Early Writings Error

[DCHindley]

semiopen,

I'll admit that any statement that the Mishnah existed in written form by the turn of the 2nd century CE is speculation. As far as I know, no scroll containing it as a stand-alone text exists. All we know for sure is that some sort of standardized text by that name was circulating and formed the nucleus of both the Talmuds, so perhaps by the end of the 4th century CE.

However, I have read that the Mishnah text of the printed editions of the Jerusalem Talmud is the same as that of the printed editions Babylonian Talmud, but the comments in the JT suggest that they were commenting on a similar but slightly different Mishnah text. This betrays intent on the part of the editor/publisher of one or more of the printed editions of the JT to discount the Mishnah contained in his exemplars, and despite the fact that the JT was composed earlier than the BT and less fantastic than the BT, the JT becomes a secondary text to the BT, useful only for the comparative value (always to confirm, never to negate the BT) and not for the authority of the text it contains.

As for why the text of the Mishnah contains major disagreements over how specific temple rituals were performed before 70 CE, I believe that J Neusner had suggested that the Mishnah was intended to portray an idealized version of what temple rituals and other ritual requirements should be like when God permits the temple to be rebuilt. Jews could hold some real expectation of this until the war of Ben Kosiba. After then, barring a miracle, it was all a pipe dream, and speculation could run wild. It all became purely academic, and in a way, theological.

DCH

PS: I see that bmuch of this is dealt with in more detail in the book you cited:

Orality, Narrative, Rhetoric: New Directions in Mishnah Research

I think Johnson is mistaken. His book seems to have been for mass consumption, and it was written in 1987 before there was a strong group of Rabbinic scholars.

Note how he says that the Mishnah was complete and even edited into a book. I've spent my last several posts discussing this, maybe he is right and all the Rabbinics experts I've quoted are wrong, but if he is, it is because he was lucky.

I've quoted many different wikis which also seem oblivious to any advances in Rabbinic studies. Personally, I was also unaware until I attended the ASJ convention last December. Several posts above, I mentioned that I'm not aware of any strong voices that challenge the concepts I've discussed here.

Orality, Narrative, Rhetoric: New Directions in Mishnah Research http://hartman.org.il/Blogs_View.asp?Ar ... Type=Blogs

It seems that whatever was put into oral tradition by the Rabbis turned into shit, even if there were the best of intentions. This was even with stuff that one might figure they'd get right such as actual descriptions of the temple rituals. After all these were actual things that happened not so long before the Tannaic process started.

When I first saw DCH's post, I wasn't so sure about whether the Mishnah was written down. I'm pleased that I seem to have guessed correctly that it wasn't. There seem to be many oral traditions that had some sort of Mishnah at the bottom of it. Much of the material may have been similar but there were significant differences.

[beowulf]

There are many opinions about most things and religious history is one fertile field.
Mishnah : the new scripture, is the title of chapter 10 in the book. From Text to Tradition, A History of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism by Lawrence H. Schiffman.
http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/F ... edir_esc=y



Schiffman writes that "the period beginning approximately in the year 80 CE was the era in which the Mishnah was being compiled...
The fundamental change was that the oral Torah gradually evolved into a fixed corpus of its own which eventually replaced the written torah as the main object of Jewish study and practice, at least for rabbinic Jews"
NB: The formation and function of the Mishnah as described by Schiffman appear to be like the formation and function of the Roman Catholic Church Catechism.

Schiffman adds this :"The redaction (collection and editing) of the Mishnah, and the subsequent tannaitic and amoraic compositions, ultimately made possible the expansion of rabbinic Judaism to virtually all over the world's Jews in the early middle ages"
NB: It was a fixed written corpus which made it possible for Jews to remain Jewish instead of disappearing from history as the 10 tribes of Israel had done about 700 BCE.
A fixed written corpus also made Christianity capable of expansion.
Buddhism and Brahmanism also share with other religions this transitional period leading to stability and expansion.

