 Maimonides Moses Ben-Maimon penned his famous letter to Yemen, his epistle to Yemen in, we think, 1172. And we have quite a few letters that Maimonides wrote to different Jewish communities. The community in Yemen at that time was undergoing severe pressure to embrace Islam. And the Islamic missionaries were actually trying to substantiate Islamic belief by appealing to passages in the Jewish Bible. In this letter to the community of Yemen, he warned about the disastrous conclusions that can be reached if you take isolated snippets of a text out of context. Maimonides wrote, remember, it isn't right to take a passage out of its context and to draw references from it. It is imperative to take into consideration preceding and following statements in order to fathom the writer's meaning. One example he shares, he actually gives several examples, is based upon reading part, a snippet of Deuteronomy chapter 11 verse 16. And here is the soundbite, the snippet, where he quotes, and you shall turn and serve other gods. So it says, va'avad atem Elohim acherim, ye shall serve other gods. Are we really supposed to worship idols? Is that what the Bible is teaching us? So if you read the entire verse, not just half of it, the absurdity of this idea is exposed. The whole verse says, be very careful for yourself, lest your heart be misled. And you turn astray and serve other gods and bow down to them. So obviously if you bother reading the whole verse, you will never walk away assuming that God is commanding us to serve idols. But if you snip out half of the verse and take only part of it, you can walk away with that absurd conclusion. Now this kind of mangling of text was recently displayed by a missionary named Sakhi Shapira. In a recent YouTube video, he is shown hovering breathlessly over a tractate of the Talmud and claiming that he has absolute proof, 100% absolute proof that some of the rabbis who compiled the Talmud believed that Jesus was the Son of God and the Messiah. When he claims, he's got the proof. Now what is the passage that he bases this upon? So it's tractate Babakama, 80 folio A, 80 side A. Babakama generally deals with torts and damages. But here, there's a little story that takes place where it says the following. Rav and Shmuel, two great sages, and Rav Asi, a third, once happened to be present at a house where a celebration was being held marking the passage of the week of a newborn son. And the commentaries point out what kind of a celebration you have after a week of a son is born. They point out it's referring to a circumcision which takes place after the week. So the Talmud here is saying that these three sages were at a house where the celebration was taking place for a Brithmi la circumcision. But then the Talmud goes on to say that some say that no, it wasn't for the occasion of a Brithmi la circumcision. It was a house where a celebration was being held marking the redemption of a son, the redemption of a firstborn son. And then the Talmud says that when these three sages came into the house, Rav would not enter before Shmuel. And the Talmud goes on to discuss the etiquette of which sage should have gone in first, etc. Now what Shapiro does in his analysis of this Talmudic passage is zero in on the Hebrew phrase for the redemption of the son, which in Hebrew here is Yeshua Haben. Here it's Yeshua Haben. Now normally the redemption of the firstborn son is called Pijon Haben, the redemption. But this is an alternative term that the Talmud uses. And he assumes that what it's telling you is that the Ben, the son, was named Yeshua. And his assumption is that Yeshua is the Hebrew name for Jesus. Now what he does is basically rip this phrase totally out of its context to assert that the author of this passage in the Talmud believed that Jesus was the son of God. Now let's back up for a moment and say that even if, even if this passage in Babakama was coming to tell us, it's not. But even if the passage was coming to tell us that someone had a son named Yeshua, it doesn't say that the Father is God. The truth is that Yeshua is not an unheard name. We even find people in the Tanakh and the Hebrew Scriptures that are named Yeshua. But of course that's not what this passage is coming to teach us. It's not teaching us that someone had a son named Yeshua. The context of this passage is not about any son's name. It's about sages that are entering a home where a celebration is taking place. And one opinion of the Talmud is that the celebration was a Shavua Haben for the week of the son, meaning a celebration taking place after a week for this young boy was born, meaning a circumcision. And the other opinion in the Talmud is that the celebration was not a Shavua Haben. It was a Yeshua Haben. It was the redemption of the son. Now we know that a pigeon had been the redemption of a firstborn son to a father who was not a Kohane, who was not a priest. Basically is when such a father presents a priest with five silver coins after the child has reached 30 days of age. And the reason is that originally it was the first born males who were supposed to be the priests. That was the original plan. That there wasn't going to be a family of priests like we have now from the descendants of Aaron. But originally the firstborn in general were to be the priests. And the problem was that after the sin of the golden calf, where the firstborn were all worshiping the golden calf, so God took away that privilege from the firstborn and He transferred it to the descendants of Aaron who were part of the tribe of Levi, Levi, because the whole tribe of Levi didn't participate in the sin of the golden calf. And so today in order to quote unquote redeem the firstborn from what should have been their task of being the priests. So the father of such a firstborn child presents the Kohane with five silver coins. So the Yeshua Haben, the redemption of the son, is basically a special celebration marking the redemption of any firstborn, any bechore, and it's not about the name of a child. Now after Rabbi Eli Cohen pointed out this ridiculous reading of the Talmud by Tzachi Shapiro, he pulled down his video. And I think that's an admission that he realized that he had totally butchered this passage of Talmud.