On How and How Not to Read The Talmud (VIII)

The Finale, bar a coda to come: Who checks those who tell you you should check things?

Welcome back, we’re at the end - or would be if it weren’t for vociferous blogging that I have for some reason interpreted as requiring counter-blogging. All that remains after this is a coda. This will include a comprehensive bibliography, perhaps annotated. That way people can check me, if they so desire.

Also, once again, there are several mini-essays in the footnotes providing substantial rebuttals to points. They should not be necessary for the average reader to follow the argument, but carry a fair bit of data.

For anyone jumping on board now, this and the previous installment should suffice as a short, cliff-notes version, terminology can either be found via the first installment, or by googling.

Previous installments can be found here, for those who want everything, including close readings of the passages cited in Carrier’s book and placing them in their literary and historical context, while outlining the methodology of modern historical-critical scholarship.

On How or Read, and How Not to Read, the Babylonian Talmud from a Historical-Critical Perspective (I)

On How or Read, and How Not to Read, the Babylonian Talmud from a Historical-Critical Perspective (II)

How and How Not To Read The Talmud (III): BT Sanh. 93b.

On How and How Not to Read The Talmud (IV) Sanh. 97a-98b

On How and How Not to Read The Talmud (V) Suk. 52a-b.

On How and How Not to Read The Talmud (VI)

On How and How Not to Read The Talmud (VII)

Contra Carrier’s own claim on his blog that “There is in fact no argument I made that hasn’t passed peer review multiple times, in studies completed by some of the most prominent experts in Hebrew, Talmud, Second Temple Judaism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” If we put aside Peter Shäfer who is cited elsewhere for other things, and Jacob Neusner who is inexplicably cited only for pre-Rabbinic Judaism rather than the voluminous work on the Rabbinic literature he is most well-known for,¹ Boyarin and Mitchell appear, as far as I can tell, to be the only authorities on Rabbinic literature Carrier has engaged with on these passages, and the latter only after the fact, given he is not cited in OTHOJ. Of the two only Boyarin presents any kind of awareness of modern Rabbinic textual criticism and historical methodology, leading him to disagree with Carrier’s interpretation of BT Sukkah. I am unaware of any “prominent scholar” of Talmud who would support this kind of reading. If fact the many who populate my bibliography demonstrate both the extremely problematic nature of the reading, and the paucity of scholarship Carrier has consulted. This casts substantial doubt on his ability to engage with even the extremely selective secondary scholarship he is relying on, particularly given his lack of both Hebrew and Aramaic, which would be necessary to comprehensively assess the arguments presented by Mitchell and rebutted by Boyarin. One cannot assess his interpretation of what Amoraim means if you don’t know how Amoraim is used in different strata of the Rabbinic literature. Without languages, you either take his word for it, or that of Boyarin.² But with them, you can assess both, and scour the corpora for instances of how word is used and compare them, which is what I have done several times for this project. It appears from the citation of Boyarin and Mitchell alongside each other not only that Carrier expects his audience to be under-read,³ but that he himself has not read Boyarin’s other work, including his scholarly volume on much the same topic, Border Lines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity, Chapters 7 and 8 of which deal substantially with textual and historical criticism of the Bavli. The thesis of these chapters is that the Stammaim’s work in constructing Rabbinic-Jewish self-identity is a dialectical counterpoint to the construction of Nicaean Christian Orthodoxy, involving a self-conscious and concerted project of historical mythologization, projecting their ideal self-image back into the past, and that the development of this ideological position can be clearly demonstrated from the differences between the Bavli and the other, earlier, Rabbinic writings.⁴ This book also contains a very important methodological qualification:

At this point I must stipulate an important assumption… I assume that rabbinic writings are necessarily evidence for the time and place in which they have come into being as texts and not necessarily for the time and place of which they tell us. They may be evidence for earlier times but certainly evidence that something was being thought or said at the time the text was promulgated… the historiography of Judaism in the rabbinic period, together with its implications for the history of Christianity, had been, until quite recently, founded on the assumption that the kind of historical information the rabbinic legends could yield was somehow directly related to the narrative contents they displayed.⁵

This is worth comparing to the positions affirmed by Carrier, discussed both above and in the previous installment.

