they actually constitute those norms.”  The first passage describes Abraham Ibn Daud's retrieval model, the second Maimonides' cumulative model, the third the constitutive model of Nachmanides' students. ↩

  18. 18.

    The count was made for Is the Oral Torah from Sinai? from the Hebrew text of all 63 tractates of the Mishnah on Sefaria, 4,158 paragraphs, of which 4,050 lie outside Avot, a book of sayings rather than law.  A strict rule counts paragraphs in which two or more named sages give rulings, "the sages" answer a named sage, or the House of Shammai faces the House of Hillel:  1,081 paragraphs, or 26.7 percent.  A broad rule adds paragraphs in which a named sage speaks after an anonymous ruling:  1,877, or 46.3 percent.  A hand check of samples found the broad rule usually right and the strict rule an undercount.  The count is of paragraphs, not of laws. ↩

  19. 19.

    Halivni, David Weiss.  Revelation Restored:  Divine Writ and Critical Responses.  Westview Press.  1998.  A theology of the Torah's text by an Orthodox-ordained Talmudist and Holocaust survivor who taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia.  Halivni affirms a revealed oral law but traces, text by text, when the rabbis began to claim that their whole tradition came from Sinai.

    1. 19a.

      Page 58:  “Most striking, however, is the number of early Palestinian Amoraim (students of R. Judah the Prince, anthologizer of the Mishnah) who declare that the whole Torah, in all of its aspects, was given to Moses at Sinai.”  Page 59:  “Elsewhere, I conjectured that this increasing inclination toward ascribing all oral tradition to Halakha le-Moshe mi-Sinai on the part of the early Palestinian Amoraim was motivated by the desire of the students of R. Judah the Prince to enhance the authority of the Mishnah.” ↩ ↩

  20. 20.

    Lampel, Zvi.  The Dynamics of Dispute:  The Makings of Machlokess in Talmudic Times.  Judaica Press.  1992.  A traditional Orthodox study, written for yeshiva readers, of how the sages of the Mishnah and Talmud came to disagree.  Lampel holds that the sages' conclusions are "intimately connected to G-d’s Will", but argues against the popular view that laws given at Sinai could never be forgotten or disputed.

    1. 20a.

      Page 55:  “However, this distinction is simply untrue. At least one Halacha L’Moshe MiSinai was among the forgotten halachos spoken of above and its form clearly remained a matter of dispute (Temura 16a)”. ↩ ↩

  21. 21.

    Nemoy, Leon.  Karaite Anthology:  Excerpts from the Early Literature.  Yale University Press.  1952.  The standard English collection of Karaite writings from the eighth to the sixteenth century, translated from Arabic and Hebrew by a Yale scholar of Karaism, with an introduction and notes.  It includes Salmon ben Jeroham's verse attack on the Rabbanite oral law and Elijah Bashyatchi's account of Karaite tradition.

    1. 21a.

      Page 248:  “They are not recorded in the Law and have become as second nature with us”.  “Such ordinances are called by scholars “the burden of inheritance” or “tradition”; for example, the slaughtering of animals which must be performed by means of a slaughtering knife and by proper cutting of the prescribed parts of the body; the sanctification of the new month”.  Elijah Bashyatchi, Adderet Eliyahu, written in the late fifteenth century. ↩

  22. 22.

    Koestler, Arthur.  The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage.  Random House.  1976.  A popular history by the novelist and essayist that argued Eastern European Jews descend mainly from the Khazars, a Turkic people whose rulers adopted Judaism.  Written before any genetic test existed, it rests on medieval documents, a demographic argument and physical anthropology.  It is the book that made the Khazar theory widely known.

    1. 22a.

      Page 17:  “the large majority of surviving Jews in the world is of Eastern European — and thus perhaps mainly of Khazar — origin. If so, this would mean that their ancestors came not from the Jordan but from the Volga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus, once believed to be the cradle of the Aryan race; and that genetically they are more closely related to the Hun, Uigur and Magyar tribes than to the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Should this turn out to be the case, then the term ‘anti-Semitism’ would become void of meaning”. ↩

  23. 23.

    Elhaik, Eran.  “The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses.”  Genome Biology and Evolution 5(1):61–74.  2013.  A reanalysis of the Behar 2010 genotype data, 1,287 people from 8 Jewish and 74 non-Jewish populations, by a geneticist then at Johns Hopkins.  With no Khazar remains available, it used living Caucasus peoples as stand-ins for Khazars and Palestinians as stand-ins for Judeans, and concluded in favour of a Khazar origin for Eastern European Jews.  It is the main genetic statement of the Khazar hypothesis.

