spin

How does this change what is known of the context of the gospels??

The particular section in which the two items I quoted are found basically starts with the question of how property cases are different from capital cases. These are just two. Nothing stands out that would separate them from their context. They are just two differences between property and capital cases that would mean nothing special except for their applicability in this issue and the unpalatableness for you.

I'm arguing that it wasn't. That it is part of an old law preserved with the rest of the indications in the section. The first addition is signaled through the mention of rabbi Judah, who explains how many people write down the votes for acquittal and conviction.


spin

spin

The reference to Rabban Simeon ben Gamaliel as having made the ruling ostensibly places the ruling to prior to the fall of the temple, which is consistent.

Rabbi Judah provides a dating for his own addition, but only provides a terminus ad quem for the rest.

I don't follow your conclusion, andrewcriddle. I would have thought we had dated the what rabban Simeon ben Gamaliel had said to his own period.


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Solitary Man

Non-sequitur, anyone?

Ben C Smith

One knows more after reading a good book than one knew before reading said book. I certainly learned a thing or two from Talbert.

Unpalatableness? What on earth are you talking about?

I have no firm opinion here on how early these traditions are. This is about method.

So, according to you, before 70 this law about priests applied, and it still applied after 70.

If this law was the same after 70 as before 70, how can you demonstrate that the one who listed it in (what became) the Mishnah was writing before 70?

To aver that this marriage law did not change is fatal to your positive argument for the early date of its inclusion in this list. It may have been included before 70, because the law had applicability before 70, but then again it may have been included after 70, because the law still had applicability after 70. On your own terms, neither a positive argument nor a negative argument is possible.

Ben.

spin

Look, Ben C, I don't give a flying fig for your name. If you have some reason you think you know more about the context of the gospels, elucidate it. Repeating names of people who aren't here to speak for themselves is not a particularly good approach.

I see.

According to me the law was written before the fall of the temple for it to have stated temple requirements. Had it been written later the requirements would have reflected a different world. Instead, the law reflects the status quo ante.

Status quo ante.

We have a legal section which dates itself by the inclusion of a status quo (regarding eligibility for capital cases) that was no longer meaningful with the fall of the temple. Laws, being conservative, are often kept when the initial conditions have changed. Think about it, Ben C. In the post-war period, when the culture is being run by rabbis and hachmim, why write laws giving pride of place to priests, Levites and Israelites who can marry into the priesthood rather than rabbis and hachmim?


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Ben C Smith

It would be a sin for me to try to summarize such a fine book on a single post when all you have to do is read the thing:

Charles Talbert, What Is A Gospel? (or via: amazon.co.uk)

If or when you read it, I would be happy to discuss the data and their implications with you.

(I know you prefer to eschew modern scholarship and turn solely to the texts themselves; however, one thing a good scholarly book will do is present and organize the data from the texts. If nobody ever read such scholarly books, we would have to reinvent the wheel every time we set pen to parchment.)

You have already answered this question: Because the laws tend to be inherently conservative. That being the case, you have no way of knowing that whoever compiled this list was writing before 70. Some of the laws on that list may derive from before 70; others may not.

It is a bit like the US Constitution or the Bill of Rights. The Constitution is written up tightly as a structured list of laws and guidelines. Some of these laws are very old, dating in principle back to English common law or the Magna Carta; others are brand spanking new, barely precedented except perhaps in the imaginations of Voltaire or Locke. The fact that some of the laws in the list date back to century XIII does not mean that all of the laws in the list date back to century XIII; the list itself was compiled five centuries to late to be put to such use.

Likewise, in the case of the Mishnah, it matters not whether certain laws on the list are ancient; the antiquity of one law on the list does not inherently prove anything about the antiquity of another law on the same list; the list compiler may have incorporated both old and new laws.

You have, AFAICT, provided no method for using one law to date another.

