Jesus and the Rabbis (1) Robbert A. Veen
Veen
Jesus and the Rabbis (1)
Jesus' attitude toward the Torah
and Jewish oral tradition
By Dr. Robbert A. Veen
Huizen, the Netherlands
@ all rights reserved 2008
Summary: Though Jesus affirmed the validity of the To-
rah and obeyed its precepts, He did interpret it in a par-
ticular way. The Kingdom, Gods presence among His
people, exceeds the boundaries of Israël and favors moral
integrity above cultic purity. Is this new interpretation of
the Torah a complete deviation from Jewish Oral tradi-
tion? Or is it part of an ongoing debate between Pharisaic
teachers of the Law? Here we might need to make a dis-
tinction between what Jesus taught and how the early
Church received His teaching. In the light of contempo-
rary events, the Church exaggerated the differences be-
tween Jesus and the rabbis.
In this first part I will investigate the rabbinic institution
of the washing of the hands as discussed in Mark 7. In
the next article I will deal with the passage itself.
How did Jesus approach the Torah?
If Jesus did not abrogate the Torah1 what then was
He teaching His disciples about its function?
We must turn now to the difficult question of what
Jesus really taught about the Mosaic law and of
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what consequences this has for the shape of Chris-
tian obedience.
First, to simply go to the opposite and assume
agreement between Jesus and the Pharisees on ma-
jor issues of law, based for the most part on silence,
is a dangerous enterprise. There is more than
enough positive evidence to suggest that in many
cases there was agreement between Jesus’ position
and at least some of the reconstructable early
sources of rabbinic doctrine.
Jesus would certainly have agreed with the majori-
ty of his contemporaries that the Torah contained
the decisive revelation of the will of God.
However, there are differences. The texts show us
that a different understanding of the nature of God
and a different response to the social tensions of his
time made Jesus stand out in some of his decisions
on Jewish law.
Consensus on the shift in attitude
There is a considerable consensus about the shift in
attitudes that Jesus' preaching presupposes.
In the traditional view three basic shifts account
for the difference in Jesus’ position vis-à-vis the
law:
1. Salvation without the Temple
Jesus accepts the gospel of John the Baptist that
there was only one way to escape the coming judg-
ment, and that way did not lead through the Tem-
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Jesus and the Rabbis (1) Robbert A. Veen
ple and its system of sacrificial atonement. One
needs to be baptized and follow the will of God
with a new commitment. Jesus’ baptism in the Jor-
dan therefore implies Jesus’ rejection of the suffi-
ciency of the Temple cult. It includes an image of
God as avenging Judge that soon afterwards is
transformed in Jesus’ own preaching.
2. God is coming like a bridegroom
Jesus shows that God is about to renew his marriage
vows to Israel. God, the Bridegroom of Israel, is
coming to His people to save them. That is why
there can be no fasting! There is a deep sense of the
presence of God among His people.
3. Kingdom beyond Israël
If God is coming like that to His people, then Israel
is not identical to the Kingdom of God. That king-
dom was present since the Mosaic law, the com-
mandments, were given to realize God’s sovereign
rule in this world. What Israel is awaiting is a new
kind of presence of God in the midst of His people
without the mediation of the Temple, i.e., directly,
forgiving the sins of all people without condition.
That is the reason that Jesus is not interested in mat-
ters of holiness and purity.
Jesus looked at the Torah in the light of this partic-
ular understanding of God. The Torah had the func-
tion to reveal to humankind God’s boundless and
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benevolent love for man. Because God had already
begun His new kingdom of divine presence, it was
not important to direct everybody’s attention to the
Torah as a rule of life. Not the text of the Torah, but
the revelation of God’s love contained in it, was to
Jesus the essence of the traditions of Israel.
It seems clear that though this is a different posi-
tion from that encountered in mainstream Phari-
saism, it does constitute a radical effort to affirm the
validity of the Torah as a vehicle of revelation and
the basis for man’s behavior. The nature and extent
of Jesus’ abrogation of the Torah in its aspect of law
could be combined with His statements on the va-
lidity of the Law as vehicle of the revelation of
grace.
Is this picture correct? Then we should find a clear
rejection of the rabbinic way of thinking in Jesus’
teaching on the Law. After all, if the Torah remains
a revealed text, but its focus is no longer on human
behavior but on Gods revealed grace, Jesus stands
in opposition to the Rabbis that tried to claim both
at the same time.
