Jacob Neusner RIP

[andrewcriddle]

The paper that shook the world of scholarship in 1984 (the year Quesnell and Smith almost met in Jerusalem) https://www.jstor.org/stable/602175?seq ... b_contents Lieberman died in an airplane crash a few weeks later.

Lieberman actually died in March 1983 (on an airplane but not IIUC in a plane crash). The review of Neusner's translation was published posthumously at the decision of Lieberman's colleagues/legal executors.

Andrew,

Yes, I have seen that review before. L seemed to think that Neusner was woefully ignorant of the technical nature of the Aramaic grammar, and had no business translating the Jerusalem Talmud. Why he would be competent to translate the Babylonian Talmud, but not the Jerusalem, if that is even an accurate observation, is hard to imagine.

I happen to like the way that Neusner breaks down the arguments and discussion to make it easier to understand the argumentative strategies being employed (or imputed by the final editors) by the Rabbinical authorities cited.

It is bad enough that there appear to be several ways to divide the JT into sections and other headings, making cross checking between JT & BT very difficult.

DCH

There is a specific problem with the Jerusalem Talmud. The standard printed text is corrupt in a way not paralleled by the Babylonian Talmud and other rabbinic texts, where the printed text is usually much better. Neusner seems to have tried to translate the printed text even when (according to Lieberman) the text is badly wrong.

Andrew Criddle

[Secret Alias]

Yes died on a plane not plane crash. Still Andrew knows the SBL story so he's protecting Neusner knowing full well that the break with Smith led to the Secret Mark fiasco. It was just Quesnell on an island before Smith had enough with Neusner. Then Neusner was thrown out of Brown and went to some backwater university in Florida spending night and day attempting to publish his way back to respectability. He was both insane and a shoddy scholar. No point arguing though as he is no longer here.

[DCHindley]

Neusner often eviscerated other scholars when he didn't agree with their work.

Back when Robert M Price & Darrell J Doughty were still publishing the Journal of Higher Criticism, there was an article in Vol. 5/2 (Fall 1998) in which Jacob Neusner gave his candid review of seven published books. None of them were favorable, and if he said anything good about this or that part of them he did so in the form of backhanded compliments.

The seventh book received the harshest treatment. I am going to post the article in full, in the interests of describing the nature of Neusner's criticisms of others, so my apologies to Price & Doughty:

[279]Tal Ilan, Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine. An Inquiry into Image and Status. Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum 44. Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1995. ISBN 3-16-146283-1.

Another dreary Israeli dissertation consisting of a collection and arrangement of information masquerading as scholarship, this dull book asks no important questions and conducts no penetrating analyses. Dr. Tal Ilan of the Hebrew University covers these topics: daughters (birth, relations between father and daughter, the daughter as only child, etc.); marriage (the virtuous wife, the bad wife; marriage and spinsterhood, polygamy, economic and legal arrangements, etc.); a woman’s biology (virginity, menstruation, sexual relations, etc.); preserving a woman’s chastity (talking with a woman, looking at a woman, etc.); crises in married life and the breakdown of marriage (adultery, divorce, widowhood, levirate marriage); women and the legal system (punishments and judgments, women as witnesses, inheritance); women in public (commandments, occupations and professions, study of Torah); other women (maidservants, proselytes, prostitutes, witches). There is a conclusion of exactly three and a half pages; as usual with Israeli dissertations, we may say, iqqar haser min hassefer, that is to say, the book misses the point. To state matters in more accessible terms, as we shall see, after assem- bling diverse facts out of diverse and incoherent sources, the author finds nothing to say about them.

[280] The sources that supply the data scarcely intersect. They are formulated at different times and set forth different propositions and perspectives. All that they have in common is that, here or there, they contain allusions to topics of interest to Dr. Ilan, and what interests her is anything to do with women. She brings to the sources no interesting questions, and she derives from them no data pertinent to the testing of important hypotheses. In the same paragraph we will find the Book of Jubilees, a citation of Sifre Zuta, a passage of the Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan; the next paragraph is devoted to Josephus, and the prior one to Palestinian and Babylonian Talmudic passages on a given theme. In fact, the whole conveys little more than a paraphrase, if that. Any passage, chosen at random, yields the same conceptual chaos. So the whole adds up to little more than a report of what is in a variety of writings, lacking all coherence, whether social, whether theological, whether legal. What, indeed, are we supposed to learn from this sequence of paragraphs on “relations between father and daughter” (pp. 48-50):

A girl was brought up in her father’s house until she was married. The longest comment on father-daughter relations can be found in ben Sira [followed by various sayings]... Thus in Ben Sira’s eyes a daughter is a constant aggravation to her father...

