No Robots

All Dodd says is:

Hezekiah...is thought to be the person referred to in the cryptic saying attributed to Hillel (who may be the famous rabbi) that there is no Messiah for the Israelites because they devoured him in the days of Hezekiah.--Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel By C. H. Dodd, p. 100, fn 1.

There is no interpretation of what is intended by the word 'devoured.'


The very Soncino translation of the Talmud that I first cited uses 'enjoyed.'

Yes. Translations of this passage frequently use 'enjoyed' as a gloss for 'devoured.'

Absolutely.

I don't really know why many translators have substituted 'enjoyed' for 'devoured.'

In the specific question of attribution, my speculation is that it is the idea of the Messiah having come and gone that is too outrageous to accept as having come from Hillel the Great. On the gloss of 'enjoyed' for 'devoured,' it seems to me that Rashi wanted to distance the passage from any correlation with Christian Eucharistic doctrine.

He does not do so, nor have I claimed that he did. It is Bammel who does so.

My only point is that the trope of eating the Messiah exists within the Talmud, and thus is not inherently un-Jewish.

'Enjoyed' is indeed a gloss for 'devoured,' but its use counter-indicates your claim that the passage proposes that the Jews somehow made themselves unworthy of receiving the Messiah.

As I said above, the only thing that I intend to demonstrate is that the trope of devouring the Messiah is found in the Talmud and thus is not inherently alien to Judaism.

aa5874

I have already showed you that there were no belief with respect to Nazarene in the Gospels, the author appear to have thought that a Nazarene was from Nazareth.

It should have now become apparent to you that the authors of the Gospels did not syncretise any beliefs, they were only interested in propagating out of context and mis-leading information, these Gospel authors mutilated the beliefs of the Jews.

These Gospel authors did not even appear to know or realize that the Jews, based on their beliefs, expected the Messiah sometime around 70 CE or that Jews would not have worshipped a man as a God, based on their beliefs.

spamandham

a) You have not shown that at all. Of the 4 canonical Gospel authors, only 1 makes a link between 'Nazarene' and 'from Nazareth'. That link does not exist in Mark, which is generally accepted as the oldest of the 4.

b) Our knowledge of competing Jewish sects comes from Josephus, not the NT. The NT supports that idea, but is not the primary source of such information.

I see no point in discussing this further. If you want to pretend there were not competing Jewish sects in the first century, you're welcome to do so.

Jeffrey Gibson

A trope is a common or overused theme or device. Since the phrase "eating/enjoying/devouring the Messiah" appears only twice in the whole of the Talmud, i.e, at Sanhedrin 98b


and at Sanhedrin 99a

and is in both instances attributed to one Hillel as something he and he alone said, the expression can hardly be labeled a "trope".

More importantly, it appears within a discussion of when the Messiah would finally appear and deliver Israel from oppression and establish the Messianic Kingdom. It has noting to do with the Messiah's coming and going.

Nor does it have anything to do with the type of eating of his "body/flesh" that Jesus commands his disciples to engage in which is, notably, something that he says will commemorate him/preserve his presence among them and is the only way by which they may secure for themselves a share in "eternal life".

And most important of all, it is something that according to Hillel prevents the Messiah from ever coming, something that ruined the hope of Israel for Messianic deliverance, and something that other Rabbis did feel was alien to Judaism.

So how this "trope" -- even if it was uttered in the first century -- has anything to do with the words of institution or what Jesus says in Jn. 6, let alone shows that what Jesus says in the words of institution and in Jn 6 was something that existed in, and was consistent with, first century Jewish thought is beyond me.

The only reason I can see that you keep saying that it did and that it was is that you cannot bring yourself to admit that Brunner was wrong in associating San. 99a with the Last Supper and that his knowledge of first century Judaism, not to mention his bankrupt assumption that we can use the Talmud indiscriminately to illuminate first century Palestinian Judaism (see the work of Neusner and a host of other Talmudic experts on this) is less than stellar.

Jeffrey

Stephen T-B

Just butting in here (arrived too late at the party) but for someone to be considered
Jewish it is necessary that both mother and father are Jews.
Mary was presumably Jewish - but what about God, the Father?
Should we ask him to take down his pants so we can see?