    1. 23a.

      Page 61, section Abstract:  “Our findings support the Khazarian hypothesis and portray the European Jewish genome as a mosaic of Near Eastern-Caucasus, European, and Semitic ancestries”.  Page 72:  “The most parsimonious explanation for our findings is that Eastern European Jews are of Judeo–Khazarian ancestry forged over many centuries in the Caucasus.” ↩

  24. 24.

    Sand, Shlomo.  The Invention of the Jewish People.  Verso.  Translated by Yael Lotan.  2009.  A history by a Tel Aviv University historian arguing that the Jews are not a people of common descent but a religious community enlarged by mass conversion, in Khazaria among other places.  It was a bestseller in Hebrew and English, and it is the main recent statement of the Khazar theory by a professional historian. ↩

  25. 25.

    Carter, Robert W.  “The genetic history of the Israelite nation.”  Journal of Creation 32(1):114–120.  Mar 2018.  A review of the Jewish genetics literature by a creationist geneticist, written for Creation Ministries International's journal and reviewed by Jonathan Sarfati.  It covers Y-chromosome diversity, the Cohen modal haplotype, the Lemba and the Samaritans, Ashkenazi mitochondrial lineages and the Khazar hypothesis.  It is Carter's fullest written statement of the position this article tests.

    1. 25a.

      Section Conclusions:  “There is no ‘Jewish gene’, although there are certainly genes common to Jews. And because of the possibility of genetic drift, we cannot be 100% certain that things like the CMH are actually the Y chromosome of Aaron.”  “However, as a Middle Eastern tribal community, they should have Middle Eastern genetic roots, and the evidence tells us they certainly do.” ↩

  26. 26.

    Bray, Steven M. et al.  “Signatures of founder effects, admixture, and selection in the Ashkenazi Jewish population.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107(37):16222.  2010.  A genome-wide study of 471 Ashkenazim compared with about 3,000 Europeans and with Middle Eastern samples.  It estimated European admixture locus by locus, with Palestinians and Druze standing in for the Middle Eastern ancestor, and found more European ancestry than earlier Y-chromosome studies had.

    1. 26a.

      Section Results and Discussion:  “we calculated the amount of European admixture in the AJ population to be 35 to 55%.” ↩

  27. 27.

    Xue, James et al.  “The time and place of European admixture in Ashkenazi Jewish history.”  PLoS Genetics 13(4):e1006644.  Apr 4, 2017.  A study of 2,540 Ashkenazim that labelled each stretch of their genomes as European or Middle Eastern and then asked which European region and which Middle Eastern region fit best, and when the mixing happened.  It is the most detailed estimate of the size, source and timing of the Ashkenazi European share.

    1. 27a.

      Page 13, section Discussion:  “The estimates for the total European ancestry in AJ range from ≈49% using our previous whole-genome sequencing analysis [9], to ≈53% using the LAI analysis here, and ≈67% using the calibrated Globetrotter analysis.”  The ≈ signs are in the printed paper;  they do not survive text extraction from the PDF. ↩

  28. 28.

    Hammer, Michael F. et al.  “Extended Y chromosome haplotypes resolve multiple and unique lineages of the Jewish priesthood.”  Human Genetics 126:707–717.  2009.  A Y-chromosome study of 215 Jewish priests, 1,575 other Jewish men and 2,099 non-Jewish men from the Near East, Europe, Central Asia and India, typed for 75 lineage markers and 12 repeat markers.  Its last author, Karl Skorecki, led the first study of priests' Y chromosomes in 1997.  It refined that haplotype into an extended version on lineage J-P58 and dated it.

    1. 28a.

      Page 707, section Abstract:  “While Cohanim from diverse backgrounds carry a total of 21 Y chromosome haplogroups, 5 haplogroups account for 79.5% of Cohanim Y chromosomes. The most frequent Cohanim lineage (46.1%) is marked by the recently reported P58 T->C mutation, which is prevalent in the Near East. Based on genotypes at 12 Y-STRs, we identify an extended CMH on the J-P58 background that predominates in both Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi Cohanim and is remarkably absent in non-Jews. The estimated divergence time of this lineage based on 17 STRs is 3,190 ± 1,090 years. Notably, the second most frequent Cohanim lineage (J-M410, 14.4%) contains an extended modal haplotype that is also limited to Ashkenazi and nonAshkenazi Cohanim and is estimated to be 4.2 ± 1.3 ky old.” ↩

    2. 28b.

