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The Fall, Freewill and Human Responsibility in Rabbinic Judaism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

A.P. Hayman
A.P. Hayman
Affiliation:
New College, Edinburgh
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Extract

This paper is an attempt to follow up and expand on the following statement which I made in an earlier paper published in SJT: The Christian doctrine of original sin has no place within a rabbinic system which avoids the crucial difficulty in Christian theodicy — that of the creation of evil ex nihilo at the time of the Fall.

In developing this statement I would like to sound a warning note to NT and patristic scholars who utilise rabbinic sources as background material for the study of early Christianity. It is often assumed that rabbinic texts, along with the literary remains of the other sorts of Judaism in existence in the first century A.D., can be used as a mine of material for illustrating the sort of beliefs with which the early Christians started out and against which they subsequently reacted. Thus, for example, to approach closer to the title of this paper, in considering the famous Pauline passage on the Fall (Rom. 5.12–21), it is customary for NT scholars to marshall all the evidence from the OT, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and rabbinic Judaism to try and explain the origin of the Christian doctrine of the Fall and Original Sin. But all too often the rabbinic evidence is used rather indiscriminately without regard to the date of its origin or to the possibility that rabbinic views on these matters may have changed in the course of the centuries during which the Talmudic literature was evolving.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , February 1984 , pp. 13 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1984

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References

page 13 note 1 ‘Rabbinic Judaism and the Problem of Evil’, SJT 29 (1976), p. 463Google Scholar. I have also followed up some aspects of this article in my ‘Theodicy in Rabbinic Judaism’, Transactions of the Glasgow University Oriental Society XXVI (19761975–), pp. 28–43Google Scholar.

page 13 note 2 Sec, e.g., Brandenberger, E., Adam und Christus: Exegetischreligionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zu Rom. 5.12–21 (Neukirchen, 1962)Google Scholar.

page 13 note 3 For an excellent discussion of the methodological problems of utilising rabbinic materials for the purposes of NT background see Sanders, E. P., Paul and Palestinian Judaism (London, 1977), pp. 1–233Google Scholar. But note the reservations of Neusner, Jacob ‘The Use of the Later Rabbinic Evidence for the Study of Paul’, Approaches to Ancient Judaism, ed. Green, W.S. (Brown Judaic Studies, 9), 43–63Google Scholar. Sanders replies to Neusncr in this same volume, pp. 65–79.

page 14 note 4 An interesting recent study of this rabbinic counter-attack against Christianity is Segal's, A. F. book Two Powers in Heaven. Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (Leiden, 1977)Google Scholar.

page 14 note 5 Method and Meaning in Ancient Judaism, Second Series (Brown Judaic Studies, 15), part III.

page 14 note 6 End of the third century and beginning of the fourth.

page 14 note 7 Mid to late second century.

page 17 note 8 The nearest Judaism gets to a doctrine of inherited sinfulness is R. Johanan's statement on the lust injected by the serpent into Eve — see b. Shabb. 145b–146a, Ab. Zar. 22b.

page 17 note 9 For a fuller exposition of the doctrine of the evil yetzer see my ‘Rabbinic judaism and the Problem of Evil’, op. cit.

page 18 note 10 Mid second century.

page 18 note 11 End of first and beginning of second century.

page 21 note 12 There are some very interesting parallels between this rabbinic exegesis of Ps. 82 and that of Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew (ch. 124). But whereas the rabbis apply Ps. 82 to Israel at Sinai, Justin applies it specifically to the story of Adam and Eve.