A slightly different picture emerges from parables in rabbinic literature. Clearly the fathers and daughters in these parables are usually allegorical representations of God and Israel, but still the authors were describing reality as they saw it when they depicted mutual feelings of love and respect between father and daughter...[here the citations are to “the Tannaim” meaning Song of Songs Rabbah [sic!], and to Leviticus Rabbah].

The halakhah, too, exhibits a double standard regarding boys and girls, imposing many obligations on a father in connection with his son but awarding rights and benefits in the case of a daughter [here the references are to the Mishnah];’

A similar picture arises from the halakhic discussion of whether a father is required to provide for his daughters [here: Yemshalmi Ketubot]...

In sum, the various sources treated affection between a father and daughter as exceptional and worthy of note.
Even the halakhah treated daughters as less valuable [281] than songs. But the propounders of the halakhah changed their minds on this matter..., at least in one place where it seemed to them that the ‘standard halakhic attitude was liable to endanger the lives of daughters.

Not a single question of a theoretical character, not a single initiative in relating text to context, an isolated fact to a larger conceptual or social theory, enlivens this tiresome, yet shallow and superficial, collection of topically-pertinent data. All Dr. Ilan has done is collect card-files, arrange them, then empty the box into neat piles and copy down what she found. Yet even here, in a mass of platitudes and banalities, she misses even the simplest opportunity to compare and contrast, so seek context and meaning, for her data. She observes, in a footnote in context, “Father-daughter relations in Judaism — if our sources present a true picture — are quite the opposite of father-daughter relations pictured by Roman sources of the same period, at least as presented by Judith P. Hallet, Fathers and Daughters in Roman Society: Women and the Elite Family.” An alert scholar will have turned to another body of data to ask, if I know this, what else do I know? If these facts characterize the social order before me, then what more do I know about that social order, about the larger theory of the world and of woman in that world?

And raising tough questions in the quest of interesting hypotheses and suggestive theses begins in an exercise of comparison and contrast, first among the sources of the data that are surveyed (what indeed do Ben Sira, Leviticus Rabbah, Song of Songs Rabbah, and the like, have in common, other than that circumcised males made them up and wrote them down?) For Dr. Ilan, “Jewish” imposes on diverse data a single point of origin and interest; failure to differentiate among sources as to time and place of origin, social status and economic interest of authors and sponsors, theological position and moral perspective of the framers of documents — that failure bears devastating consequences for Dr. Ilan's work. It leaves her, as is clear, simply with nothing to say.

And so at the end, she produces commonplaces, generalizations so stupefyingly obvious as to make one wonder, upon what demonstration of intellectual merit was a doctoral degree conferred, if this is all Dr. Ilan has claimed to prove [pp. 226-229]:

a. All sources surviving from the Second Temple period were written by groups who maintained very high [282] moral standards and viewed licentiousness as one of the most serious threats to those standards...

b. These social norms were anchored in law, as it is laid out in halakhic literature. Yet here we are able to make a clear distinction between the law of the pietists and the more pragmatic Tannaitic-Pharisaic law. The laws of the pietist circles resemble the requirements for an ideal society, and thus make severe demands.... By contrast, the Tannaitic-Pharisaic halakhah takes into consideration both real conditions which depart from the ideal picture of society, and human nature, which is much more complicated than that of the ideal member of society...

c. Yet we may ask whether the lenient Tannaitic- Pharisaic halakhah was in fact equal for every person, and whether Jewish society of the Second Temple period did in fact follow it. reality turns out to be different from the legislated ideal...

Dr. Ilan has labored to collect and arrange over two hundred pages of passages on her chosen topic only to present platitudes as insight, banalities as worthy of attention. Who can find any of this surprising—or provocative?
In the same concluding pages, she has two more major conclusions in the same setting, each with its own subhead:

The Heterogeneity of Jewish Society in Palestine

In the Second Temple period, Jewish society was highly heterogeneous. Different groups lived by different versions of Jewish law. Tannaitic halakhah was not fully adhered to in that period, both because it was not yet fully developed, part of it being written after the destruc- tion of the Temple, and because only a particular group attempted to live by it before the Destruction...

