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The rabbis of antiquity avoided scriptural paraphrase.
Translations derive from a liturgical setting; paraphrases derive (apparently) from folk piety, from tellers of tales; commentaries derive from schools, the learned elite.
The earliest rabbinic commentaries are on Exodus–Deuteronomy. Later they added Genesis (the initial omission of Genesis would have astonished Philo) and some of the other biblical books (mostly those that were used in the liturgy). The earliest commentary on the entire Hebrew Bible was written by a Babylonian rabbi in the tenth century.
the Jews sensed that they were living in a postclassical age and that it was their duty to collect, venerate, and study the works of their great ancestors. This tendency ultimately yielded the Bible and the idea that classical prophecy had ceased.
sacrifices were replaced by prayer and Torah study.
The Jews were living in an age of silver but were seeking gold.
The Mishnah (“repetition” or “teaching”) is the first rabbinic book, written in Hebrew and edited around 200 CE.
the bulk of the sages named in the Mishnah belong to either the generation of Yavneh (ca. 80–120 CE) or the generation of Usha (ca. 140–180 CE). Relatively little material is ascribed to named figures who lived before the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70.
The Mishnah covers a broad range of topics and is divided into six sections known as “orders”; each order in turn is divided into “tractates.” There are sixty-three tractates in all.
The Mishnah is full of legal material but is not a law code.
The effects of the Bar Kokhba war (132–135 CE) were equally serious. Judea was ruined, thousands of people were killed or enslaved, the Romans rebuilt Jerusalem as a pagan city and renamed the country Palestine (“land of the Philistines”) instead of Judea (“land of the Jews”).
Collaboration with the enemy was no sin if the enemy was granted dominion by God and if the enemy’s Jewish opponents were themselves sinners.
Many scholars have suggested that as a result of the disasters of 70 and 135 CE, the rabbis turned their backs on the outside world and isolated themselves from gentiles and gentile culture. The matter is not so simple, however. The beauty of Japheth (Hellenism) dwelt in the tents of Shem (rabbinic Judaism), as the Talmud says.
One of the major forms of rabbinic literary expression, the commentary, is of Greek origin, as mentioned in the previous chapter.
An indication of a more ecumenical attitude toward gentiles and paganism is the notion of “Noahide laws” that was elaborated by the rabbis of the second century.2 Righteous gentiles need not convert to Judaism in order to have a share in the world to come. They need obey only a certain basic minimum, which God revealed to Noah and which was to be observed by all of Noah’s descendants, namely gentiles.
Why did God abandon the Jews and allow the enemy to triumph? Why does the world appear to be dominated by evil? Is God still loyal to his people? These questions are addressed by Fourth Ezra and the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, both written shortly after 70 CE.
The regimen of daily prayer, Torah study, participation in synagogue services, and observance of the commandments sanctified life outside the temple and, in effect, competed with the temple cult, just as the new lay scholar class, the scribes, and others in effect competed with the priests.
What the Mishnah is saying by its very existence is that God can be found through the study of his laws, even the laws that cannot be observed in daily life.
laws that are attributed to the houses of Hillel and Shammai, which are concerned for the most part with purity, Sabbath and festivals, and meals
Not a single tractate of the Mishnah is devoted to a theological topic.
In the rabbinic mystical literature, however, the direction of movement is exclusively from earth to heaven;
Perhaps that is because when heaven came to earth many of them did not recognize the hour of their visitation. Rejecting the movement of heaven to earth in the person of Jesus Christ, unbelieving Jews were left with no mediation—no vital connection—to the God whose Son they despised. What began as God in search of man devolved into new traditions that outlined a new philosophy of man in search of God.
The rabbis triumphed over the indifference of the masses by gradually gaining control of the schools and the synagogues. The exact date of the triumph is hard to determine, but it was not earlier than the seventh century CE.
The synagogue was the home of popular piety, and as a result many rabbis in both the second century and later recommended prayer in the bet midrash, the safe confines of the rabbinic school, rather than the synagogue. Some said outright that study was more important than prayer.
One Christian writer of the third century remarks that after the destruction of the temple and the rejection of the Jews by God, Satan no longer bothers to tempt the Jews to sin. Instead, Satan directs his attentions to the Christians. Therefore, Christianity is beset with heresy and discord while Judaism is not.10 After 70 CE, Jewish society was not marked by sects.
the rabbis see themselves not as “Pharisees” but as “the sages of Israel.” Neither the Mishnah nor any other rabbinic work betrays a Pharisaic self-consciousness.