Boyarin then continues to provide an extensive methodology for dealing with textual evidence:

All texts inscribe … the social practices within which they originate, and may also seek to locate the genealogy of those social practices in a narrative of origins, producing a reversal of cause and effect. This reversal is a mode of narration that is particularly germane to the project of replacing traditional patterns of belief and behaviour … with new ones that wish, nevertheless, to claim the authority of hoary antiquity.⁶

In short, rather than taking at face value the claims of narratives that represent historical reality, passed down largely unchanged via a reliable oral tradition for centuries before their final codification, one must historicize them as products of a complex historical process of Rabbinic self-definition. It should go without saying that this is also my attitude toward the documentary evidence of early Christianity.⁷

This casts a great deal of doubt on Carrier’s assessment of both the primary and secondary literature, and his estimation of his ability to make these kinds of assessments, which are absolutely required to make the kinds of probabilistic arguments he appears to be making. The possibility of pre-rabbinic content being reflected in the passages I have addressed (in many cases which they themselves do not claim to provide) appears to face enormously higher barriers than for the early Christian literature, on which I myself lean far nearer to agnostic than many others; I personally doubt if many such speculations, particularly from the latter half of last century, are particularly useful.

Further even to this, while I was in the process of proofing, editing and publishing this, Carrier has posted yet more on his blog, as he is want to do, this time, among other things, excoriating Mark Goodacre and others for appealing to assumed, but not evidenced, sources for the Gospels in earlier oral traditions. If Carrier finds this so incredible, necessitating the statement that “human tradition wasn’t even a respected source at the time” (seemingly based on Paul and thus presumably applying to the first century) why is he singing the praises of David C Mitchell, whose entire thesis rests on the assumption that the Talmud Bavli, compiled half a millennium after the fact, accurately and unproblematically records oral traditions not attested in earlier literature? not in Tosefta, not in Mishnah, not in Sifre or Sifra. And not just oral traditions dating back to the Tannaitic period, but specifically to prior to the destruction of the second temple, possibly going back even further than Paul, through the Qumran literature as far as 1 Enoch,⁸ and maybe even the Psalms, a claim the texts do not even make themselves on this point? This necessitates the unstated claim that the parallel, demonstrably earlier Yerushalmi text is corrupt, incomplete or self-censored, and thus the later more heavily edited and redacted Bavli is more reliable, even when that editorial intervention, including the creation of entirely novel material, can be clearly demonstrated. Imagine what Carrier would say if someone made these claims about the New Testament or apocryphal Christian literature. If any readers are familiar with the work of Shaye Cohen (and they should be), and have watched any of his fantastic lectures, then, after him, I will say surely, surely Carrier would take this into account.

