Jewish-Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity: Heretic Narratives of the Babylonian Talmud by Michal Bar-Asher Siegal (review)

At first glance, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal's Jewish-Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity is a kind of sequel to her impactful first book, Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Continuing to explore the question, "How much Christianity is in the Babylonian Talmud?," Bar-Asher Siegal turns to a well-defined set of talmudic stories to seek evidence of rabbinic knowledge of Christian ideas, tropes, and especially, debates. Unlike in her first book, however, Bar-Asher Siegal here looks beyond monastic literature written in or translated into Syriac, including Christian authors writing in Greek (e.g., Basil of Caesarea) and even Latin (e.g., Ambrose of Milan). This broader set of comparanda necessarily makes the current volume more speculative than the first, and it will likely make it more controversial with its scholarly audience. It also, to my mind, makes it even more significant and even more productive.

Bar-Asher Siegal defines her data set as stories in which a character labeled a min ("heretic") asks a seemingly silly question of a rabbi. The rabbi calls the min a "fool" and easily refutes the claim. Staking out a middle path between those scholars who tried to read rabbinic narratives of this sort as reflecting historical debates between rabbis and Others, and those who portray such stories only as externalizations of purely internal rabbinic concerns and anxieties, Bar-Asher Siegal reads these min narratives as "a fictitious dialogue composed to express rabbinic thought," but which "are rooted in historical realities" (22). They do not, however, reflect rabbinic-Christian debates; rather, they are a kind of imaginative rabbinic work in which the rabbis insert themselves into internal Christian debates.

Bar-Asher Siegal's wider net in looking for Christian analogues means that she cannot rely on foolproof arguments that prove genealogical connections based on geography and/or known routes of transmission. Rather, she argues that the texts themselves make clear that ideas from the Christian world were known—somehow, in some way, in some form—to rabbinic authors. The scholar's job, then, is to work "from the end to the beginning"; first we examine "what the literary traditions [tell] us about the rabbinic knowledge of these traditions," and then we begin to speculate about the how (38). This is the piece of Bar-Asher Siegal's work sure to provoke the most consternation among a certain set of historians, for whom the accusation of "parallelomania" is the most damning.

I, for one, find Bar-Asher Siegal's approach both refreshing and convincing. In each chapter, she examines one of these min narratives, noting the specific interpretive challenges that each entails. She then goes on to a consideration of the Jewish and Christian reception histories of the verse at the heart of each story, and then explains how appreciation for those receptions makes sense of the otherwise perplexing rabbinic narrative. (Bar-Asher Siegal's reception histories are immensely valuable in and of themselves, aside from the role they play in her analysis of rabbinic texts.) In the process, Bar-Asher Siegal highlights a host of breadcrumbs in the rabbinic tale that hint at engagement with Christian ideas and themes. This argumentation by accumulation is necessarily subjective: How many details are enough to convince the reader of rabbinic-Christian engagement? How serious an interpretive problem must the Christian context solve, and how thoroughly must it solve that problem, to justify Bar-Asher Siegal's interpretations?

This kind of argumentation also means that readers will find some chapters more convincing than others, and a book such as this deserves, and to some extent requires, a review of each chapter and its analysis in its own right. Space does not allow for such a review here, so I will limit myself to one of the analyses I found most convincing. In Chapter...