Can you tell us about the early life of Yeshu – if you don’t know who Yeshu is, that’s the founder of the Christian religion – about his growing up among the Jewish people and what effect his early experiences had on the rest of his life?
Rav Avigdor Miller:
Well, briefly, he was born under suspicious circumstances.  Now, that’s what they say – not what I say.  And naturally he labored under a severe disability, a severe social disability, because even among gentiles a man of doubtful parentage is not a privileged person.  To have Hashem for a father doesn’t get you much anywhere in this world.  Oh, but they claim that he’s descended from King David.  That’s a little contradiction there because Hakodosh Boruch Hu is not of the House of David.  But either way, because of this disability he became very embittered.
Now he never succeeded in anything.  He wasn’t married.  That’s not a coincidence because he couldn’t be married – a mamzer is not permitted to marry a Jew.  He attempted to learn Torah but he didn’t make it.  He remained a very mediocre person in Torah because we see from his utterances a number of gross errors that even a medium ben Torah would never commit.
Now as a result of this, he was, as I said before, very embittered.  But he was endowed with one ability and that was a tremendous ambition; had he been psychoanalyzed today it would have been called megalomania.  And when a man has a tremendous ambition but he has no abilities, the result is a terrible bitterness.
Like our poor friend – I won’t mention his name – who left America and is now in Eretz Yisroel; he thought he would be welcomed by the whole people with open arms but he failed even to get one seat in the Knesses; so he’s very embittered nebach.
So Oso HaIsh turned his bitterness upon those who did make it.  Now who were the ones who were successful in the Jewish people?  Who were the ones who were admired by the whole nation?  The Sages, Pharisees.  The Pharisees were the darlings of the people.  The entire nation worshipped their deeds and their word.  But because Oso HaIsh failed to become prominent, so he turned his guns on them.  And that’s why the entire New Testament from beginning to end is one long tirade against the Tanaim.  There isn’t another book in the world that has so much bitterness against the Sages of Israel like the New Testament.  And that’s the reason.  Because he failed to make it.
And that’s the secret of the beginning of that religion.  It was founded in frustration and bitterness; and that caused that hostility that resulted in the loss of so many Jewish lives in history.
TAPE # 47 (February 1975)
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