      Page 713:  “The original CMH is present at moderate frequencies (5–8%) in the other Jewish castes (i.e., Levites and Israelites), among non-Jewish Yemenites (13%) and Jordanians (~7%), and as singletons in a number of other non-Jewish populations”.  “In contrast, the extended CMH and its two related haplotypes are observed only among Cohanim (29.8%) and Israelites (1.5%) (i.e., it is completely absent from the Levites and non-Jews surveyed here).” ↩

  29. 29.

    Behar, Doron M. et al.  “No Evidence from Genome-Wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews.”  Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints.  Aug 30, 2013 (edition of 2013).  A genome-wide test of the Khazar hypothesis by 30 geneticists, using 1,774 people from 106 Jewish and non-Jewish populations, including 13 Caucasus populations and the Chuvash and Tatars of the Volga, the groups living where the Khazar state stood.  It found no special resemblance between Ashkenazim and those groups.  Published in Human Biology 85(6):859–900;  page numbers here are those of the authors' manuscript.

    1. 29a.

      Page 5, section Abstract:  “No particular similarity of Ashkenazi Jews with populations from the Caucasus is evident, particularly with the populations that most closely represent the Khazar region.”  Page 12:  “the one considered to best overlap with the center of the Khazar Khaganate is the Volga region, followed by the North Caucasus region”. ↩

  30. 30.

    Kupovetsky, Mark.  “Population and Migration: Population and Migration before World War I.”  The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe 2:1425–1428.  Yale University Press.  Translated by I. Michael Aronson.  Edited by Gershon David Hundert.  2008.  The standard reference survey of East European Jewish demography before 1914, by a Russian historical demographer, with tables of best-guess population figures from 1495 to 1900 drawn from Weinryb, Stampfer and other specialists.  It covers the Khazar period, the eastward migration and the sources of growth.

    1. 30a.

      Page 1426, table 1:  “Estimate of the Number of East European Jews from the End of the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (in thousands)”.  Within the borders of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth:  10 in 1495, 55 in 1550, 185 in 1648, 163 in 1660, 285 in 1700, 750 in 1765. ↩

    2. 30b.

      “Until the middle of the seventeenth century, immigration was the main cause of Jewish population growth.”  “In the absence of massive migration, the impressive population growth of Jews in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth from the sixteenth to eighteenth century must be attributed to a high rate of natural increase, somewhere between 15 to 20 per thousand annually.”  Online edition. ↩

  31. 31.

    Agranat-Tamir, Lily et al.  “The Genomic History of the Bronze Age Southern Levant.”  Cell 181(5):1146–1157.  May 28, 2020.  An ancient-DNA study of 73 Bronze and Iron Age individuals from five sites in Israel and Jordan, analysed with 20 earlier published genomes.  It finds the Bronze Age "Canaanites" genetically alike across sites, models them as a mix of Neolithic Levantine and Zagros-related ancestry, and models 14 present-day Jewish and Arabic-speaking groups as mixtures of that ancestry with East African and European components.  It is the main ancient reference for Levantine ancestry in this article.

    1. 31a.

      Section Discussion:  “We found that both Arabic-speaking and Jewish populations are compatible with having more than 50% Middle Eastern-related ancestry. This does not mean that any these present-day groups bear direct ancestry from people who lived in the Middle to Late Bronze Age Levant or in Chalcolithic Zagros; rather, it indicates that they have ancestries from populations whose ancient proxy can be related to the Middle East.”  "any these" is as printed. ↩

  32. 32.

    Costa, Marta D. et al.  “A substantial prehistoric European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages.”  Nature Communications 4:2543.  Oct 8, 2013.  A mitochondrial study that placed the Ashkenazi founder lineages on a tree of about 2,500 complete mitochondrial genomes and surveyed some 470,000 shorter sequences from Europe, the Near East and the Caucasus.  It concluded that most Ashkenazi mother lines came from European women who converted.

    1. 32a.

      Page 8:  “Overall, it seems that at least 80% of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry is due to the assimilation of mtDNAs indigenous to Europe, most likely through conversion.” ↩

  33. 33.