[semiopen]

Again, you are quoting stuff from 1991. That was too long ago to prove anything.

Also I'm not sure what Schiffman is saying; nobody is disputing that eventually the Talmud (and Mishna) was written down. The issue is when. I've scanned various books by Schiffman and he doesn't seem to discuss orality. Anyway I don't see any dates in what you posted.

Oddly enough, I met this guy a few years ago at NYU at a lecture but didn't get his name. I've been wondering who he was, so your post answered that question, so thanks for that.

David_Weiss_Halivni (I think I mentioned this wiki above)

His impact on JTS has been profound. Most of the Talmud professors at JTS follow his source-critical approach.[citation needed] This has impacted the manner in which Talmud is taught to its students. In recent years, the work of Halivni and Shamma Friedman has resulted in a paradigm shift in the understanding of the Talmud (Encyclopaedia Judaica 2nd ed. entry "Talmud, Babylonian"). The traditional understanding was to view the Talmud as a unified homogeneous work. While other scholars had also treated the Talmud as a multi-layered work, Halivni's innovation (primarily in the second volume of his Mekorot u-Mesorot) was to distinguish between the onymous statements, which are generally succinct Halachic rulings or inquiries attributed to known Amoraim, and the anonymous statements, characterised by a much longer analysis often consisting of lengthy dialectic discussion, which he attributed to the later authors- "Stamma'im" (or Savora'im).

My impression is that Mishnaic orality is part of the source-critical approach. The articles that I've read about the subject are from the mid 90s and after. I haven't seen any attempts to refute the overall concept.

His methodology of source-critical analysis of the Talmud is controversial among most Orthodox Jews, but is accepted in the non-Orthodox Jewish community, and by some within Modern Orthodoxy. Halivni terms the anonymous texts of the Talmud as having been said by Stammaim (based on the phrase " stama d'talmuda" which refers to the anonymous material in the Gemara), placing them after the period of the Amoraim, but before the Geonic period. He posits that these Stammaim were the recipients of terse Tannaitic and Amoraic statements and that they endeavored to fill in the reasoning and argumentative background to such apodictic statements.

I'm not sure what to make of this statement. Haredi Jews have no academic standing, and they think the Talmud was passed down from Moses. Most Rabbinic scholars are Modern Orthodox. I can see that a religious guy who went to Yeshiva and had the traditional view drilled into his head might vehemently disagree with source-critical analysis. Such a guy would also believe that the Tower of Babel happened... who cares?

[beowulf]

Precise dating is not important and of course Judaism was and is a heterogeneous religious group. The dogma is that both the oral Torah and the written Torah were given to Moses at Sinai by God. Schiffman discusses the process of formation of the Mishnah and Talmud, and their importance for Judaism.

Dating:
Judaism: History, Belief and Practice
Dan Cohn-Sherbok
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Judaism-History ... 0415236614
Paperback: 608 pages
Publisher: Rutledge (8 May 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0415236614
ISBN-13: 978-0415236614
chapter 21 and companion to the book : CHAPTER 22 Jews in Babylonia

"The most important nasi of this epoch [ the 3rd century common era] was Judah ha-Nasi whose main achievement was the redaction of the Mishnah. This volume consisted of this discussions and rulings of scholars whose teachings had been transmitted orally.

By the sixth century Babylonian scholars had completed the redaction of the Talmud. This massive work parallels the Palestinian Talmud and consists largely of summaries of discussions that took place in previous centuries.
With the compilation of these two Talmud, Jewish scholarship reached its apex. In later centuries the Babylonian Talmud became the central focus of study. As we will see, subsequent Jewish groups rejected the authority of Talmudic law (see Chapters 26 and 44)."

[semiopen]

Thanks for the response DCH.

I've been investigating these things for a few weeks, working a little harder than I did as an undergrad (which isn't saying much).

