In Quest of the Historical Pharisees

CHAPTER 15. The Anglo-American Theological Tradition to 1970

CHAPTER 15 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN THEOLOGICAL TRADITION TO 1970 Jacob Neusner 375 APOLOGETICS AND GULLIBILITY Defining principal parts of Pharisaic theology proves difficult. First, we do not know whether pre-70 authorities whom we assume to have been Pharisees really said what is assigned to them in the rabbinic documents. Second, the theological side to Pharisaic Judaism before 70 CE is not easily accessible, for in the case of the rabbinic traditions about the pre-70 Pharisees the pre-70 beliefs, ideas, and values have been taken over and revised by the rabbinic masters. We cannot reliably claim that an idea first known to us in a later rabbinic document, from the third century and afterward, was originally both known and understood in the same way. But critical considerations have not prevented facile use of the rabbinic sources, taken at face value as facts not concerning the period in which they surfaced—for example, ideas held in the time of the Mishnah or the Talmud of Babylonia (200, 600, respectively)—but concerning the time of which they speak. Not only uncritical but also anachronistic, the program of scholarship focused on issues of apologetics, with special interest in the first-century Christian indictment of Pharisaic Judaism and its Christian continuators later on, through the Reformation and into the Roman Catholic-Protestant debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries . These two traits of mind—gullibility toward what was said and theological apologetics for the meanings imputed to what was said— characterized most, though not all, writing on the Pharisees. Accordingly, scholarship on the Pharisees conducted under AngloAmerican auspices to 1970, when my Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70 appeared, pursued a program of apologetics for Judaism, deemed to descend from Pharisaism, with historical narrative 376 JACOB NEUSNER as the medium for apologetics. The narrative was constructed on the foundations of a literal and gullible reading of the narratives and attributed sayings of the rabbinic documents, from the Mishnah of ca. 200 into the later Middle Ages. Everything was deemed historically factual, and the task of the scholar was to form the facts into a favorable picture of the Pharisees, who were assumed to have founded rabbinic or normative Judaism. My Rabbinic Traditions introduced the critical agenda of the academy to the study of the rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees, and it was rapidly followed by approaches, associated with the names Steve Mason and the late Anthony J. Saldarini by way of example, that moved beyond my work and carried it forward . But my contribution was to render obsolete nearly all historical scholarship on the Pharisees of the preceding two hundred years THE QUEST FOR HIDDUSHIM: THE YESHIVA MÉTIER Uncritical and credulous reading of the sources defined all else. The study of Talmudic and related literature for historical purposes stands conceptually and methodologically a century and a half behind biblical studies. While biblical literature has for that long been subjected to the criticism of scholars who did not take for granted the presuppositions and allegations of the text, Talmudic literature was studied chiefly in Yeshivot, whose primary interests were not historical to begin with, and whose students credulously took at face value both the historical and the legal sayings and stories of the Talmudic sages. Here the influences of literary and historical criticism emanating from universities were absent. The circle of masters and disciples was unbroken by the presence of nonbelievers; those who lost the faith left the schools. When Talmudic literature was studied in universities, it was mainly for philological, not historical, purposes. Those Talmudists, such as Abraham Geiger and Louis Ginzberg, moreover, who did acquire a university training, including an interest in history, and who also continued to study Talmudic materials, never fully overcame the intellectual habits ingrained from their beginnings in Yeshivot. Characteristic of Talmudic scholarship is the search, first, for underlying principles to make sense of discrete, apparently unrelated cases; second, for distinctions to overcome contradictions THE ANGLO-AMERICAN THEOLOGICAL TRADITION TO 1970 377 between apparently contradictory texts; and third, for hiddushim, or new interpretations of particular texts. That exegetical approach to historical problems which stresses deductive thought, while perhaps appropriate for legal studies, produces egregious results for history, for it too often overlooks the problem of evidence: How do we know what we assert? What are the bases in actual data to justify hiddushim in small matters, or in large ones the postulation of...