Since the affirmation of the Torah as Law is the
viewpoint that is most often associated with the
Pharisaic approach to Torah, our attention now
must shift to Jesus’ connection with the proponents
of oral law.
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Jesus and the Rabbis (1) Robbert A. Veen
Jewish traditions
We must ask what Jesus’ response was to the Phari-
saic traditions. Was He really that far removed from
the way the Pharisees explained the law? We cannot
accept beforehand the idea that Jesus was a part of
the Pharisaic tradition, and the classical view in-
forms us that Jesus was in opposition to the Phari-
saic exposition of the Torah. We need to examine
the evidence to reach a conclusion.
The most decisive opposition to Pharisaic thought
in the gospels seems to be found in Mark 7 so it
seems evident that we should start here. If Mark 7
does not give evidence for a rejection of oral law by
Jesus, the other passages, with far weaker state-
ments, should be reconsidered along the same lines.
In order to understand what is going on, some in-
troductory remarks are needed.
The gospel of Mark is based on Palestinian tradi-
tions about Jesus, which account for most of the
sayings, and Hellenistic and Galilean narratives.
Marks main effort was to provide a consistent nar-
rative that could combine the various traditions that
he had received into one continuous story.
That does not mean however that Mark did not
have a specific message he wanted to convey. The
main intent of Marks theology seems to be linked to
a very early type of piety that saw in Jesus the ex-
ceptional teacher, debater, leader, and healer. The
debates are constructed in order to show Jesus’ ex-
ceptional nature, and they focus less on the con-
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tents.
Nevertheless, Mark received Palestinian traditions
that did focus on the contents, as is clear in particu-
lar from such passages as Mark 2 and 7. These tradi-
tions were not simply reported, but used as build-
ing blocks within the context that Mark constructed
for his major purposes. It is Marks strategy to use
them in such a way, that the emphasis shifts from
the dialogue and its issues to a statement about Je-
sus. He uses the dialogue as a means to portray the
various responses to Jesus. The crowds, the dis-
ciples, the Pharisees, and other groups are con-
fronted with Jesus and are astonished or in fear.
(E.g. 1:22, 27; 2:12; 4:41; 5:20, 42; 6:50; 7:37; 9:14;
10:32; 12:17, 34; 15:5; 16:8)
In the same manner, the role of the disciples is por-
trayed in various ways as a response to Jesus.
The meaning of Jesus’ mission is not presented in a
more or less independent Christology, but through
the response of men to the exceptionality of Jesus’
character and mission. Dialogue therefore is not re-
presented for its own sake, but with this larger issue
in mind. It seems obvious that the Palestinian tradi-
tions that Mark received, have had their own mean-
ing taken up and altered by the wider context.
We might expect that every passage that shows Je-
sus in dialogue must then have two distinguishable
layers. The one is the tradition that Mark had to
report, the other is the wider context and certain
additions that Mark made to achieve his own theo-
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logical goal.
This has consequences for the way we read the di-
alogues about Jewish oral tradition. Jesus' position,
if still known with some degree of certainty, would
still be used to proclaim Jesus status or explain His
character. But some continuity between these state-
ments and the theological image of Jesus should be
present. The two layers would need to be harmo-
nized.
As far as I can tell, this had to be achieved by link-
ing the original dialogue or event to the surface is-
sues that Mark wanted to deal with. That link in-
volves an interpretation of the received tradition in
the light of the new question of Jesus' identity. The
older material would be used to extract an answer
to that question and then in return the text would be
remodeled to reflect this understanding even better.
Jesus’ own position may have given rise to a varie-
ty of positions on the Torah and, by implication, a
variety of positions with regard to what constitutes
Christian obedience. The interpretation of the ma-
terial would provide an more uniform statement
about who Jesus was. Knowing who Jesus was be-
came more important, especially to non-Jewish
Christians, than knowing what He had said.
How can we hope to regain some insight into Je-
sus' teachings if we need to differentiate between
the sayings in their original context and the way
they gave rise to and were taken up in the new con-
text?
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The separation of the oldest traditions and the lay-
ers of reflective materials is motivated and driven
by the form of the material. If a text is halakhic in
nature, we probably have before us the material that
occasioned the labor of the redactor. That is based
on the assumption that the more Jewish a quotation
of Jesus is, the more authentic it will be, because
keeping it would be motivated solely by the respect
for its source. The apparent need to provide an in-
terpretative framework to dispel unwanted conse-
quences when taken on its own, is precisely evi-
dence of its authenticity. The Church itself after all,
as is clear from Acts and the letter of Paul, moved
away from its Jewish center soon after Jesus' death.