Social Class and Tannaitic Literature

In contrast to the heterogeneity of Jewish society, the authors of Tannaitic literature and of most of the other surviving sources like Josephus and Ben Sira belong to the upper-middle and aristocratic classes...Thus the requirement that men and women be kept separate comes from social circles whose members had the means to put this into practice. Likewise, only a social class whose women could hire wet-nurses in order to save themselves the trouble and possible deterioration of the [283] body would determine that nursing was neither an obligation nor a religious duty. Only families worried about preserving their own property would place great importance on the family backgrounds of the husbands for their daughters, and in fact would make every effort to ensure that the husbands came from related families or families of similar social position. Poor families, by comparison, would have preferred to marry up into wealthier classes. Yet as we have seen, laws made by only these upper social classes were not always appropriate for the lower classes: “A decree cannot be made for the people unless most of the people can endure it” (b BB 60b).

And that is the concluding paragraph of the book — a wild farrago of self-evident but pointless observations (who is going to find surprising that the poor try to marry into money?) and undigested, inarticulate yearnings for a theory and a point (who will wonder at the — unsubstantiated — claim that upper class law in general does no favor for lower class life?)! The pity is, the glimmerings of speculative thought, e.g., on the relationship of gender to class, could have illumined the discussion throughout and turned a collection of inert facts into a purposeful and constructive argument. What we have here is no book, nor even a monograph, but what is no more than a collection of notes lacking a text — a primitive and intellectually flaccid research report, and the editors of the series, Martin Hengel and Peter Schaefer, have done the author no favor by printing undigested data in book-form. I very much doubt that they made the effort to suggest how she should revise and recast her findings into a systematic statement; they serve as mere gate-keepers.

Now let me say a word in apologia for this obvious failure of scholarship. Dr. Ilan clearly has done the best she could, given the retrograde circumstances of her work. She has undertaken a project in feminist studies in a setting in which the entire enterprise is prohibited. She worked with no model, an autodidact, doing her best with what she had. Her first dissertation director was the late Menahem Stern, the classicist, and the second, Y. Gafni, who works on what is called in the State of Israel “the period of the Mishnah and the Talmud,” and who wrote a history of the Jews in Babylonia that has yet to be translated into a Western language. Neither has published in feminist studies, nor have they worked even in the realm of social and intellectual [284] history; they are garden-variety, hard-core positivists, who collect and arrange what they conceive to be historical facts.

As a young doctoral student, Ilan had not only to qualify and make a contribution to learning; she had also to invent the field in which she would pursue learning. Her opening paragraph is the one passionate and compelling statement in the entire book and deserves respectful attention to its honesty:

This book began its career as a Ph. D. dissertation in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Although it was written in the late 1980s, when feminism and women studies [sic!] were making enormous strides in many disciplines the world over, working in Jerusalem was like working on another planet. The works of feminists were both unknown and viewed with suspicion as devoid of sound scientific methodology. The literature on the subject of women in the Greco-Roman period was not systematically collected by any of the libraries. Some of the most important books...were not found in any library in the country.

As the author of books that have been proscribed in Jerusalem for thirty-five years, indeed, even kept under lock and key in the Hebrew University Library until the death of E. E. Urbach scarcely a decade ago, my heart goes out to Dr. Ilan. For she took on a scholarly community that, in its way, aped the academic ethics of Bolshevik universities. In the vulnerable position of a doctoral student, depending on the good will of omnipotent masters to validate her work and allow her entry into the profession, she nonetheless chose a forbidden subject and made her way without teachers, without colleagues, without access to a scholarly tradition at home — and yet fully aware that, elsewhere in the world, teachers, colleagues, scholarship and intellectual tradition flourished. The book is a work of remarkable courage and tenacity, and if it is an utter failure as a contribution to learning, it succeeds in revealing that human side of scholarship that does not always dare to show its face. Here is a truly great woman, and I hope that in future work of a more mature and penetrating character, she will prove worthy of her subject. Her book, in its negative, but also in its positive, aspect, forms an indictment of the setting in which it was written. It is heartening to be able to end on a positive note.

I'll leave it to the reader to assess the degree to which he could, and would, go to savage others. This, from what I hear, is an exaggerated version of what Smith was famous for as well, heavy hitting but generally accurate critiques of the work of others.