Ben.

spin

You aren't a particularly eloquent speaker when it comes to saying what the basic ideas are that you find so g-o-o-d. If you cannot even say what you find in what he writes that provides you with a real context for the gospels, then perhaps you can say how he knows the context for the gospels, ie what texts does he refer to in order to contextualize the gospels. You see that's what it comes down to: to know what something is you really have to contextualize it. If you cannot date it, say when it was written, who wrote it, where it was written, how many hands worked on it (and the points of view they were working each from), then I cannot see how anyone can contextualize the text. Will you shed some light or are you so cowed in awe that the cat's got your tongue?

I don't even claim that the list was written before 70. I do claim the differences between the trial of property and capital cases were formulated prior to 70.

You have only captured part of the idea of my argument when you lean on the notion that laws are inherently conservative. You must lean on the rest of the argument that writing a set of differences which includes a specifically pre-70 status quo should be dated on that inclusion, as there is no indicators that the clause about people who try capital cases is of a different fabric from the rest of the discourse and there are no attributions to any part of it to a later sage as is the case of so much of the material in the Mishnah.

You need to have a reason for hacking bits out of the text and so far you don't.

Funny enough I was going to write about the US Constitution in my previous response to show the basic idea of laws from one period whose context and content are quite clear from knowing the history of the time get added to later, reflecting the times the addition is from. Take the second amendment which talks about militias: you know, without considering the rest of the bill of rights, that it was written in a context in which militias were a going concern and people needed arms to be part of a militia. You can date that amendment and the other more pithy ones to a similar date based on style and interest.

The history of the writing of the US Constitution is quite interesting, and certainly not a simple process. Many constitutions were looked at but the laws were written afresh based on the conflicts of the people who went through the drafting process.

However, your attempt to compare the texts as you do isn't viable. You need to look at what the text is doing -- and sorry, it seems at least to me that you haven't got past what I've cited of the section. We are not dealing with separate laws but with a section which deals with the state of two related institutions and the differences between them. But you do need to read the Mishnah in order to see how it was put together.

The structure of the Mishnah tends to be in sections, starting off with a description of the status quo to which rulings get appended. The make-up of those who try capital cases is towards the end of the section, after which a ruling is added which indicates the end of the status quo material for the section, as the status quo needed clarification or adding to.

We are not dealing with more than one law, just one complicated law.


spin

DCHindley

I remember researching Neusner a while back on this issue. Unfortunately I cannot recall in which of his innumerable works he says this, but I believe he thinks that the legal opinions expressed in the Mishna are those that should be applied in a revived Jewish state.

Yes, for some while after the destruction of Herod's temple there was hope that the political situation would change enough for Jews to lobby the emperor to allow the reestablishment of the Temple state. However, that never transpired and by the Bar Kochba rebellion it as pretty much a given the chances were virtually zero.

So, while Neusner would agree that some part of these decisions might have been based on actual pre-70 practice, that doesn't mean that is how the sages wanted things done in the future. It all would depend on whether they thought there was a good reason for continuing the practice, or if the better choice was to recommend a better course for the future.

As for the actual state of affairs in Jesus' time, many critics believe that the Jerusalem temple operated as a "temple state" (sort of like a city state, with land under its jurisdiction, setting its own laws, etc). In the east, temple states were overseen by a representative of the king who ruled the area in which the temple state operated, and that would have beeen the Roman prefect Pilate in the early 30's CE. He or the Roman king could have set limits on how far the temple state could carry out its own legal decisions, and apparently did in the case of the Jewish temple state.

The popular stoning of gentiles stupid enough to wander out of their permitted boundries in the temple complex would be an example of something they did permit. The stoning of Stephen, if it really happened the way it is depicted in Acts, would likely have been an illegal tumult in Roman eyes. But did lynchings of blacks get prosecuted in the US south in the early part of the 20th centuy ... no. Neither did the Stephen thing ...

In Jesus' case, the gospels clearly depict the Jewish authorities as wanting to do away with this troublemaker, for petty reasons like jealousy or quibbling over violations, that to the gentile readers would seem like superstitious requirements, but in the end hand him over to the Romans as an unauthorized royal pretender.

