NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 78, Issue 3, 2024

The article gives an overview of the publications and the editorial policy of Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum since its inception in 1969. It was presented as an introductory address at a symposium presenting CRINT 16, The Literature of the Sages: A Re-visioning, edited by Professor Christine Hayes of Yale University, in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on March 21, 2023. While making some minor adaptations and supplementing the bibliography of CRINT at the end, the author has preserved some of the oral style of the address.

The Literature of the Sages: A Re-visioning presents the major works of classical rabbinic Judaism as inter-related aggregates analyzed through three broad perspectives: intertextuality (the multi-directional relationships among and between rabbinic texts and non-rabbinic Jewish sources), east and west (the impact on rabbinic texts of the cultures of the Hellenistic, Roman, and Christian West and the Sasanian East), and halakhah and aggadah (the relationship of law and narrative in rabbinic sources). This article demonstrates the insights gained by mobilizing all three perspectives in the analysis of a single text—the story of R. Yehoshua ben Ḥanania in Bavli (further; b.) Bekhorot 8b–9a.

This essay reviews the 2022 volume, The Literature of the Sages: A Revisioning, edited by Christine Hayes in the series Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum (CRINT).

This review article predominantly focuses on the way intertextuality is addressed in The Literature of the Sages: A Re-visioning. A significant and informative portion of the work is dedicated to intertextuality, including a comprehensive history of the respective scholarship in the study of rabbinic texts. Indeed, rabbinic texts are full of intertextuality in terms of parallels, implicit or explicit referentiality, quotes, allusions, or simply shared vocabulary. The review will point out that although A Re-visioning does a fine job in summarizing and reviewing prior scholarship (esp. Hayes) and in gesturing at new directions (Gray), the contributions lack consideration of the physical aspects of texts, which enabled, shaped, and perhaps prevented intertextuality on an intellectual and a material-related level.

The section on halakhah and aggadah in the recent volume of The Literature of the Sages addresses the complex relations between legal and non-legal materials, and the ways their juxtaposition creates a richer, multilayered view of normativity. At the same time, we learn that the merging of legal and non-legal materials is a result of intentional redactional activity, while the underlying sources reflect the separation between different study frameworks. Following this textual insight this paper suggests to re-examine the uniformity of rabbinic study culture, and the varying roles of halakhah and aggadah in the construction of rabbinic instruction and transmission.

The “lens” approach guiding The Literature of the Sages: A Re-visioning (2022) fits a new trend in handbooks on rabbinic literature. Reviewing handbooks produced after the Strack-Billerbeck commentary on the New Testament shows how their focus shifted from addressing and countering supersessionist views as embedded in the Spätjudentum paradigm by providing philological critique, towards synchronic approaches of rabbinic Judaism and its relations both to the non-rabbinic and the non-Jewish world. Moreover, textual discourse became paired with debating material culture and non-elite or non-canonical practices and genres, and gradually detached itself from reconstructing the Jewish world of the New Testament to offer a diachronic view on inner-Jewish developments.