DCH

[Secret Alias]

And Smith savaged Neusner at the SBL conference. Publicly put his translation of the Jerusalem Talmud in the garbage (or perhaps I am remembering incorrectly) and proceeded to hand out Lieberman's article to those gathered there. I don't have access to the original SBL article - http://members.bib-arch.org/publication ... rticleID=8 - but here are some of the letters that followed (note the letter at the end of the letters after the SBL)

In Defense Of Jacob Neusner

To the Editor:

Your report of Morton Smith’s takeover of the SBL meeting honoring Jacob Neusner’s significant contribution to scholarship missed the mark in several ways. Instead of informing readers of papers delivered by Neusner, A. T. Kraabel, Anthony Saldarini and W. D. Davies, you restated the criticism directed at Neusner by Smith, Saul Lieberman, Hyam Maccoby and Shave Cohen, and failed to ask the obvious questions: What motivated Smith to engage in singularly unscholarly and unprofessional behavior?

When senior scholars of Smith’s generation engage in tactics of the sixties, something more must be at stake than scholarly disagreement.

Smith cited the late Saul Lieberman’s last work—published posthumously in the JAOS—a violent polemical review of Neusner’s Yerushalmia translation. Lieberman could not even bring himself to refer to Neusner by name and suggested that the translation (of a sacred text) best belongs in a trash can. Cohen’s piece, which first attempts a serious critique of Neusner, swiftly falls into an ad hominem attack unbefitting either the scholar or the journal, and Maccoby virtually accuses Neusner of seeking credit with Gentile scholars by defaming Pharisaic Judaism.

These accusations, which were not voiced at the SBL meeting, are cited without editorial comment while the words of praise spoken at the session are omitted—except for an occasional aside to Neusner’s brilliance. Your article did not probe why Neusner should be the subject of so violent an assault.

The answer is not found in Neusner’s personality, nor in the reported shortcomings of his scholarship. Were the issue scholarly, it would have been fought out in journals and at conferences with the civility appropriate to learned discourse.

The assault has much more to do with the sociology of Jewish scholarship than with Neusner’s scholarship. Neusner has transgressed the fundamental norm of the rabbinic world. In a charming autobiographical fragment, Midge Decter described the ethos of the Jewish Theological Seminary during the late ’40s: “In order to say something, you had to know everything.” Rabbis trained at JTS were desperately afraid of snaking an error—perhaps they had overlooked a book, missed an article, or someone else knew more. The result was a sense of scholarly inferiority, a fear of failure, and repeated delays in publication.

By his prolific writings, Neusner has violated the unspoken norm of the institution that nurtured him and of the yeshiva world that trained the JTS’s professors. 019Furthermore, he has repudiated that norm. His works are called preliminary. He expects them to be superceded. His students publish treatises while Seminary candidates are still memorizing talmudic passages. If there are errors in Neusner’s work, they are corrected. If he changes his mind, the result is another book. Within weeks of the Lieberman review, a correction was appendixed to the next volume in what will eventually be a 35-volume translation.

Neusner has become liberated from that world and he flaunts his freedom. His academic superego is shaped neither by Germanic precision nor by the yeshiva world’s matmid.b Neusner is characteristically American: nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Furthermore, Neusner has moved the center of Jewish scholarship from the seminary into the university. His students occupy chairs in more than a score of universities, and for the past two decades the best and the brightest have journeyed from 3080 Broadwayc and even from Jerusalem to Providence, Rhode Island. He is envied for his freedom and for his students and he is unusually generous to them—working hard to find them appropriate placement.

The movement from the sacred halls of the rabbinic seminary to the ivy towers of the university secularizes Jewish studies and Neusner adds insult to injury by daring to study Judaism as a phenomenon that can be approached like other phenomena in the history of religions. He cannot be dismissed as either a self-hating or apologetic Jew, and he is taken seriously by both Jews and Gentiles beyond the halls of the academy.

He has violated the norms of the rabbinic world and played the game by his own rules. He has followed the traditions of the university and is a devout believer in that secular institution. He even admits to errors that would have silenced forever his seminary-trained colleagues. And he has raised the next generation.

Apparently some traditionalists and their allies feel that Neusner must be stopped before it is too late. And when they try, they return to the true and tried methods of the medievalists who knew how to impose silence and discipline.

And they fail.

The question still remains open: Can civilised academic discourse be held in the field of Judaic studies? Neusner and his friends have shown that it can. Smith and his colleagues have demonstrated that it cannot. The jury is still out.

Professor Michael Berenbaum Georgetown University Washington, D.C.
018
BAR’s Coverage of the Annual Meetings

To the Editor:

I have just read your treatment of the events in Chicago involving Jacob Neusner and Morton Smith, as printed in BAR (“BARview: Annual Meetings Offer Intellectual Bazaar and Moments of High Drama,” BAR 11:02). I cannot let them pass.