Gamaliel was a distinguished Pharisee of Jerusalem, a member of the Sanhedrin in the time of Paul (Acts 5:34; 22:3). Simon ben Gamaliel, Josephus tells us, was a Pharisee “of an illustrious family” and one of the leaders of the revolutionary coalition in Jerusalem in 66–67 CE. Rabban Gamaliel was the leader of the first generation of rabbinic sages after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE and the founder of the patriarchal house.11 Rabbi Judah the Patriarch was his grandson. From leader of Pharisees to patriarch of rabbis—the continued prominence of the house of Gamaliel provides strong
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although by the fourth century the “benediction against heretics” was directed against Christians or some Jewish-Christian sects, its original version was a generic denunciation of all heretics. The intent was not to single out Christians or any other specific group but to proclaim the end of sectarianism.
The real concession that the rabbis demanded of all comers was that they forgo any sectarian affiliation.
The rabbis prayed that God destroy all those who persisted in maintaining a separatist identity in a world without a temple and in a society that was prepared to tolerate disputes.
The separation of Christianity from Judaism was a process, not an event. The essential part of the process was that the church was becoming more and more gentile and less and less Jewish, but the separation manifested itself in different ways in each community where Jews and Christians dwelled together.
The rabbis debated the canonical status of various books, but for the most part they were not creating a canon so much as they were confronting a canon that was already in existence.
But whether understood minimally or maximally, the notion of “Torah” in the opening paragraph of tractate Avot seems to adumbrate the talmudic idea of “the Oral Torah,” according to which Moses at Mount Sinai received two Torahs from God: the written Torah, what we call the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch, Genesis through Deuteronomy; and the Oral Torah, which supplemented and explicated the written Torah. According to various passages in the Talmud, the contents of the Mishnah derive from the Oral Torah.15 Rabbinic Judaism is the Judaism of the Oral Torah.
By the early second century CE and consistently thereafter, the Romans regarded Christians as not-Jews and Jews as not-Christians.
by the middle of the second century CE, Christian writers regularly accuse the Jews of assisting, or even goading, the Romans in their persecuting activities.
R. Tarfon said: I swear by the lives of my children40 that if these scrolls were to come into my hands, I would burn them and their divine names. Even if a murderer41 were pursuing me, I would enter a house of idolatry rather than enter42 a house of theirs, for the worshippers of idolatry do not recognize him [God] and deny him, but these [minim] recognize God but deny him. . . .
their Torah scrolls are written in Hebrew and contain the divine name in Hebrew.
From antiquity through the Middle Ages, Yeshu ben Pantira (or Pandira or Panthera) is a standard Jewish appellation for Jesus of Nazareth.
The two stories are juxtaposed in the Tosefta, and indeed their moral is the same: pious rabbinic Jews are to stay away from Jewish Christian minim, the disciples of Yeshu
The stories imply that rabbinic Jews avoid or ought to avoid Jewish Christians.
The heart of the rabbinic daily liturgy is a prayer consisting of eighteen paragraphs, each paragraph devoted to a specific theme
Fixed wording was not established until the early Islamic period.
is not explained why the number of appearances of the divine name in Psalm 29 should have anything to do with the number of benedictions in the central prayer of the daily liturgy.
Berakhot 4:3, which has Rabban Gamaliel, a prominent sage of the Yavnean period, declare that a person should pray “Eighteen” every day.
Hence it is most unlikely that the benediction about minim has anything to do with Justin Martyr’s statement, cited above, that the Jews daily curse Christ and Christians.
If the statement of Justin Martyr was a polemic it may certainly have been a reference to this prayer even if it is a mischaracterization of it.
Justin could not have known the Birkat ha-minim.
Ultimately this is not an important point, but this seems overstated.
Justin (writing around 160 CE) states boldly and forthrightly that gentile Christ-believers are God’s holy people, God’s chosen people, the true children of God, and the true people of Israel.78 By the end of the second century, Christians were producing their own Scriptures, which were distinguished from Jewish Scriptures not only in content but also in form: they were written in codices (books) instead of scrolls, and they employed a distinctive system for abbreviating the names of God and Christ (Jewish scrolls had no such system).
By the end of the second century CE, we have our earliest description (in Rome) of parallel and separate religious congregations, one a church (as we would call it) and one a synagogue.80 By the third century if not earlier, we have evidence for separate burials; Jews and Christians were separated in death, as in life.
a theology of Christ that was too “low,” or otherwise seemed “too Jewish.”
in the 380s CE some of the good Christians of Antioch attended synagogue on the Jewish New Year because they wished to hear the shofar being blown. This was but one of the many ways by which they showed reverence for the synagogue. Bishop John Chrysostom reproved them for being traitors to Christianity and for consorting with the enemies of Christ. The bishop believed that these Christians had effaced the boundary between Judaism and Christianity, but apparently these Christians disagreed. They were Christians whose Christianity prevented them neither from respecting Judaism and its rituals
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The Tosefta has been translated by Jacob Neusner, 6 vols.