    The year number of the Jewish calendar is the Christian-era year of its autumn start plus 3,761.  Mitchell First gives 5,756 as the year current when he wrote in 1995,35 and 1995 plus 3,761 is 5,756.  By the same rule the year that began in the autumn of 2026 is 5787.  Edgar Frank states the conversion in the other direction:  subtract 3,761 for dates between the Jewish New Year and 31 December, and 3,760 for the rest of the year.53 ↩

  34. 34.

    Sefaria.  Babylonian Talmud, William Davidson Edition:  Avodah Zarah 8b–10a, Nazir 32b, Yoma 9a, Megillah 11b–12a, Rosh Hashanah 3b, Arakhin 12b–13a, Yevamot 82b;  with Tosefta Zevachim 13, Rashi on Daniel 9 and Maimonides, Sabbatical Year and Jubilee 10.  2026.  The English is that of the Koren Noé Talmud.  In it, bold type translates the Aramaic and plain type is the translators' explanation, so only the bold words are the Talmud's.  The Talmud was compiled in about the third to sixth centuries AD.  Cited by tractate and folio.

    1. 34a.

      Section Yevamot 82b:  “Rabbi Yoḥanan said:  Who is the tanna who taught Seder Olam?  It is Rabbi Yosei.”  The same words stand at Niddah 46b. ↩

  35. 35.

    First, Mitchell.  Jewish History in Conflict: A Study of the Major Discrepancy Between Rabbinic and Conventional Chronology.  Jason Aronson.  1997.  The standard study of the gap between the rabbinic and the conventional dates for the Persian period, by an Orthodox Jewish scholar, revised from his 1995 master's thesis at Yeshiva University.  It surveys the medieval and modern Jewish responses to the problem and concludes that the rabbinic count is an interpretation of Daniel, not a record.

    1. 35a.

      Page 6:  “SO's chronology of the Persian and Second Temple periods is included in and adopted by the Talmud and is viewed by all authorities as implicit in the accepted Jewish count from creation.”  Note 14 on the same page gives the year current when First wrote as 5,756 from creation. ↩ ↩

    2. 35b.

      Page xix, section Statement of Purpose:  “According to Seder Olam Rabbah (SO), the work that forms the basis for almost all rabbinic chronology, the period from the defeat of the Babylonians by the Medeo-Persians until the beginning of Greek rule encompassed 52 years and spanned the reigns of three Persian kings.  According to the chronology that is universally accepted by historians today (conventional chronology), this period of Persian rule over the land of Israel encompassed 207 years (539 to 332 BCE) and during this period more than ten Persian kings reigned.” ↩

    3. 35c.

      Page 154:  “Rabbi Yose says:  'Seventy weeks of years' (Daniel 9:24) from when the First Temple was destroyed until the Second Temple was destroyed, 70 years in its destroyed state and 420 years in its built state.”  First's English of Seder Olam chapter 28, adapted from Chaim Milikowsky's translation of his critical text. ↩

    4. 35d.

      Page 118:  “There is no evidence that any type of system of reckoning was used by the Jews during the Persian period that would have enabled an accurate record of the length of the Persian period to have been kept and passed down.” ↩

    5. 35e.

      Page 67, note 194:  “there is no evidence in SO to suggest that preventing messianic calculations was a concern of this work.” ↩

  36. 36.

    Parker, Richard A., and Waldo H. Dubberstein.  “Babylonian Chronology 626 B.C.–A.D. 45.”  Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 24.  University of Chicago Press.  1942.  The standard list of the first and last dated cuneiform tablet of every reign, compiled at the Oriental Institute of Chicago, with tables for converting Babylonian dates.  Dates are written month/day/regnal year.

    1. 36a.

      Page 14:  “VII/27?/36 (Nov. 7?, 486), Borsippa (VAS IV 180)”.  The last tablet of Darius I.  The same page concludes:  According to this evidence Darius I died in November, 486. ↩

    2. 36b.

      Page 15:  “IX/12/41 (Dec. 24, 424), Nippur (Clay, BE IX 108)”.  Among the last tablets of Artaxerxes I.  The same page lists one later tablet, XI/17/41 (Feb. 26, 423), and reports Clay's suggestion that its date may be a scribal error. ↩

    3. 36c.