In the strongest terms I must protest what you have written. As you wrote it up, it made an exciting story, but an exceedingly biased one. You may not have caught that at first. I hope after you have read what follows you will set things right.

You do not allow Neusner to speak for himself. You quote his critics only. Except for Smith, the ones you quote were not even on the program in Chicago, nor did they speak. You quote nothing positive about Neusner, although you had my manuscript (sent to you at your request), and—I suspect—you could have had Saldarini’s for the asking.

I am particularly concerned about the image of Jewish scholarship presented to your readers, most of whom will know about this area only from what you have written. Saldarini and I had sufficient to say about Neusner’s failings, but for all his faults, he is the best thing to happen in Jewish studies for the Gentile Academy in a very long time. If other Jewish scholars were covering the areas he does, and reaching the vast audiences he does, that would be one thing; but they are not. They do not wish to, nor do they wish Neusner to, and that is exceedingly unfortunate.

Your account is very much out of balance; you need to redress that balance. You owe it to your readers to set the record straight.

A. Thomas Kraabel Vice President and Dean of the College Luther College Decorah, Iowa
To the Editor:

I would like to correct one small error in your account of my warning the SBL audience against Jacob Neusner’s “translation” of the Palestinian Talmud.

Saul Lieberman’s review did not say that Neusner’s essays in this book “abound in brilliant insights,” etc. That praise (Journal of the American Oriental Society 104 [1984], p. 319) referred to Neusner’s earlier works. In the present volume he found nothing to recommend, but recommended the whole “for the wastebasket.”

Apart from this small slip, I found your account remarkably accurate and unbiased—a very difficult thing to achieve in unexpected reporting of rapid and complicated action about a controversial subject. Congratulations. And thanks for a public service, since it is a public service to alert the public to the dangers of this wretched mistranslation.

Professor Morton Smith Columbia University New York, New York

[StephenGoranson]

I don't personally prefer an all-or-nothing evaluation of these scholars.
Though Neusner's books include more errors and repetition than usual or welcome, he presented (in some publications and lectures) some interesting ideas.
I haven't read Tal Ilan's dissertation-book, but I have found her Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity, Part I, Palestine 330 BCE-200 CE (a project she started under fine scholar Menahem Stern) more helpful than any Neusner volume.
Morton Smith's publications were of varying quality, though mostly carefully written, and he was, at times, helpful in conversation and correspondence.

[Blood]

a collection and arrangement of information masquerading as scholarship

I like that. Sums up about 75% of so-called Biblical "scholarship."

[StephenGoranson]

Aren't collections sometimes useful?

[Secret Alias]

I don't personally prefer an all-or-nothing evaluation of these scholars.

Talk to people from his time at Brown about his time at Brown. He was in the view of many of his peers - insane. It was non-stop drama until the administration tried to figure out a way to get rid of him. This went on for years until he finally left and then he was banished to the academic wilderness. His hatred and resentment against Smith did accomplish one thing - it fueled the nonsense about Secret Mark which of course you and the rest of the gang benefited from in no small part. He published the closest thing to a scholarly accusation in the years between Quesnell and Carlson's nonsense. His lasting legacy will be his keeping the lie alive. Quesnell was silenced by actually seeing the MS in 1984 and realizing that he couldn't disprove it's authenticity. With Quesnell benching of himself from any future discourse about the text (in part because he'd have to tell people he saw it and that revelation in itself would set back the movement) Neusner's hatred is what effectively fueled the movement until Carlson.

An interesting sidebar to his time leading up to his break with Smith. The anti-Secret Mark movement was assisted in no small part by the Republican election stranglehold between 1980 - 2008 (with the Clinton years in between). Especially with Bush's election there was something of a puritanical zeal growing in the ranks of Republicans owing perhaps (if we can speculate) to the AIDS crisis and Clinton's sexual indiscretions. The fact that 'liberals elites' in universities were undermining Christian values was a well-established talking point as well as gays being undesirables. The Secret Mark reaction was timed to perfection.

But let's go back to the Reagan presidency. Homosexuality still was very much in the closet. But the resentment against academia was still there. Neusner was the perfect Reagan appointment. Neusner sat as the head of the committee to disburge scholarly grants at the National Endowment of the Arts under Reagan (both he and Smith where seemed fascist compared with their left wing leaning colleagues). The following are things that I heard and took notes for four or five years ago. Shouldn't be taken as verbatim truths but recollections.

