Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- The Babylonian Talmud: an introductory note
- 1 How much of the Babylonian Talmud is pseudepigraphic?
- 2 The Babylonian Talmud: an academic work
- 3 Rabbinic views on the order and authorship of the Biblical books
- 4 Literary analysis of the sugya in Bava Kama 11a-12b
- 5 Literary analysis of the sugya in Bava Kama 20a-21a
- 6 Literary analysis of the sugya on taking the blame on oneself
- 7 Literary analysis of the sugya of ‘half and half’
- 8 Rabbi Joshua b. Hananiah and the elders of the house of Athens
- 9 Bavli and Yerushalmi on Rabban Gamaliel and Rabbi Joshua
- 10 Bavli and Yerushalmi on Rabbi Dosa and the Sages
- 11 The Rabbi Banaah stories in Bava Batra 58a-b
- 12 The device of addehakhi, ‘just then’
- 13 Conclusion
- Glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
1 - How much of the Babylonian Talmud is pseudepigraphic?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- The Babylonian Talmud: an introductory note
- 1 How much of the Babylonian Talmud is pseudepigraphic?
- 2 The Babylonian Talmud: an academic work
- 3 Rabbinic views on the order and authorship of the Biblical books
- 4 Literary analysis of the sugya in Bava Kama 11a-12b
- 5 Literary analysis of the sugya in Bava Kama 20a-21a
- 6 Literary analysis of the sugya on taking the blame on oneself
- 7 Literary analysis of the sugya of ‘half and half’
- 8 Rabbi Joshua b. Hananiah and the elders of the house of Athens
- 9 Bavli and Yerushalmi on Rabban Gamaliel and Rabbi Joshua
- 10 Bavli and Yerushalmi on Rabbi Dosa and the Sages
- 11 The Rabbi Banaah stories in Bava Batra 58a-b
- 12 The device of addehakhi, ‘just then’
- 13 Conclusion
- Glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
Summary
Students of the Babylonian Talmud are aware that many of the statements attributed in the work to various teachers are not necessarily authentic. We are not here concerned with the question of the reliability of the transmission as much as with the phenomenon that some of the statements, at least, were never intended to be understood as the actual remarks of the teachers to whom they are attributed. In other words, some of them are pseudepigraphic. Pseudepigraphic Rabbinic statements are not limited, of course, to the Babylonian Talmud, but it will be argued that in this work the pseudepigraphic element is prevalent to a remarkable degree.
In the case of an acknowledged pseudepigraphic work like the Zohar, the problem can be seen clearly. No one nowadays would dream of quoting the numerous Zoharic statements put into the mouth of R. Simeon b. Yohai, R. Eleazar, R. Hamnuna Sava and the other heroes of the Zohar as those actually uttered by the second-to fourth-century teachers themselves. It is generally recognised that these sayings were never intended to be accurate reportage, and that while they tell us a great deal about late thirteenth-century Spanish Jewish thought, they tell us nothing at all about Jewish thought in the second- to fourth-century Palestine. R. Simeon b. Yohai in the Zohar serves in exactly the same role as Bunyan's Pilgrim in Pilgrim's Progress.
Now it would be the height of absurdity to see the whole of the Babylonian Talmud as pseudepigraphic in this sense.
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- Structure and Form in the Babylonian Talmud , pp. 6 - 17Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991