      Page 16:  “VIII/10/46 (Nov. 24, 359), Babylon (VAS VI 186;  the year numeral is damaged slightly but was read as '46' by Arthur Ungnad)”.  The last tablet of Artaxerxes II. ↩

  37. 37.

    Kent, Roland G.  “Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon.”  American Oriental Series 33.  American Oriental Society.  1950.  The standard edition and translation of the Old Persian royal inscriptions, the kings' own words carved at Persepolis, Susa and Behistun.

    1. 37a.

      Page 156, section A3Pa, Persepolis:  “I am the son (of) Artaxerxes the King, (of) Artaxerxes (who was) the son (of) Darius the King, (of) Darius (who was) the son (of) Artaxerxes the King, (of) Artaxerxes (who was) the son (of) Xerxes the King, (of) Xerxes (who was) the son (of) Darius the King, (of) Darius (who was) the son of Hystaspes by name, of Hystaspes (who was) the son (of) Arsames by name, an Achaemenian.”  Artaxerxes III speaking.  Kent records four copies with identical spelling. ↩

  38. 38.

    These are this project's own calculations, set out with their scripts in Parts 4 and 6 of Traditional Jewish Chronology.  The eclipse test takes the 38 Persian-period lunar eclipses that Huber and De Meis list as watched and seen,54 moves each a whole number of years later, and looks for a real eclipse visible from Babylon in NASA's catalogue.55  All 38 match at the conventional dates and none at a shift of 165 years.  A shift of 167 years puts 28 back in an eclipse season, but only 4 when the kind of eclipse and the local time must also match, and no wrong shift from 1 to 250 years scores above 28.  The Elephantine test computes the Babylonian month for each of 19 papyri dated in both the Babylonian and the Egyptian calendar.  With one constant fitted, 15 of 19 fall on the right day at Hool's shift of 171 years and 9 of 19 at the conventional dates, and 884 of 14,101 shifts of whole lunar months, 6.3 percent, do as well as his;  on the twelve papyri whose dates are fully preserved, about one shift in thirty does.  Counted back without a break from AD 139, the Egyptian calendar puts 1 Payni of 238 BC on 19 July, a day after the first dawn rising of Sirius at Memphis, and the Canopus Decree puts that rising on 1 Payni;  a calendar 43 days out would miss it by six weeks. ↩ ↩

  39. 39.

    Hool, Alexander.  The Challenge of Jewish History: The Bible, the Greeks and the Missing 168 Years.  Mosaica Press.  2014.  The publisher's sample of Hool's book, the fullest modern defence of the traditional count.  Hool accepts the Persian kings and their years and argues that the later records were altered to fit a mistaken Greek chronology.  The sample's page numbers are the book's.  Mirror:  Mosaicapress.com

    1. 39a.

      Page 18:  “These astronomical texts clearly indicate a much longer Persian era than indicated by the Bible and traditional Jewish chronology, and match precisely with Ptolemy's chronology.” ↩ ↩

  40. 40.

    Cowley, A.  Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century B.C.  Clarendon Press.  1923.  The standard English edition of the papyri of the Jewish garrison at Elephantine in southern Egypt, letters and contracts dated by the years of the Persian kings.

    1. 40a.

      Page 113, section Papyrus 30, lines 1–2:  “To our lord Bigvai, governor of Judaea, your servants Yedoniah and his colleagues, the priests who are in Yeb the fortress.”  Page 113, line 2:  “give you favour before Darius the king”.  Page 114, lines 29–30:  “Delaiah and Shelemiah the sons of Sanballat governor of Samaria.”  Page 114, line 30:  “On the 20th of Marheshwan the 17th year of Darius the king.” ↩

  41. 41.

    Mauro, Philip.  The Seventy Weeks and the Great Tribulation.  Hamilton Bros.  1923.  A study of Daniel 9 by an American lawyer and Bible teacher that shortens the Persian period so that the seventy weeks end at the crucifixion, rejecting Ptolemy's king list.

    1. 41a.

      Page 22:  “But Ptolemy does not even pretend to have had any facts as to the length of the Persian period”.  Page 23:  “In a word then, there is no chronology in existence of the period from Cyrus to Christ except in the Bible”.  “according to Jewish traditions in the days of Christ (which surely are as much to be trusted as heathen traditions of a later date), the period of the Persian kings was only 52 years”. ↩

  42. 42.