While Smith was of course disgusted with Neusner's scholarship there does seem to be some suggestion that Neusner used his time at the NEA to shut out grant money to scholars he didn't agree with. Theodore Gaster was destitute and desperately depended on money from the NEA. Gaster and his wife were living apart and their daughter told me that Smith was involved at this time with her mother. It was a strange group with Smith still friends with Gaster. Smith tried to get money for Gaster from Neusner for some strange text (I think it was Babylonian). Neusner wouldn't relent.

At the same time Neusner had a long running feud with this other scholar at Brown whose given name was Horst. I spoke to his wife many times. Horst was a Josephus specialist and Neusner suspected he was a Smith ally. Horst was German and Neusner apparently (according to Horst's wife) accused him of spouting Nazi propaganda against him and a war broke out between. Neusner suspected that Horst was part of a plot to get rid of him from Brown which seems to have been true because it seems everyone was trying to get rid of him - he was so mentally unstable.

The papers describing the circumstances of Neusner's departure from Brown were sealed and former staff members (I spoke to everyone from Porter on down to heads of departments) were almost sworn not to discuss them. Nevertheless it is clear that the forces trying to throw him off campus eventually won out. I tried to get a hold of Horst's papers but they were in the hands of one of his students who was deeply indebted to Neusner. Couldn't get a hold of those papers.

It should be noted that since Smith and Neusner shared the same quasi-fascist leanings you'd think that Smith would also have endured the same kind of hatred at Columbia. I can't say I have investigated this. But it is important to note that Smith was hated as the Secret Mark thing demonstrates. While I can't prove where this came from, it is interesting to note that in the same way that Smith was despised by Christians many Jews did not like Neusner's low estimation of the historical value of the rabbinic literature. While Smith was accused of forging the Letter to Theodore, Neusner was accused of a shoddy translation of the Jerusalem Talmud. But lurking in the background of much of the Jewish dislike of Neusner was his rejection of the rabbinic tradition.

Also Neusner appeared to be observant it was apparently well known that he ate things he shouldn't have and seems to have had - shall we say - an inconsistent attitude toward 'Jewish rules.' We should always keep in mind that both men challenged long held truths in both Christian and Jewish communities. They were regarded with suspicion by members of their own religious communities. This can in many ways be regarded as the result of shock and awe resulting from scholarly investigation shining a light in the dark recesses of religious convention. Perhaps this is a more positive way of regarding Neusner's legacy.

The bottom line is that while Smith was often accused of being 'strange' Neusner was even stranger (maybe as a result of the fact that Jewish people tend to start off as 'characters' to begin with perhaps from being cultural outsiders at the outset - at least that is how I excuse myself). Part of the reason Smith had to make his break from Neusner public in the way he did was that the two were tied together in a way that was later associated with Shaye Cohen. There were in many ways striking similarities shared by Smith and Neusner in terms of outward mannerisms and eccentricities (Smith was very involved in his scholarship and Neusner's productivity shows he shared his master's habits at least in terms of activity). Neusner was in the mind of many in 1984 Smith's prodigy. Smith clearly took his scholarship seriously and didn't want to be associated with the translation of the Talmud.

To this end I have always found it difficult to understand - given Smith's obsession about his reputation - how people claim that he could have went out on a limb and forged at text and left in a library for public viewing. Carbon dating tests were available within a few years of his discovery. If he was so worried about his reputation as a result of Neusner's translation it is impossible to imagine that he could have allowed himself to be 'exposed' by the MS that was seen by Quesnell in the same year as the break (= 1984). In fact Smith and Quesnell almost ran into one another in the summer of that year in Jerusalem. Quesnell saw the manuscript, Smith was part of a documentary team that was not allowed access to the manuscript. Clearly then he knew the manuscript was still available for viewing and testing. The whole theory has always been absurd.

[DCHindley]

Here is a comparison of two portrayals of Morton Smith by Jacob Neusner:

The ying...