But alas, then, it is bizarre that only a couple of paragraphs later that he claims the Talmudic stories of Jesus, including the execution narrative in Sanhedrin 43a as somehow more plausible than the gospels, partly based on its coherence with the idea of the Sanhedrin as a functional proto-Rabbinic court prior to the rabbinic period, all the way back to, in this case, the last decades of the Hasmonean period.⁹ (It is also worth reading yourself through the previous link, so you can judge for yourself if it is a particularly realistic framing). He also extrapolates that this is based on “a gospel” of “Torah observant Nazoreans”, that particular gospel being known to the authors of the Bavli, but the others not.¹⁰ This assumption of Rabbinic naivete, and the limited transmission of Christian literature (even through one of the primary trade routes linking the Mediterranean to the Silk Road), strains credulity. The distribution of Christianity and its correlation to centres of Rabbinic activity would have to investigated in order to seriously assert this, and the reality of this is in fact the opposite of what Carrier requires for his assertion. The canonical gospels were known in Babylonia, which is unsurprising given that Christian Monasteries and Rabbinic Yeshivot co-existed in the same towns.¹¹ This should not be surprising as Jews and Christians have lived alongside each other, traded with one another and generally been embedded in the same societies for the entire history of both religions. However part of his argument also appears to appeal to the plausibility of early proto-Rabbinic courts, and, If Carrier was up to date, he would know that this is one of the most contestable claims in terms of 2^nd Temple historiography. It was previously assumed to be the case, and still is by some but ironically, like so many of these assertions, things fall apart if you check. The evidence of a pre-Rabbinic Sanhedrin and what its role and powers were is sparse and contradictory, and the existence of such an concrete, continuous institution is even wholesale denied by some.¹² Even the more cautious approaches consider the Rabbinic picture to be highly mythologized and anachronistic, and that the pre-70CE reality was far more limited, a kind of advisory council to the high priest, meeting irregularly, whose political and juridical power waxed and waned relative to the political situation at the time. There is no way to reconcile the latter Rabbinic accounts, including the earliest Tannaitic sources, with the contemporary accounts of writers such as Josephus, and thus they are of questionable historical value.¹³ The argument pitting these narratives against the gospels in order to demonstrate lack of certainty, based on comparable levels of historical plausibility collapses when the texts are read in context, both literary and historical-cultural. It is utterly unsurprising that a group being missionized to and in social competition with another group would propagate counter-narratives about what “really happened” that undermine the credibility of their social competitors’ account. This provides us sociological data about the late-antique Persian Empire, but is of questionable value for historical data about 1^st Century Roman Judaea.

At this point, it is probably worth returning to Carrier’s own words, which I cited at the beginning of this study:

I do not assume such elements are beyond any possibility of debate, only that the evidence is such that the burden must be on anyone who would deny them. The remaining elements I will demonstrate to be true with an adequate citation of evidence and scholarship.¹⁴

I think that I have adequately met this burden on the questioning of the claims he has made.¹⁵  And, I would hope, both provided adequate citation of evidence and scholarship, and, I further hope, demonstrated the inadequacy of that he has thus far presented. Indeed, as, for these passages in OTHOJ there are no citations of scholarship at all, there simply can’t be adequate citation, and, if his opinions did follow the scholarly consensus (which they absolutely do not), then that would be uncited, which is concerning in terms of academic integrity. See my previous note regarding a specific example regarding this. If these types of issues are so glaringly obvious both to scholars and even graduate students like myself then it is no wonder that people don’t systematically work though 700-page tomes. This project has turned into around 25k words simply treating the methodological problems of his treatment of one type of literature, and I only have the spare time to do this because, due to disability, I am predisposed to sit around and read all day (a fate that I must admit suits my personality).

All of this presents very serious issues and suggests a particularly selective deployment of the hermeneutic of suspicion. In the process of doubting one specific category of literature, another is used to replicate exactly the same kinds of “forced explanations” that Halivni sees as a primary form of evidence that the oral tradition that informs the Bavli was incomplete, consisting primarily of apodictic statements without preserving the dialectical argumentation required to explain them.¹⁶ I However, as I have said, I have little-to-no investment in the broader claims of Carrier, nor in the subject of Jesus Mythicism. But I hope that this contribution does some good, in that I see this as an opportunity to present what I hope is a broadly accessible entry point into the study of the Rabbinic texts, and in doing so correct many common mistakes and misapprehensions about this deep, complex and very rich body of work in which I have myself been immersed, and to which there is very little accessible introductory literature, much less in English. If I can achieve one thing, I hope it is that. And if I have response to Carrier that I wish to make, it is to thank him for providing an opportunity for me, hopefully, to do so. The process of researching this, reading, cross-referencing and checking the available literature, and just throwing myself into research (one of my favourite pastimes) has been a welcome and deeply enjoyable project over my mid-semester break.¹⁷ I hope reading it reflects that.

next post:

On Reading the Talmud: A 21st C. Non-Eschatological Coda

1. Carrier, On the historicity of Jesus. For Shäfer, 282 n4, 283 n5, 284 n9. For Neusner 67 n15, 68 n17, 647. In the case of the latter, why one would cite one of the leading Talmudic scholars of the post-War era for non-Talmudic material, and then not cite him, or anyone else, for one’s discussion of the Talmud is absolutely beyond me.

