74
CHRISTIANITY IN TALMUD
must be admitted, a somewhat violent one, if the
author who had written the one name was aware of
the other. But he may have found a name to him
unintelligible, and by the help of Num. xxxi. 8
have transformed it into Pinhas Listaah. Talmudic
tradition did not, so far as
I am aware, know the
name of Pontius Pilate, or ascribe the death of
Jesus to a non-Jewish tribunal. But it is certainly
strange that a Jew should call Pinhas [Phinehas]
a robber, being, as he was, a highly honoured hero
of tradition. Bacher seeks to
show
(Jew. Quart.
Rev.,
iii. p. 356) that the reference is to the historical
Phinehas and the historical Balaam, as against the
theory of Perles. And if it were not for the word
Listaah, I should agree with him. He explains its
use in connexion with Pinhas by assuming that the
heretic quoted from some apocryphal work about
Balaam of an anti-Israelite tendency. But was
there such a work? Was Balaain of any special
interest to either Jews or heretics, except as a type
of Jesus? With all deference to Bacher's great
authority, I cannot help thinking that under this
mention of Pinhas Listaah there lies concealed a
reference to Pontius Pilatus. The difficulty that
the heretic, if a Christian, would not call Jesus by
the name of Balaam, may be met by the considera-
tion that the whole conversation comes to us in a
Jewish form. As for the historical value of the
incident, there is nothing to make it impossible.
Such conversations were frequent, and R. Ilanina
was a well-known man. That the story only occurs
in the Babylonian Gemara is not surprising, since
we have already seen that there was considerable
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