Recent studies by Bohak, Anthony, Stökl Ben-Ezra and myself have firmly placed much of the raucous Toledot Yeshu tradition into the Late Antique period. This opens the door to a new triangulation between 1) these Jewish polemical texts, 2) the more dialectical approach to Jesus taken in the Babylonian Talmud, and 3) the establishment of Jesus as an Israelite prophet who was not crucified in the Qur’an. In this paper, I will argue that both the Bavli and the Qur'an are best read as diverging responses to the Toledot Yeshu narrative, reestablishing Jesus either as an Israelite sinner that should have been saved in the case of the Talmud or as God's prophet, in the Qur’an. The new perspective will allow for a revaluation of the way in which both the Talmud and the Qur’an relate to the Christian tradition more broadly.
In this talk I would like to offer a fresh take on the famous chain of transmission in Avot 1-2. I will argue, contrary to most previous scholarship that this text does not have any polemical agenda against another group. Furthermore, to the extent to which this text grants authority to any of the individuals mentioned in the list, this is entirely secondary. Rather, the primary purpose of this text is to reassure members, or potential members of the Rabbinic community regarding doubts about the integrity of the received tradition in light of the fact that there is no record or communal memory of the existence of a rabbinic community of scholars prior to the late Second Temple period. Unlike the succession lists in classical and early Christian sources, the list of individuals and pairs in Avot, represent the exception rather than the norm. The norm was a community of scholars a such that of the tannaim and those imagined to have existed in the Biblical period. This has very significant implications for the overall ideology of the text. In order to develop this argument, I will reexamine the terms זקנים and אנשי כנסת הגדולה that appear in the first Mishnah of the tractate.
As religious communities ritualize the act of copying sacred books, they often assign symbolic, theological meanings to the scribe’s tools. Several classical rabbinic sources (e.g., b. Taanit 20a-b) include the proverb that one “should be soft like a reed, not stiff like a cedar”—opining that the reed’s flexible strength merits it to be the preferred tool for copying Torah. The way these sources imagine reed pens sheds light on late antique Jewish scribes in the cultural matrices of Greco-Roman scribal traditions and rabbinic self-understanding. Just as Jewish scribes used the same reeds as Greco-Roman scribes, so this proverb draws from the fable of “The Oak and the Reed” found in Aesop and other fabular traditions. Despite the proverb’s Gentile origins, however, it illuminates rabbinic notions of virtue and communal ethics. Though it echoes biblical mappings of plant traits onto humans—namely, emulating the cedar’s strength (2 Sam 7:2) over the reed’s weakness (1 Kgs 14:15)—the rabbinic proverb flips the preference. It recasts the reed’s supposed weakness as flexibility and humility, paralleling the social value of accommodating to majority powers in diaspora. In this proverb, a mundane, everyday writing implement becomes a pedagogical and mnemonic device for cultural values.