The Palestinian traditions, most notably what
scholars have called the logia-source, are in some
respects akin to the language of the Mishnah. It
might consist of a single quotation with a legal con-
clusion. It might consist of a single statement about
proper behavior. Such halakhic statements take
precedent over Christological material which is
more likely to have been added since they answer
the question who Jesus was.
As an example I'll consider the material present in
chapter 7:1-23 of Marks gospel first. The passage is
about eating bread with defiled, that is unwashed
hands. It obviously contains elements dealing with
behavior (7:2-4) , it contains dialogue between Jesus
and the Pharisees (7:5-17) and a quotation of scrip-
ture with an application to the situation at hand
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Jesus and the Rabbis (1) Robbert A. Veen
(7:10-13). All ingredients are there: halakhic state-
ments, dialogue and scriptural exegesis. But it also
belongs to a strain of events that ultimately ans-
wered the question who Jesus was in relation to the
Pharisees (7:37).
Impurity of the hands
I will examine the impurity of the hands first from a
Jewish perspective to see precisely what issue Mark
is dealing with.
The Gemara2 in Sabbath 15a quotes Rav Judah (Ju-
dah b. Ezekiel, a Babylonian Amora3 of the third
century) as saying in the name of Samuel, who lived
one generation earlier at the end of the 2nd century,
that King Solomon had instituted the ritual washing
of the hands.
That seems to indicate that the discussion was set-
tled and the ritual an ordinary part of Jewish life.
The statement about the antiquity of the ritual is
then hardly exaggerated.
If we take all of this at face value, we might agree
with what seems to have been a long standing con-
sensus, that Jesus violated Jewish Law here, as well
as in Mark 2 with regard to the Sabbath. These con-
flicts are then taken as decisive for measuring Jesus'
opposition to His contemporaries and as ultimately
leading to His death.
Mark himself suggests as much when he states at
the end of the passage about the man with withered
hand being healed on the Sabbath: 'And the Phari-
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sees going out straightway with the Herodians took
counsel against him, how they might destroy him.'
(Mark 3:6; Darby)
If we take the opposite direction by claiming that
the incident is not worth our attention since there
cannot have been any serious infringement of the
Law, we still have to explain why both the Sabbath
infraction in Mark 2 and the washing of the hands
are being treated with so much weight by Mark.
This is even more so, when we consider the unrea-
listic quality of the event. It is highly unlikely that
the Pharisees would find Jesus in Galilee in order to
find an deviation from rabbinic law in His disciples.
That would motivate the notion that the conflict
stories were actually composed in the light of the
growing conflict between Judaism and Christianity.
But it might even be more unrealistic than that.
In the view of E.P. Sanders, the discussion in Mark
7 is also highly artificial because washing the hands
before a common meal (as opposed to a festive meal
or on Sabbath), was a Pharisaic tradition at most
and not a law; there is hardly any evidence for it in
the 1st century; it was certainly not a uniform tradi-
tion; most Jews probably did not abide by it, so it
could not have been a cause for deadly enmity.4
Sanders5 maintains that the issue arose much later,
in the early period of the formation of the Mishnah
tractate Yadaim, in his estimate well after A.D. 70,
which deals extensively with the purity of the
hands. That would mean that not only the circums-
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tances, but the heart of the conflict itself is highly
dubious.
Sanders then comes to the conclusion: 'Surely sto-
ries as these should not be read as describing actual
debates between Jesus and others.'6 My answer: Yes
and no, I would say. No, in the sense that the inci-
dent as a whole, with all the weight it has, did not
happen as described. Yes, in the sense that after
separating the incident from the reflective layers,
the debate is probable and its consequences correct-
ly drawn out. The only thing is, it might not be real-
ly about washing the hands after all.
Could it have been an original first century debate?
Let's consider that question first. James Dunn, disa-
greeing with Sanders on this question, sees in Mark
7 strong evidence that the issue of washing the
hands before meals was already under debate. In
his estimate, the core issue of Mark 7 is indeed a
Jewish debate on a point of law.7
Dunn more or less accuses Sanders of having in-
troduced the dogma that there could have been no
conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees about hala-
kah. Mark 7 would actually show the opposite.
Whereas Sanders reconstructs the Pharisee position
from later sources and on that basis rejects Mark 7
as improbable, Dunn accepts the historical informa-
tion of Mark 7 and concludes that the Talmudic po-
sition is late in origin.