2. Or, as Carrier addresses Sefer Zerubbabel, one could also consult Himmelfarb’s likewise critical, but slightly more charitable assessment of his work in her Monograph on that text, previously cited.

3. Explicitly, the simultaneous citation elides the conflict between the two scholars’ opinions on points that are crucial to the validity of the very point Mitchell is being cited for, failing not only to address them but even to alert readers to the fact. That no other readers of his blog seem to have questioned this discrepancy appears to indicate that, while he strongly advocates “checking”, his readers have not done that, and are not asking obviously pertinent questions regarding his citations.

4. While this conclusion and the analysis of the evidence for this across the Rabbinic literature are extremely strong, unfortunately Boyarin’s assessment of the Pre-Rabbinic environment is somewhat idiosyncratic. His assertion of the prevalence of Logos theology is (to put it mildly) less well-evidenced, and far more open to dispute, as is much of the rest of his historiography of this period, with claims often extending well beyond what most scholars would consider justified. I am not sure that the second Power in Heaven, Chokhmah/Sophia (including, implicitly, Torah itself), the Logos, and, presumably, k’vod/Shekhinah can all be taken as conceptually related, or even equivalent terms in the general theology a period as theologically diverse and with such limited textual evidence as we are dealing with. I have my own theories, but they are yet to be systematized. Boyarin’s book is important and well worth reading (I would hope that Carrier will do so), as there are many keenly insightful observations, but also worth reading critically, in dialogue with more moderate positions like those of Cohen, Colins, Sanders, Himmelfarb, Baumgarten, Schäfer, Adler, et al.  

5. Boyarin, Border Lines, 46.

6. Ibid. 48. For the root of this framework that historicizes the texts, rather than seeing them solely as windows to periods before their composition, Boyarin cites Neusner as a model. See note 1 above.

7. By which I mean to say that, by my standards, the primary interest of said literature is based more on what it says about the communities that produced, distributed, read, and edited it than what it says about Jesus himself.

8. See the substantial citations of Mitchell’s various papers and rebuttals of the claims therein in Himmelfarb, Jewish messiahs in a Christian empire: a history of the Book of Zerubbabel, 102-6. From his website it looks like he even traces this messianic figure back to the Psalms by way of the same methodology, a claim I do not think that Carrier would be willing to defend.  