I could argue that this is all careful apologistic rhetoric written in the late 1st or early 2nd century CE intended to explain (away) to the Romans in general how the founder of the Christian faith could have been executed as a rebel king, while at the same time distancing themselves from and blaming the unpopular Judeans (who had just suffered defeat by the Romans in the war of 66-74 CE). But one could also look at the operations of death squads and illegal "disappearance" style executions that occur all the time in the puppet states of powerful empires and wonder if this isn't an example of that kind of justice (or at least presented that way by the gospel authors as "the way it is" in places like Judea).

DCH

Ben C Smith

Of course there are no indicators that the different items on the list are of a different fabric. That is what lists do; they tend to erase such indicators. There are no such indicators in the main beatitudes, either. Yet Matthew has a few more of the basic ones than Luke does, and Luke has one that Matthew lacks. Without Luke, one would never guess (at least not very easily) that the strictly Matthean ones were not intrinsic to the list (or vice versa, if one knew Luke without Matthew)... unless one knew, as I think we should, that lists do that; they standardize what otherwise might have looked distinct.

Perhaps you could break the text...:

Cases coming before the court, be they civil or criminal, the witnesses thereof must be examined and investigated. As it is written: One manner of judicial law shall you have.

But what difference is there between civil and criminal cases? It is the following: The former cases are to be tried by three, and the latter by twenty-three judges. In the former the discussion may commence either with the accusation or with the defence, while the latter must commence with the defence and not with the accusation. In the former case one voice suffices either to accuse or to acquit, and in the latter he is acquitted by one voice, while to condemn two are needed. In the former the judge who proclaimed his view either to advantage or to disadvantage may, after deliberating, announce his view to the contrary. In the latter, however, he may do so only to acquit, but not to condemn. In civil cases the whole body of the court may defend or accuse, while in criminal cases all of them may acquit, but the whole body must not accuse. The former may be discussed in the daytime and the decision rendered at night, while in the latter the decision must be in the daytime. But if they did not come to a conclusion on the same day, they have to postpone it to the morrow. The decision concerning the former may be reached on the same day either to one's advantage or to his disadvantage, while in the latter the decision may be rendered on the same day to free him, but not to condemn him until the next day; and, therefore, cases of capital punishment must not be begun on the eve of the sabbath or of a legal holiday. In civil cases, and regarding defilement and purity, they begin by asking the opinion of the eldest, while in criminal cases they begin with those who are sitting on the side. All are qualified to judge civil cases, but not every one is qualified to judge criminal cases; as to the latter -- only priests, Levites, and Israelites who may legally marry daughters of priests.

...up for me in your usual way (I like the colors and boldfacing that you do) so that I can see exactly what in this list you are regarding as the status quo and what you are regarding as the appendices.

By my calculation, the make-up of the jury is not toward the end; it is at the end; it is the very last rule on the list. After this comes the Gemara, and the next Mishnah section turns to seating arrangements for the sanhedrin (right?).

This is what you must prove, not assume. Sure, it is a list of regulations on the same topic (differences between two different kinds of trials). But how do you know that all these regulations sprang up at the same time or in the present order of the list? If they did not necessarily spring up at the same time or in the order we have now, then your point is moot and your argument goes nowhere.

As for Charles Talbert, he draws upon the heroic and divine biographies and compares the gospels to them. These texts include: the Life of Moses; the Life of Empedocles; the Life of Apollonius; the Life of Romulus; and the Life of Hercules. The gospels share with these (and other) texts their central storyline: The hero lived his life heroically because he was either a theios anēr or divinely born (or both). Accordingly, the gospels are heroic biographies. That is their genre.

To directly compare the gospels to, say, the nonheroic biographies or to, say, the popular novels is a mistake, since they lack what is most important in the gospels, to wit, the divine nature of the hero (along with such things as his unusual birth, his ascension or assumption, and the like).

But the devil is in the details. Read the book.

(It was, BTW, no storming conservative who first encouraged me to read Talbert; it was Robert M. Price. Just FYI.)

Ben.

andrewcriddle

I should have noted, purely for the sake of completeness, that at the end of T Sanhedrin 7 there is an appendix giving the seven rules of exegesis attributed to Hillel.

Andrew Criddle