    Schwab, Shimon.  “Comparative Jewish Chronology?”  Selected Speeches: A Collection of Addresses and Essays on Hashkafah, Contemporary Issues and Jewish History, 255–285.  CIS Publishers.  1991.  An essay by the rabbi of K'hal Adath Jeshurun in Washington Heights, New York, first written in 1962, which proposed that the sages hid the true length of the Persian period on purpose.  This revision adds an Epilogue, pages 281 to 285, in which Schwab withdraws that proposal.

    1. 42a.

      Page 285, section Epilogue:  “I would rather leave a good question open than risk giving a wrong answer.” ↩

  43. 43.

    Brown, Raymond E.  The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke.  Doubleday.  1977.  The standard critical commentary on Matthew 1–2 and Luke 1–2, by a Catholic priest and New Testament scholar.  It examines each of Matthew's "formula citations" of the Old Testament against the Hebrew, the Greek and Jewish interpretation, and asks what each meant in its own setting and what Matthew made of it.

    1. 43a.

      Page 148:  “In summary, the MT of Isa 7:14 does not refer to a virginal conception in the distant future. The sign offered by the prophet was the imminent birth of a child, probably Davidic, but naturally conceived”. ↩

  44. 44.

    Blomberg, Craig L.  “Matthew.”  Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, 1–109.  Baker Academic.  Edited by G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson.  2007.  A verse-by-verse study, by an evangelical New Testament scholar at Denver Seminary, of every Old Testament quotation in Matthew:  its original context, its use in Jewish sources, its text and Matthew's way of applying it.  Blomberg defends Matthew's use as typology and "double fulfillment" while granting the plain sense of each Old Testament text.

    1. 44a.

      Page 7:  “Hosea 11:1 is a reference to the exodus, pure and simple.” ↩

    2. 44b.

      Page 5:  “The majority of scholars deny any pre- dictive element”.  “Better than both of these approaches, however, is the con- cept of double fulfillment”. ↩

  45. 45.

    McDowell, Josh.  Evidence That Demands a Verdict.  Campus Crusade for Christ.  1972.  A popular evangelical handbook of arguments for Christianity, widely used for decades, made up largely of quotations from other books.  Cited here as the most common route by which an unlocated "Talmud" quotation reached Christian apologetics.

    1. 45a.

      Page 177:  “Rabbi Rachmon says, "When the members of the Sanhedrin found themselves deprived of their right over life and death, a general consternation took possession of them; they covered their heads with ashes, and their bodies with sackcloth, exclaiming: 'Woe unto us, for the scepter has departed from Judah, and the Messiah has not come!'”  McDowell's note points to his source 20, "LeMann, M. M. Jesus Before the Sanhedrin. Translated by Julius Magath. Nashville: Southern Methodist Publishing House, 1886", pages 28–30. ↩

  46. 46.

    Council of Trent.  “Decree concerning the Canonical Scriptures, Session IV.”  The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent.  Translated by J. Waterworth.  Apr 8, 1546 (edition of 1848).  The Catholic Church's answer to the Protestant Reformation on the sources of doctrine, defining the canon and placing unwritten apostolic tradition beside Scripture.

    1. 46a.

      “are contained in the written books, and the unwritten traditions which, received by the Apostles from the mouth of Christ himself, or from the Apostles themselves, the Holy Ghost dictating, have come down even unto us, transmitted as it were from hand to hand”. ↩

  47. 47.

    Justin Martyr.  “Dialogue with Trypho.”  Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1.  Translated by Marcus Dods and George Reith.  Edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson.  c. 155 (edition of 1885).  The oldest surviving Christian–Jewish debate, written by a Christian philosopher in Rome as a dialogue with a Jew named Trypho who has fled the Bar Kokhba war.  Trypho is Justin's own character, so his objections show what a Christian of the 150s thought a learned Jew would say;  several match later rabbinic arguments closely.  Cited by chapter.

    1. 47a.

      Chapter 110:  “and we who were filled with war, and mutual slaughter, and every wickedness, have each through the whole earth changed our warlike weapons,--our swords into ploughshares, and our spears into implements of tillage”. ↩

  48. 48.

    Kravitz, Bentzion.  “Daniel 9 – A True Biblical Interpretation.”  Jews for Judaism.  Jun 18, 2009.  A popular article by the founder of the counter-missionary organisation Jews for Judaism, giving the rabbinic reading of Daniel's seventy weeks against the Christian one.  The page has no numbered sections, so places are given by position.  Mirror:  Archive.org

    1. 48a.