The date of the actual physical step of writing the Talmud (and presumably the Mishnah) is unclear. I think we agree on that. For the Talmud, a written version probably only appears sometime after the so-called final redaction. My personal theory on Judaism holds that the best ways to pick dates is using the latest possible method. If Halivni is correct in giving the middle of the 8th century CE for the final redaction then we know that a written version did not show up until sometime after, perhaps during the time of the Geonim.

The most logical idea is that the Mishnah probably existed in many more or less similar but different versions. Based on what I've read, it seems likely that none of these various versions were committed to writing. They were memorized and recited. The logical argument (in my mind at least) is that the Mishnah was committed to writing at the same time as the Talmud.

You obviously bothered me by bringing up the Yerushalmi Talmud. I think I found solid backing for the idea that the sages weren't looking at a written Mishnah, but I'm not clear when this Talmud was written down. There seems to be a debate about whether the sages in Babylon ever got a look at the Yerushalmi, the current cool answer appears to be No.

As for why the text of the Mishnah contains major disagreements over how specific temple rituals were performed before 70 CE, I believe that J Neusner had suggested that the Mishnah was intended to portray an idealized version of what temple rituals and other ritual requirements should be like when God permits the temple to be rebuilt.

To me this looks like theological twaddle; seems to me that they just didn't know. The capital punishment stance is well known to laymen of course because of the Yoshke execution issue. So the fact that we see hanging and not impalement or whatever does not exactly fit the idealism riff.

Orality, Narrative, Rhetoric: New Directions in Mishnah Research http://hartman.org.il/Blogs_View.asp?Ar ... Type=Blogs

These characteristics have brought Jacob Neusner to claim that the Mishnah should be read as a substitute to the Temple in a post-Temple era, rather than as legal guideline toward it: "The Jewish nation went from doing things to imagining systems […] The second century was an age of system-building, making things up in the mind, spinning a web of reality out of the gossamer threads of attenuated hope. It was a time of philosophy, inner reconstruction." Neusner’s ungrounded generalizations were justly criticized, but as a result the thesis itself was never seriously engaged. I believe that Neusner's thesis should be modified, but not rejected altogether. The Mishnah cannot be fully explained as a fictitious substitution for a failed reality, but this aspect does exist in the Mishnah, and should not be overlooked.

I guess Dr. Rosen-Zvi http://telaviv.academia.edu/IshayRosenZvi and others sort of agree with me at least on the subject of ungrounded generalizations.

At the risk of contradicting some of what I've just written, in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, Alexander gives three views on orality relating to the Mishnah -

http://books.google.com/books?id=4dYzI7 ... ng&f=false

J.N. Epstein thinks that anecdotal evidence of written copies is true but that all work in the academy was from memory but that written versions had authority.
Saul Lieberman (after Epstein) holds that the oral versions had authority.
Shmuel Safrai (more recently) accepts that there were written copies, but argues for a "pure mishnaic orality"

She (Alexander) follows this by a more detailed exposition citing the work of other scholars, notably Elizabeth Finnegan and Martin Jaffee. The key issue seems to be fixity. If we talk about writing, we automatically consider that action as fixing the concepts and text; as these scholars demonstrate this is far from the case.

It seems that even if we are talking about a written Mishnah, we are not. Personally, as a not very knowledgeable layperson, I wouldn't be surprised if the views don't over estimate the presence of writing... you get big problems with changing a hand written copy, especially a large one, and where do you put the old one?

Quite a complex and interesting topic.

[Mental flatliner]

On the main page of 'Early Writings' you place the Talmud c. 217 CE. I think you mean the Mishnah

I think this is written from a non-Jewish perspective.

The Mishnah was compiled in 135 AD, the Gemarrah followed, and the discussions surrounding this core text followed for centuries after. The date for the first portion of the Talmud (the Mishnah) is easy to set since it was inspired by (easily datable) rampant anti-Semitism at the time. There were so many highly educated Jews being killed that loss of the oral tradition was feared, and what was before forbidden to be set to print (the oral law) was finally justified--they wrote it down before it was gone forever.