Dunn of course has some historical support in the
probability that the decree demanding a washing of
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the hands must have been old, precisely because the
Talmud cannot remember who started it: the re-
ference to the days of King Solomon might support
that. But that is not a decisive peace of evidence by
any standard.
Based on Talmudic evidence, a debate on the
washing of the hands is not completely to be ruled
out. The decree that triggered the later - later in
Sanders' estimate that is - conflict, could have been
at least as old as the 1st century BC, the era of
Shammai and Hillel, though the same text seems to
indicate that there was initially a difference of opi-
nion amongst them and that the matter was brought
to agreement only afterwards amongst their pupils.
Therefore, presuming that the Talmud is historically
accurate, the matter was concluded after Jesus’ life-
time.
If therefore the Talmud is correct in pushing the
institution of the washing of the hands toward an
earlier date, it thereby also moves the conflict about
its validity to an earlier date.
The latter means that Mark 7, if we take Dunn's
side and see it as evidence of an early institution, is
at the same time evidence of it being debated among
the Rabbis. Sanders is then right in his conclusion
that the issue would never have led to a violent con-
flict as such, because no Pharisee consensus would
make it so. But he is wrong about the idea that the
debate as such was not important.
As I will show, the debate about the washing of the
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hands was important but not because of its legal
contents as such, but because of the implications
concerning Rabbinic authority.
Why does it matter?
Is it all of minor importance because it is just about
a point of law or is more at stake? Is Mark taking a
dialogue on a point of law out of context to present
us with the theological opposition between the Mes-
siah and the Pharisees? Or is he merely reflecting
the opposition between the Church and Judaism of
his own time, constructing a debate that never hap-
pened and never could have happened but was
plausible to a Roman audience without any real
knowledge of Judaism?
To my mind, it seems clear that the debate about
hand washing has to be about something else.
Precisely because in this rabbinic commandment
both the issue of the authority of rabbinical enact-
ments and the Pharisiac drive towards sanctification
of ordinary life were at stake, it must have been an
item of grave conflict. The debate between Jesus and
the Pharisees was not about washing hands as such,
as James Dunn emphasizes, but about who could
decide such an issue and for what reason it could
be deemed desirable to have such a halakah.
Rabbinic law on washing of the hands
What did the rabbis actually say? The Mishnah in
Chagiga II,4 states that hands need to be rinsed be-
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fore eating unconsecrated food, and the Gemara
(18b) explains that this must be for bread, while one
need not rinse his hands before eating fruit. (If we
take Mark 7 as historical, this shows that it must at
least have been valid law before the year 70.)
In this context we may make a motivated guess
that the historic referent of Mark 7 seems to belong
at least partially to the first stage of the conflict, and
that it is set against the background of the Sadducee
conflict because it is about the authority of the oral
tradition; in part, however, it also belongs to a much
later Christian-Jewish debate, when the ritual itself
was abolished for Christians. The element of the
inclusion or exclusion of gentiles is then made into
the context of the entire debate. I will go into this
hypothesis in more detail later.
So the core of the debate is probably authentic, and
we may identify it as pre-70, following Dunn’s
analysis. The first stage of this debate as it unwinds
in the Talmued was most certainly a debate be-
tween Sadducees and Pharisees, the second stage
exclusively a debate among Pharisaic teachers
themselves.
Now we must ask the next question: what was this
debate exactly about? The Gemara in Chulin 106a
discusses the custom in a way that makes it clear
that the rationale behind the commandment was
secondary in nature. It was an already established
custom that the Rabbis debated.
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Rabbinic origin
First of all, it surely did not originate in the Torah
itself. It was reported that R. Eleazar b. Arach (a
teacher, Tanna, of the 1st century) commented upon
a baraita (a Mishnah not found in Rabbi Judah’s
compilation) that simply stated:
It is written: And whomsoever he that hath the issue
touches, without having rinsed his hands in water, Lev.
15:11, herein, said R. Eleazar b. Arach, the sages found
biblical support for the law of washing the hands.
But the biblical support they found was derived by
a procedure called asmachta, i.e., a rabbinic ruling
was given and afterwards it was homiletically lin-
ked to a quotation from the Torah without contend-
ing that the text actually taught the ruling.
In the text of Torah, the washing of the hands is
not a separate act, but one that is included in bath-
ing, In the rabbinic ruling the washing of the hands
becomes a separate act, implying that all those who
did not wash their hands are unclean and unfit to
partake of the meal.