Christianity, Judaism and Other Greco-Roman Cults: Studies for Morton Smith at Sixty. Part One New Testament, Edited By Jacob Neusner (1975)

FOREWORD

Morton Smith was born on May 28, 1915, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He prepared for university work at the Academy of the New Church in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, then went to Harvard College, where he majored in English Literature and graduated A.B., magna cum laude, in 1936. After a year of travel, he returned to Harvard Divinity School and received the S.T.B., cum laude, in 1940, winning a Sheldon Fellowship for study in Jerusalem. He held the Sheldon Fellowship from 1940 to 1942, and was Thayer Fellow at the American School of Oriental Research, Jerusalem, in 1942-1943. In Jerusalem he enrolled as a research student in the Hebrew University, from 1940 to 1944, whence he received the Ph. D. in classical philology in 1948, for a thesis, written under the direction of Professor M. Schwabe, on Tannaitic Parallels to the Gospels (Hebrew: Maqbilot ben haDesorot leSifrut HaTannaʼm). He had meanwhile returned to Harvard for postgraduate work under the direction of Professors A. D. Nock, Werner Jaeger, and, later, Robert Pfeiffer. This led in 1957 to a thesis on the history of Judaism in Palestine to the eve of the Maccabean revolt, published in 1971, after several revisions, under the title Palestinian Parties and Politics that Shaped the Old Testament. He began university teaching in 1950 and was Instructor in Biblical Literature at Brown University in 1950-1951 and Assistant Professor of Biblical Literature at Brown University from 1951 to 1955. He held the position of Visiting Professor of History of Religion at Drew University in 1956-1957. In 1957 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Ancient History at Columbia University. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1960, and to Professor in 1962. He is now Professor of Ancient History at Columbia University. His studies since 1950 are indicated by the bibliography at the end of Volume IV. For some years past he has been collecting material for a history of magic in the Greco-Roman world.

He held a Fulbright Scholarship for post-doctoral research in Greece in 1951-1952, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955-1956, the Lectureship on the History of Religions of the American Council of Learned Societies in 1961-1962, a Fellowship of the American Council of Learned Societies in 1963-1964, a Fellowship of the Bollingen Foundation in 1964, Membership in the School of Historical Studies of The Institute for Advanced Study in 1966-1967, and a Fellowship of the American Council of Learned Societies in 19661967. He was Visiting Professor of History of Religion at Wesleyan University in 1971, and in the same year gave the Max Richter Lectures at Brown University. He is a member of, among other learned societies, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Historical Association, American Philological Association, American Schools of Oriental Research, American Society of Papyrologists, Archaeological Institute of America, Association Internationale de Papyrologues, Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti Colloquium, Israel Exploration Society, Phi Beta Kappa, Society of Biblical Literature, Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, and World Union of Jewish Studies.

The editor hopes that these papers, on themes of interest to Morton Smith, will contribute to the critical discussion of some problems of concern to him. Since Smith is one of the great scholarly masters of this generation, it is through scholarship, and not through encomia, that the editor and his colleagues choose to pay their tribute. The facts about the man, his writings, his critical judgment, intelligence, erudition and wit, his labor as selfless teacher and objective, profound critic speak for themselves and require no embellishment. We happily celebrate his reaching the age of sagacity: !בן ששים לזקנה

...

and the yang ...

Memory and Manuscript, by Birger Gerhardsson (1961, republished in 1998)

Foreword by Jacob Neusner

... In [my original] giving the work [of Gerhardsson] a negative reading on grounds of an uncritical retrojection of techniques attested only much later on into the age of the Evangelists, I followed the lead of my then-teacher, Morton Smith, with whom I wrote my dissertation just before Gerhardsson’s book appeared, and whom I extravagantly admired, but not without solid reason, for his powers of penetrating criticism. To understand Smith’s influence we have to identify the particular traits that he cultivated. And to place in perspective Smith’s reading of Gerhardsson, we have to take a second look at his principal critic, Morton Smith himself.

Like Arthur Darby Nock, but lacking his perspicacity and cultivation, Smith made his career as a ferocious critic of others. Smith thereby surrounded himself with a protective wall of violent invective; what he wished to hide, and for a while succeeded in hiding, was the intellectual vacuum within. Of his entire legacy one book survives today, quite lacking influence but still a model of argument, and a handful of suggestive but insufficient articles. In all Smith wrote three important contributions to scholarship, one a model of argument and analysis though broadly ignored in the field to which it was devoted, another a pseudo-critical but in fact intellectually slovenly and exploitative monograph, and the third an outright fraud. But in the early 1960s, when Gerhardsson’s book became a target of opportunity to demonstrate his capacity to seize the jugular, no one could have known the reality. I took as my model his sharp pen and his analytical wit, not understanding that Smith had no constructive capacities and would never on his own write an honest and important book.

The model of argument comes first. His Th.D. dissertation, written at Harvard under the general supervision of Harry A. Wolfson, the greatest academic scholar of Judaism of modern times, on Palestinian Parties and Politics That Shaped the Old Testament, in my view remains a model of scholarly argument and insight Smith completed that work in the late 1950s, and it would mark not the beginning but the apex of his contribution to learning. It was what he could do when a great mind guided him.