9. Given his reference to this as occurring “in the 70s BC” he appears to be conflating this execution narrative (or in Sanh. 67b) with the story related in Sotah 47a and Sanh. 107b. “In Lydda” (Lod), also only appears in TY Yevamot 16:6, and in Sanh. 67b in the Bavli (I did not identify this earlier because of the spelling difference, the bavli substitutes a ד for a ר). This is also, as previously noted, where he for some reason dates the Bavli, contradicting himself, to the “3rd to fifth centuries”. The harmonization of at least some of the Bavli passages is theoretically possible on a literary level (if one ignores the contradictory punishments, including explusion from the community), given the parallel of “leading Isael astray”, but assuming they are a somehow distributed, coherent whole is questionable. This is particularly questionable given the discrepancies, including in naming, with some include patronymics, some “the Nazarene”, and their distribution across two different Talmudim, in various layers divorced from each other both spatially and by centuries chronologically (not considering this appears to be the basis for his harmonization in Carrier, On the historicity of Jesus, 282-4). Thus, they explicitly don’t “consistently date this event [i.e. the exection] a hundred years earlier” because there is only one execution account which includes the name Jesus (ישו) and it doesn’t give a date: the date is extrapolated via this harmonization with 2 other sources, and the place is in a different one another one. What is considered “more plausible” is not a story, but an extrapolated, hypothetical harmonization of documents redacted, and probably authored, in different places, and different times. Further, as Lieberman suggests (in Hebrew), the origin of the name used in the Yerushalmi and in Sanh. 67a, in Tosefta Shabbat 11:15 may very well have applied to someone whose identity was forgotten, and was later conflated with a “false savior” (as per the “ben Pandira” accused of magic in BT Shabbat 104b and idolatry in Sanh. 67b). There is no other connection of any Jesus-like figure with the location of Lod and this connection is only made in the Gemara, initially in the form of a question - implying doubt. That two different names are used in the Tosefta, then harmonized in the later Gemara, implies this is a novelty: particularly as the crimes vary markedly, with the earlier Yerushalmi describing improper sexual conduct, and the Bavli describing idolatry and sorcery. Carrier himself should be aware of the fact that the equivalence between these two names is a product of the Gemara, and absent in the Tannaitic material, as his own source, Van Voorst, says exactly this, but he appears to not understand the point, saying “he almost immediately contradicts himself and says (without explanation), that the passages about Ben Stada [T Shab. 11:15] are about Jesus” (ibid, 283 n7). Van Voorst does in fact give a clear account: that this tradition and the Ben Pandira tradition, with independent origins in the Tosefta referring to different figures, are later conflated in the Gemara, assumed mistakenly by the latter rabbis to be referring to the same person (Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament, Eerdmans, 2000, 116-7). The marked disharmony in the early sources being compensated for by elaboration of detail, (to different ends in the Yerushalmi and the Bavli) including an Aramaic pun inaccessable in the Hebrew of the Tosefta is clear evidence of this. Contra Carrier’s assertions, there are no “more reliable manuscripts” that verify this conflation: it only occurs in the Germara, so his appeal to manuscripts is nonsensical (not that he could even read them). That Lieberman, cited above, is the leading authority on MSS of the Tosefta and responsible for the most accurate (though incomplete) critical edition and does not identify the two demonstrates this. Thus, Carrier’s assessment then requires the insertion of missing material into other material, disallowing mistaken identification or contradiction, in the same manner one forces the Gospel of John to say the same thing as Luke, who must say the same thing as Matthew and so on. Nor is there any detail aside from “when King Yannai was killing the Rabbis” indicating historical period, and this is only present in these latter two parallel narratives. There is nothing beyond this distinctive of that time. It also conflicts with other early Rabbinic accounts clearly placing Jesus in first Century, where a student of Jesus (Jacob ben Kefar-Sekaniah, the language clearly implies a direct student of a singular person) interacts with Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Eliezer (early 2^nd C), in the name of a Jesus who is the son of Pantira, and not some angelic being (BT Avodah Zarah 16b, citing Tosefta Chullin 2:6, present in the Vienna MS available via sefaria, 227r, 12). This is a far earlier tradition, preserved in detail in the Tosefta, contra the Bavli, which, while claiming what is claimed about Jesus, also appears to claim that the Rabbis executed Shimon Bar Koseva, as we have seen – another historical implausibility from a later period, with a shorter gap between event and account. To push the point further, there are also accounts in the Bavli of things such as the conversion of the Emperor Nero to Judaism, and Rabbis debating theology with both Roman Emperors and Alexander the Great, thus a single sentence placing a story in the Reign of King Yanni must be taken with a rather large grain of salt, significantly larger than required for the earlier Tosefta. If one is to consider one of these “plausible” to the audience they were written for, “plausibility” appears relative to the limited historical awareness of the authors and audiences. I would gently suggest that he re-read both these passages and the Peter Schäfer book cites (demonstrating a more thorough engagement with more current textual criticism than Van Voorst), which includes citations of and substantial engagement with Boyarin’s methodology, albeit in his earlier work on Martyrdom, Daniel Boyarin, Dying for G-d: martyrdom and the making of Christianity and Judaism, Figurae, (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), cited in Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud, 45-8.