It is however important that the text used refers to
uncleanlines of an entirely different nature:
If any man have a flux from his flesh, because of his flux
he is unclean. (Lev. 15:2)
And whomsoever he toucheth who hath the flux and
hath not rinsed his hands in water--he shall wash his
garments, and bathe in water, and be unclean until the
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even. (Lev. 15:11)
In fact, as is clear from Hirsch’s commentary on
Leviticus 15:118, the text itself implies that any man
who bathes also cleans his hands by doing so, and
the hands are mentioned as a meaningful pars pro
toto for the body as a whole, emphasizing that the
capability to act was restored in such ritual bathing.
It is clear, then, that an application of Lev. 15:11 to
the washing of the hands before meals presupposes
an intent to make the common meal into an analogy
of the priestly meal, which indeed required Levitical
purity.
We must note in passing that I accept the general
idea that Pharisaic teaching was characterized by
the intent of applying Levitical purity to ordinary
life, to “educate the masses in holiness” as was
shown e.g. by Jacob Neusner.9
Neusner expressed the view that the Pharisees
contributed a viewpoint and a method. The viewpoint
addressed “all Israel,” and the method focused
upon the sanctification of “all Israel.
"The Pharisees contributed to the nascent system
after 70 a fundamental attitude that everyone mat-
tered and an emphasis on the holiness of everyday
life.”10
James Dunn mentions the “received wisdom” that
the Pharisees at the time of Jesus were a purity sect.
Their concern was to keep the purity laws, which
governed access to the Temple and participation in
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the cult, outside the Temple, to extend the holiness
of the Temple throughout the land of Israel.
Rabbinic authority
Secondly, it is also clear that the custom is intrinsi-
cally linked to its authoritative source.
In the same passage we discussed above, we find
R. Idi b. Abin (a Babylonian Amora of the 4th. cen-
tury) stating that the washing of the hands was in-
stituted because of the ritual purity of terumah, food
consecrated to the Temple. This provides the argu-
ment for my contention above, that the ritual that
was prescribed for the priests - bathing the whole
body, including hands before a consecrated meal -
was transferred by the Pharisees beyond that sphere
to become a washing of the hands before a common
meal.
Hands are considered unclean, but only in the
second degree, meaning that they could not defile
common food but could defile consecrated food.
However, this is valid for priests, and, on the as-
sumption that the festive meals on religious holi-
days constituted an analogy to priestly gatherings,
only valid for such occasions. How could it, on the
basis of Torah, be applied to ordinary meals as
well?
In fact, only tradition itself could provide a foun-
dation for that, and there can be a connection be-
tween two efforts to give a basis for the ritual: the
one implying the priestly analogy, extending the ri-
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tual laws to laymen in order to sanctify Israel, and
the other the sheer fact that it had been handed
down by tradition.
Obviously, R. Idi considered compliance with this
rabbinic institution a meritorious act, even if there
was no basis for it in written law. Obeying the rab-
bis is in itself a form of piety, since it expresses
loyalty to the system in which halakah is produced.
Therefore, when the Gemara asks the obvious
question “why?” it is understandable why the
younger contemporary of R. Idi, Abaye, is thought
to have answered with a general principle:
It is a meritorious act to hearken to the words of the
sages.
The formal reason for the obedience lies therefore
in the authority of the sages themselves.
Dispute about the practice
But the sages’ opinion was not fully undisputed.
Rab (2nd and 3rd century) argued that after a per-
son had washed his hands in the morning, this
would serve him all day if he so stipulated in his
mind, if he did not dirty his hands or render them
unclean later.
Nevertheless, this opinion did not survive: it lost
the analogy with the priestly requirements and con-
tradicted the specifics of the earlier and already
widespread Pharisaic institution. It implied also a
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more “material” and rational way of looking at the
issue of impurity or cleanliness.
All of this shows that to the third and fourth gen-
erations of Amoraïm the only real reason for ob-
edience to the commandment is the fact that the
rabbis instituted it and that they loosely accepted
the priestly analogy as the general motivation for it.
This is shown also by comparison with a related
minor issue.
In the Chulin passage we also find mention of the
sages instituting the washing of the hands before
eating fruit, and not only before partaking of a
common meal with bread. The reason for that insti-
tution is given by the same R. Eleazar as “reasons of
cleanliness.”
