Jesus’s Signature

To the Editors:

I am very glad that Herder and Herder have published a translation of David Flusser’s Jesus, a work by an accomplished Jewish scholar which throws a good deal of light on the historical figure in his Jewish context. It is annoying, however, that the publisher should have garbled into nonsense a quotation from me on the jacket, and that they should have captioned a reproduction of the name Jesus in Hebrew characters, “This is how Jesus wrote his name in Hebrew,” as if there were extant, as in the case of Shakespeare, a signature or signatures that could be accepted as authentic. The German original says, “So wurde zur Zeit Jesu der Name Jesus hebräisch geschrieben.”

Edmund Wilson

Wellfleet, Mass.