Chapters in the Formative History of Judaism by Neusner Jacob;

Author:Neusner, Jacob;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UPA
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

II

THE ADVENT OF AUTHORIZED LIVES: WHY NOT?

Christianity produced biographies of saints, Judaism did not produce biographies of sages. In the comparison with the Gospels I am guided by Richard A. Burridge: “The Gospels are nothing less than Christology in narrative form.”6 We wonder then, why no counterpart in the Rabbinic canon to the Christian gospel and, by extension, why no counterpart to fully articulated lives of saints, masters of the Torah? Why no effort even at forming compositions — chapters — that would yield composites akin to a life story in meaningful part if not as a whole?7 To be sure, in the figures of Hillel and Shammai, Yohanan ben Zakkai, Eliezer b. Hyrcanus, Joshua b Hananiah and Elisha b. Abbuyah we do have sizable compositions that can have entered into coherent composites and that can have sustained partial, if not complete, life-stories, the Rabbinic counterpart for the Torah to “Christology in narrative form.”

From Eusebius, biographer of Constantine, onward, holy men in the community of Christianity, and not solely Jesus himself, were subjected to narrative representation and supplied the occasion for authorized biographies. The particular canonical documents that are generally assumed to have reached closure in the later fourth and fifth centuries contained the large composites of biographical constructions of sages that we have identified in the earlier chapters of this monograph. And I state with emphasis:

These documents rich in narratives of sages reached closure at the time at which authorized biographies were emerging in Christendom.

The span of a hundred years from Eusebius’s life of Constantine in the earlier fourth century to Augustine’s life a century later marked the period in which authorized biographies came to form a kind of Christian writing. And on the Rabbinic side documents that came to closure in that same century collected sizable narratives of sages’ lives, whether Hillel or Elisha b. Abbuyah and Meir. So we shall have to compare two very roughly contemporaneous bodies of writing, specifically some of the Rabbah-Midrash-compilations and the lives of holy men, the saints from Eusebius’s Life of Constantine to Augustine’s autobiography and the sages from Genesis Rabbah, Pesiqta deRab Kahana, and Ruth Rabbah to the Fathers According to R. Nathan text A.

Was the sage comparable to the figure of Jesus as Christ? If so, then why no stories? If not, then why expect stories?

The sage stood at that same level of authority as did the Torah, on the one side, and the Mishnah, on the other. The sage figured prominently in the Mishnah, as evidenced by tractate Abot, and the sage stood in judgment on the meaning of Scripture, as evidenced by Sifra. Therefore the failure to compose biographical composites of a sustained order — the Rabbinic counterpart to gospels in theory — alongside Midrash-compilations and Mishnah-exegesis is not to be explained away as the byproduct of the conception of revelation through words but not through persons and their actions.

Quite to the contrary, in the Rabbinic documents God reveals the Torah not only through words handed down

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