Raba explains this as meaning that washing the
hands is neither a duty (not a rabbinic enactment)
nor a meritorious act (which though not com-
manded is an act of piety), but merely a matter of
free choice.
What does this say about the washing of the hands
before eating bread? Surely that to some rabbis the
washing of the hands (since ritual defilement cannot
be conferred upon the bread) is intrinsically a mat-
ter of free choice or only an issue of cleanliness. In-
trinsically, the rabbis of the Talmud accept the ver-
dict that Mark 7 pronounces upon the custom and
agree with Jesus’ main principle that there was no
real defilement here.
But the result of the discussion in the Talmud is
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not the abrogation of the institution of the washing
of the hands before a meal where bread is used.
Rabbinic authority makes it a duty on account of
that authority itself.
As we have seen, it is a meritorious act when the
sages institute it as such. There is no valid ground
for it apart from an analogy with priestly customs,
which to some was not a sufficient reason. The
washing of the hands, included in his bathing, was
a prerequisite only for the priest when he had his
meal in the Temple.
So his “preparation” for partaking of consecrated
food, terumah, provides analogous grounds for the
washing of the hands of the non-priest before a
common meal. It is an act that strengthens the simi-
larity between life at home and priestly life in the
Temple. And that in itself is a choice the rabbis
made, and which then, because of their status, be-
comes meritorious and a duty. The act itself is an
acknowledgement of their authority and their intent
to sanctify life outside the confines of the Temple.
The issue in its final stage in Mark 7 is therefore
moved beyond the question of purity or impurity to
become focused on the authority of the rabbis them-
selves to build up the Jewish way of life.
The gospel of Mark in its editorial layer very accu-
rately opposes that by showing Jesus’ authority to
reject not only the specific halakhic decision , but the
system itself. In Mark’s rendering of the conflict,
messianic authority clashes with rabbinic authority,
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even when originally a debate on the issue itself
must have been concerned with principles and ar-
guments along the lines of the debate recorded in
the Talmud.
So we can conclude: in the ritual commandment to
wash the hands before eating a complete meal (im-
plying bread), the rationale rests on a loose analogy
with priestly law and ultimately on the fact that it
was an institution of the sages, making what is in
itself an “act of free choice” into an honoring of rab-
binic authority and the intent to sanctify life.
In this honoring of rabbinic authority, the accep-
tance of the basic Pharisaic endeavor to make life at
home into an analogy to Temple symbolism is im-
plied. Utensils, food, and company at meals must
comply with specific rules for holiness.
Obviously, a person who would not comply with
this institution would be excluded from fellowship,
since that would involve a rejection of rabbinic au-
thority as such. However, the basis for that exclu-
sion would not be, as we have seen, the fact that
such non-compliance constituted a breach of Torah,
but merely disregard for a rabbinic institution. That
changed an “act of free choice,” which might have
been prompted by arguments of cleanliness, into a
prescribed ritual.
All of this allows us to reconstruct the Mark 7 pas-
sage and differentiate between its core - the incident
- and its reflective stages. That I will do in my next
contribution.
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Jesus and the Rabbis (1) Robbert A. Veen
Notes
1 See my 'Why We Can't Have Jesus Without the To-
rah?' (2008-09-13) and 'Jesus Fulfilled the Law, But What
Does It Mean?' (2008-09-15) on
http://www.journalofcrisistheology.com/articles.php.
2 Gemara, literally: completion. The word refers to the
oral discussions on the body of Jewish Law as they were
recorded and collected in the two recensions of the Tal-
mud, the Babylonian or the Palestinian (Jerusalem) Tal-
mud, or to the whole of the Talmud consisting of Mish-
nah and Gemara.
3 The authorities in the Mishnah are called Tannaim,
expounders (of the law). The authorities that commented
on the Mishnah are called Amoraim, teachers (of the law).
These Amoraim lived in Babylonia or Palestine from the
3d century onward.
4 See note 3.
5 Sanders, E.P., Jesus and Judaism, (Philadelphia:Fortress
press), 1985, p. 264 - 267.
6 Sanders (1985), p. 265.
7
Dunn, James, D.G., The Partings of the Ways, London,
1991, p. 43. Dunn focuses his counterargument on E.P.
Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (1985), pp. 178, 199, 209, 264-5.
8 Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Pentateuch, translation and
commentary, translated by Isaac Levy, London, Judaica
Press, 19762 (1867 – 1878).
9 Neusner, Jacob, Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees
(1971).
10 Neusner , Jacob, Rabbinic Judaism, (1995), p. 52.
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