JESUS IN THE TALMUD: Mel Gibson's The Passion and Sanhedrin 43a have been generating some debate among Jews, started by an article by Steven Bayme. The article has been taken down, but you can read the Google cache copy here. More rabbinic passages that deal with Jesus, or may deal with him, can be found at Alan Humm's Ancient Jewish Accounts of Jesus website. The Talmud, of course, gives no new useful historical information about Jesus but, for what it's worth, it does tell us what kind of spin Babylonian rabbis c. 400 C.E. wanted to put on the Jesus story. How much should that inform the current discussion? I blog, you decide.