      Near the end, after the quotation of Daniel 9:24:  “The angel Gabriel reveals to Daniel this additional understanding of the 70 years extending them from 70 years to 70 weeks of years stretching the time span to 490 years that span from the destruction of the First Temple to the Destruction of the second Temple”. ↩

    2. 48b.

      Near the end, after the quotation of Daniel 9:24:  “Although there appears to be a discrepancy in chronology between the Jewish and secular Gregorian calendars of 166 years (with the secular dates earlier) it is clear that Jewish record keeping is more reliable and consistent concerning these events.  Babylonian calendars changed arbitrarily with every new Babylonian king and limited archeological discoveries often reflect their arbitrary chronology.” ↩

  49. 49.

    Stampfer, Shaul.  “Are We All Khazars Now?”  Jewish Review of Books.  2014.  An essay by a Hebrew University historian of East European Jewry examining Elhaik's 2013 Khazar paper:  its sample sizes, its stand-ins for Khazars, its historical claims, and the demographic puzzle it set out to solve.

    1. 49a.

      Paragraph 5:  “Elhaik’s article has become rather popular in some anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist circles, but this proves nothing about its truth.” ↩

  50. 50.

    Athanasius of Alexandria.  “Festal Letter 39.”  Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 4.  Translated by Archibald Robertson.  367 (edition of 1892).  The bishop of Alexandria's Easter letter for AD 367, which lists the books to be read as Scripture.  It is the earliest surviving list of exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.

    1. 50a.

      Section 5:  “These are, the four Gospels, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” ↩

  51. 51.

    Kaplan, Steven.  The Beta Israel (Falasha) in Ethiopia: From Earliest Times to the Twentieth Century.  New York University Press.  1992.  A history of the Beta Israel by a Hebrew University historian of Ethiopia, written from Ethiopian chronicles, church texts and the community's own traditions.  It argues that the community's identity took shape inside Ethiopia between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries rather than descending from an ancient Israelite colony.

    1. 51a.

      Page 24:  “In 1973 when the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, Ovadiah Yosef, publicly declared the Beta Israel to be Jews according to halacha, he stated that they were descendants of the lost tribe of Dan.” ↩

  52. 52.

    Simmons, Shraga.  “Do Jews Believe In Jesus?”  Aish.com.  Jan 18, 2026.  A popular article by an Orthodox rabbi on the website of Aish HaTorah, long circulated under the title "Why Jews Don't Believe in Jesus".  It sets out four reasons:  the messianic prophecies left undone, the personal qualifications of the Messiah, mistranslated verses, and Judaism's grounding in a national revelation at Sinai.  Cited by section. ↩

  53. 53.

    Frank, Edgar.  Talmudic and Rabbinical Chronology: The Systems of Counting Years in Jewish Literature.  Philipp Feldheim.  1956.  A handbook of the systems by which the Talmud and later rabbinic writers counted years, with the rules for converting them to Christian-era dates.

    1. 53a.

      Page 13:  “To change AM into CE we must deduct 3761 on dates between RhS and December 31 or 3760 on dates between January 1 and RhS”.  RhS is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.  Frank goes on to say that the Talmud at first sight puts the burning of the Temple in 68 CE instead of 70. ↩

  54. 54.

    Huber, Peter J., and Salvo De Meis.  Babylonian Eclipse Observations from 750 BC to 1 BC.  IsIAO and Mimesis.  2004.  The edition of every lunar eclipse report in the Babylonian astronomical texts, each set beside its computed circumstances.  Years are astronomical, so -330 is 331 BC.

    1. 54a.

      Pages 68–70:  The list of eclipses.  The 38 used here are the Persian-period entries marked as watched with the eclipse seen, from -536 April 23 to -330 September 20.  Entries marked with a query and penumbral entries are left out.  One of the 38, -528 November 17, carries Huber's comment date?, so its date is less secure than the rest. ↩

  55. 55.

    Espenak, Fred, and Jean Meeus.  Five Millennium Canon of Lunar Eclipses: -1999 to +3000.  NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.  2009.  NASA's computed catalogue of every lunar eclipse from 2000 BC to AD 3000, with its kind, time and duration, used here as the sky against which the Babylonian reports are checked. ↩