Toto

Only the mother needs to be Jewish. The father is always to some degree uncertain, at least before modern genetics.

No Robots

Brunner is hardly the only person to associate the Eucharist with established Jewish practice. See, for example, "He That Cometh" by David Daube (1966) (pdf). Btw, Daube (p. 8, footnote 40) also entertains the possibility that Sanhedrin 99a should be attributed to Hillel the Great.

Jeffrey Gibson

Wow, you keep getting slipperier and slipperier with your equivocations. The issue has never been whether the "Eucharist" (is that what we have in Jn 6?) can be associated with established Jewish Passover practice, but whether what "Hillel" is reported to have said in Sanhedrin 98b and 99a is an actual parallel to what Jesus is reported to have said in his words of institution and in Jn 6, and shows that the idea behind Jesus' call to his disciples to eat his body and to chew upon his flesh -- namely that doing so would, and was the means to, continue his presence as Messiah among them and was something necessary for them or anyone to do to gain "eternal life" -- was already something being mooted in 1st century Palestinian Jewish thought.

Should be? He says no such thing. You have woefully misunderstood his use of the world "should" in his sentence. And in any case, he certainly does not deny that Hillel's thought that the "eating of the Messiah" he speaks about was a bad thing that destroyed Israel's hope of the Messiah coming to deliver Israel from oppression.

You might want to note that Daube, Bammel, and Dodd were all part of the same NT seminar at Cambridge. Daube's and Dodd's noting the possibility (but never saying it was probable or likely) that the Hillel of Sanhedrin 98b and 99a was Hillel the great was simply an acknowledgement that Bammel had made a case for the idea, nothing more.

Jeffrey

No Robots

My only contention is that the image of eating the Messiah is a familiar one in Judaism.

Read carefully what I said, namely that Daube asserts the possibility that the passage should be attributed to Hillel the Great.

But he certainly does not assert this, either.


You can find Bammel's arguments, in German, here:

• "Das Wort vom Apfelbäumchen" / Ernst Bammel. In Novum Testamentum, Vol. 5, Fasc. 2/3 (Jul., 1962), pp. 219-228.
• Judaica Et Paulina / Ernst Bammel, p. 125ff.

Jeffrey Gibson

But it simply isn't a familiar one in Judaism, neither in the literal form that Jesus is presented in the Gospels as suggesting his disciples could/should/must do to keep the Messiah's presence among them and to partake of the Kingdom of God/eternal life, nor in the figurative form that "Hillel" speaks of.

Nor have you produced a stitch of evidence to show that it was.

Where does this literal form appear -- as we could expect it frequently would if it was a "familiar" one -- in non Christian Jewish literature or apart from Pagan accusations against Christians of cannibalism? Certainly not in Sanhedrin 98b and 99a ot anywhere else for that matter.

And where does Hillel's obviously figurative image (did he really believe not only that the Messiah had come when Hezekiah was king or during Herod the Great's reign and that people chowed down on him?) appear apart from the two times in Tractate Sanhedrin? The answer is,as G. F. Moore, Joseph Klausner (who notes that Hillel the great was never called Rab as the Hillel in Sanhedrin 98b 99b is), and others have noted, nowhere.

Quote:

The opinion of a certain R. Hillel, not to be confounded with the great Hillel, "Israel has no Messiah (to come); they enjoyed (lit. consumed) him in the days of Hezekiah" (Sanhedrin 98b, 99a), is solitary, and was refuted by R. Joseph, head of the academy at Pumbeditha (d- 322 A.D.) by reference to the messianic predictions in Zechariah from a time long after Hezekiah (Moore, Judaism In the First Three Centuries of the Christian Era, Vol. 2, 347 n. 2.)

Very strange for an image that was a familiar one.


I know what you said. The question is what Daube said. What Daube says is that that there is a possibility that Hillel spoken of in Sanhedrin 98b and 99a could be Hillel the Great.

[/QUOTE]

And what does Bammel say vis a vis what Hillel's peculiar and singular expression "eating the Messiah" means and how familiar Hillel's image was in Judaism?

Jeffrey