What he could do on his own suffers by comparison, being slovenly and poorly formulated. His prior Hebrew University Ph.D. dissertation, Tannaitic Parallels to the Gospels, presented at the Hebrew University, where at that time scholarship in the New Testament cannot be ranked as informed, was the work of an autodidact. No professor of New Testament criticized the Gospels part, and the Tannaitic parallels part pursued issues no professor of Rabbinics addressed — thus, self-instruction. As I have demonstrated in vast and accurate detail in Are There Really Tannaitic Parallels to the Gospels? A Refutation of Morton Smith,1 Smith presented very dubious arguments in behalf of remarkably obtuse propositions.

As to the scholarly fraud, who speaks of it any more, or imagines that the work pertains to the study of the New Testament at all? I need not remind readers of this reprint of the scandal of Smith’s “sensational discovery” of the Clement fragment, the original of which no one but Smith was permitted to examine. Purporting, in Smith’s report, to demonstrate that the historical Jesus was “really” a homosexual magician, the work has not outlived its perpetrator. In the end many were silenced — who wanted to get sued? — but few were gulled.

Beyond these three major scholarly projects — as I said, a self-certified Ph.D. dissertation that no one in the degree-granting university could evaluate, an exemplary work done under the tutelage of a great scholar but lacking all consequence in scholarly discourse, and a forgery and a fraud, beyond occasional articles of uneven quality but occasional brilliance, Smith produced a few potboilers, on the one side, and a corpus of book reviews of a supercilious and misleading character. And one of these — alas! — dismissed and denied a hearing to Memory' and Manuscript, as Gerhardsson says with complete justification, “in a caricatured and misleading way.” And let me plead guilty to Gerhardsson’s indictment: “This misrepresentation, and Smith’s rather simplistic counterarguments, were repeated, in even more simplified forms, by countless critics.” I was one of these, and I apologize in word and, here, in deed.

1. Atlanta: Scholars Press for South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism, 1993.

...

But why did Smith’s basic argument — the book invokes later materials to describe earlier facts, as though the third century Mishnah could tell us about how things were done in the first century enjoy the hearing that it did? Smith’s self-serving rhetoric of authority — “the only scholar of New Testament who knew anything about Rabbinic literature” is how, with his encouragement, he was billed — cannot account for the cordial reception of the criticism. Smith spoke to a receptive audience, looking everywhere for precisely the flaw that he identified here. Why so? The reason is that, at that very moment, in the 1960s, the critical program of academic study of Rabbinic literature for historical purposes was taking shape. As Smith’s then-disciple, I heard what, for my part, I wanted to hear. Smith identified in Gerhardsson’s work exactly that enormous act of gullibility — believe what the sources say, apply whatever they allege as fact in the setting of which they speak and so let the third century tell us about the first — that characterized the use of those same Rabbinic documents by all prior and then-active scholars of Judaism and the history of the Jews. Gerhardsson’s careful qualifications were simply not noticed because, with Smith’s ferocious curses ringing in my ears, I heard only what 1 wished to hear, not what Gerhardsson was saying, not why he was saying it What I expected to find — because I found it everywhere else — Smith said he had found. And that sufficed for me to find it too.

Specifically, I found Smith’s critique [of Gerhardsson] self-evidently devastating because it was exactly that critique that I framed of my own work — I believed it all, except what I chose not to believe ...[then he proceeds to explain how what he chose not to believe caused him to gradually change his mind about what he calls "Judaism in late antiquity", eventually publishing books that repudiated his own earlier works, as a justification for changing his mind about Gerhardsson's book Memory and Manuscript]

DCH

[Secret Alias]

This is what I find so implausible about the 'Secret Mark is a forgery argument.' Smith was so obsessed about his reputation. This is why he publicly disavowed Neusner who was formerly his protege and so intimately associated with Smith in many people's eyes. Smith had to say 'I don't accept this scholarship.' He would have been better advised to just stay quiet or ignore Neusner. But the break was necessary because his reputation as a scholar was at stake with one of his 'star pupils' exhibiting what thought was scholarship unworthy of a great academic.

That is what distinguished Smith from Neusner. He couldn't produce something that would sully his reputation. Say what you want about the massive tome he published in 1973, it is highly researched! No stone is left unturned. Neusner on the hand rushed production on his works (hence the massive number of published things).