10. Carrier’s argument for credibly via conflation of Epiphanius’ account and the Bavli material hinges on the latter’s “Jewish authors [appearance] to have known no other form of Christianity” (Carrier, On the historicity of Jesus, 282). This appears to imply that the Rabbis were not just ignorant but substantially cognitively deficient. See note below for a substantial disproof of this assertion, but by itself the previously-cited awareness demonstrated of Rabbinic knowledge of intra-Christian Heresiological debate is enough to sink this (Bar-Asher Siegal, Heretic Narratives, 66-108). Even if this story demonstrates knowledge of the Nazorean claims, the reason for those claims is given by Epiphanius himself: Contra: Carrier (288) this is not about Davidic lineage, but priestly authority, in that Jesus needed priestly as well as royal authority for the validity of the atoning sacrifice he purportedly made, refuted by Epiphanius by the citation of Hebrews’ claim that Jesus was “priest forever after the order of Melchizedek” (29.4.5 citing Heb. 5:6, this and following citations from Epiphanius, The panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis. Book I (Sects 1-46), trans. Frank Williams, 2nd ed., Nag Hammadi and Manichaean studies, (Leiden: Brill, 2009)). But the Nazoreans appear to not have got that message, and may simply have been ignorant of Hebrews, given its contested canonical status in the early Church – thus it can be inferred they came up with their own solution to said problem (as is a particularly common pattern in early Christian theology). Both this and Hebrews appear on their face to at least imply that some Early Christians weren’t aware of the Qumran tradition of dual priestly and Davidic messiahs. Epiphanius himself seems confused about how the Nazoreans’ belief accords with the contents of their gospel, as, despite this claim they have the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew (29.9.4) he includes the proviso that he doesn’t know if they preserve the genealogy, implying he has not seen it directly. Thus he is relying on second hand information that may be unreliable. Their distribution he also limits to Greece, the Transjordan and Syria (29.7.7), so whether their sect’s teachings spread as far as Persia, in contradistinction to nascent Orthodoxy cannot be known from him. To imply via the description as a “faithful descent of the original Christian sect” of Christianity (Carrier, On the historicity of Jesus 284) that it is not a novel deviation, based on the convergence of a late 4^th century account and a Talmudic account dating from roughly the same time up to the 7^th or 8^th centuries, with no data earlier than that strains credulity to breaking point. His assertion that “Schäfer's thesis [that the Jannaeus-era story was not originally about Jesus, and modified] is … untenable” as “Epiphanius confirms the Jews did not invent the association of Jesus with the period of Jannaeus: Christians in the very region were already preaching that” (ibid. 284 n9) is nonsensical: Epiphanius does not extend the Nazoirans’ presence into Babylonia (while misunderstanding the reason he gives for this: that the story is different in the earlier Yerushalmi, thus the later version is probably modified - and we have a canditate for an earlier, version with an apprarently different character in TY Chagigah): the idea that the story was about Jesus could very easily be extrapolated from Nazorean preaching of said idea, with the story about some other figure modified to refer to Jesus on that basis. This, in fact, has more explanatory power, and requires less absurd suppositions about Rabbis failing to have any social contact with their Orthodox Christian neighbours whatsoever, and the further implication that everyone who heard the orthodox gospel instantly converted and never spoke to their family again, which appears requisite for this theory to hold. That we have substantial counterevidence to those suppositions settles the issue.

11. For knowledge of the gospels, see Bar-Asher Siegal, Heretic Narratives, passim. For the communities widespread, close-proximity coexistence, see ibid, 1-42, and Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Early Christian monastic literature and the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), passim, but particularly 35-64.

12. David Goodblatt, "The Sanhedrin," in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Goodblatt has an entire monograph on the subject as well, though I have not been able to access a copy yet.

13. See the response to Goodblatt’s scepticism, including an in-depth survey of literature spanning from the Persian period through to the First Revolt, in Lester Grabbe, "Sanhedrin, Sanhedriyyot, or Mere Invention?," Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman period 39, no. 1 (2008), https://doi.org/10.1163/156851507X193081. Note that this idea of a more ad hoc institution is closer to that represented in the Synoptics, as well as Josephus and the other sources spanning a significant historical period.

14. Carrier, On the historicity of Jesus, 65.

15. That being those regarding the Rabbinic literature in the first half of “Element 5”, ibid. 73-6.

16. Halivni, Formation of the Babylonian Talmud, 143-50.

17. That was when I completed the draft, alas, I underestimated both Carrier’s and my own tendency toward prolix.