a quote from a really good article on the subject:
We know very little about Yeishu ha-Notzri. All modern
works that mention him are based on information taken from the
Tosefta and the Baraitas - writings made at the same time as the
Mishna but not contained in it. Because the historical
information concerning Yeishu is so damaging to Christianity,
most Christian authors (and even some Jewish ones) have tried to
discredit this information and have invented many ingenious
arguments to explain it away. Many of their arguments are based
on misunderstandings and misquotations of the Baraitas and in
order to get an accurate picture of Yeishu one should ignore
Christian authors and examine the Baraitas directly.
The skimpy information contained in the Baraitas is as
follows: Rabbi Yehoshua ben Perachyah once repelled Yeishu with
both hands. People believed that Yeishu was a sorcerer and they
considered him to be a person who had led the Jews astray. As a
result of charges brought against him (the details of which are
not known, but which probably involved high treason) Yeishu was
stoned and his body hung up on the eve of Passover. Before this
he was paraded around for forty days with a herald going in
front of him announcing that he would be stoned and calling for
people to come forward to plead for him. Nothing was brought
forward in his favour however. Yeishu had five disciples:
Mattai, Naqai, Neitzer, Buni, and Todah.
In the Tosefta and the Baraitas, Yeishu's father is
named Pandeira or Panteiri. These are Hebrew-Aramaic forms of a
Greek name. In Hebrew the third consonant of the name is
written either with a dalet or a tet. Comparison with other
Greek words transliterated into Hebrew shows that the original
Greek must have had a delta as its third consonant and so the
only possibilty for the father's Greek name is Panderos. Since
Greek names were common among Jews during Hashmonean times it is
not necessary to assume that he was Greek, as some authors have
done.
The connection between Yeishu and Jesus is corroborated
by the the fact that Mattai and Todah, the names of two of
Yeishu's disciples, are the original Hebrew forms of Matthew and
Thaddaeus, the names of two of Jesus's disciples in Christian
mythology.
The early Christians were also aware of the name "ben
Pandeira" for Jesus. The pagan philosopher Celsus, who was
famous for his arguments against Christianity, claimed in 178
C.E. that he had heard from a Jew that Jesus's mother, Mary,
had been divorced by her husband, a carpenter, after it had been
proved that she was an adultress. She wandered about in shame
and bore Jesus in secret. His real father was a soldier named
Pantheras. According to the Christian writer Epiphanius (c.
320 - 403 C.E.), the Christian apologist Origen (c.185 - 254
C.E.) had claimed that "Panther" was the nickname for Jacob the
father of Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus. It should be noted
that Origen's claim is not based on any historical information.
It is purely a conjecture aimed at explaining away the Pantheras
story of Celsus. That story is also not historical. The claim
that the name of Jesus's mother was Mary and the claim that her
husband was a carpenter is taken directly from Christian belief.
The claim that Jesus's real father was named Pantheras is based
on an incorrect attempt at reconstructing the original form of
Pandeira. This incorrect reconstruction was probably influenced
by the fact that the name Pantheras was found among Roman
soldiers.
You can check out the whole thing here:
http://embracingthecontradiction.org/Mythical_Jesus.html
