The Intellectual Foundations of Christian and Jewish Discourse: The Philosophy of Religious Argument

201 Pages·1997·0.58 MB·English

by  Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton

THE INTELLECTUAL
FOUNDATIONS OF CHRISTIAN
AND JEWISH DISCOURSE
The Intellectual Foundations of Christian and Jewish Discourse argues that Judaic
and Christian heirs of Scripture adopted, and adapted to their own purposes
and tasks, Greek philosophical modes of thought and argument, and explores
how the earliest intellectuals of Christianity and Judaism shaped a tradition
of articulated conflict and reasoned argument in the search for religious
truth that was to be shared through continuing that argument with others.
Professors Neusner and Chilton examine, using the formative sources of
Judaism and Christianity, the literary media of adaptation and reform:
precisely where and how do we identify in the foundation writings of
Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism the new opposing modes of articulated
conflict and reasoned argument that through Christianity and Judaism,
Greek philosophy and science bequeathed to the West?
This provocative volume provides a unique and controversial analysis of
the genesis and evolution of Judaeo-Christian intellectual thought as being
informed by the appropriation of Greek philosophy and science and
identifies the modes of discourse in the Judaic and Christian intellectual
and literary traditions.
Jacob Neusner is Distinguished Research Professor of Religious Studies at
the University of South Florida and Professor of Religion at Bard College,
New York.
Bruce Chilton is Bernard Idding Bell Professor of Religion at Bard College,
New York.
OTHER TITLES AVAILABLE FROM ROUTLEDGE
JUDAISM IN THE NEW TESTAMENT
Practices and Beliefs
Bruce Chilton and Jacob Neusner
THE INTELLECTUAL
FOUNDATIONS OF
CHRISTIAN AND
JEWISH DISCOURSE
The philosophy of religious argument
Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton
London and New York
First published 1997
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.
© 1997 Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Neusner, Jacob, 1932–
The intellectual foundations of Christian and Jewish discourse : the philosophy
of religious argument / Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Talmud—Hermeneutics. 2. Jewish law—Interpretation and construction. 3.
Bible. N.T. Epistles of Paul—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 4. Theology—
Methodology—History of doctrines—Early church, ca. 30–600. 5. Midrash—
History and criticism. 6. Dialectic. 7. Reasoning. 8. Judaism—Relations—
Christianity. 9. Christianity and other religions—Judaism.
I. Chilton, Bruce. II. Title.
BM503.7.N478 1997
296.3’01—dc21 97–3402
ISBN 0–415–15398–0 (hbk)
0–415–15399–9 (pbk)
ISBN 0-203-13180-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-17919-6 (Glassbook Format)
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Part I Confronting Conflict: Articulating Disagreement in a
Reasoned Setting
1 CONFRONTING CONFLICT IN THE
MISHNAH 3
2 CONFRONTING CONFLICT IN THE
LETTERS OF PAUL 26
3 CONDUCTING DIALECTICAL
ARGUMENT IN THE TALMUD 47
4 CONDUCTING DIALECTICAL
ARGUMENT IN ORIGEN 70
Part II Seeking Truth: The Character of the Arguments
5 ARGUMENTS FROM NATURAL
HISTORY IN THE MISHNAH AND IN
LEVITICUS RABBAH 89
6 ARGUMENTS FROM NATURE
Irenaeus 111
7 ARGUMENTS FROM SOCIAL HISTORY
Paradigmatic thinking in Ruth Rabbah, Pesiqta deRab
Kahana, and Genesis Rabbah 129
8 ARGUMENTS FROM SOCIAL HISTORY
Paradigmatic thinking in Augustine 154
Glossary 168
Notes 175
Index 182
PREFACE
The Egyptians . . . had various beliefs about the way the sky is held up.
One idea was that it is supported on posts, another that it is held up by
a god, a third that it rests on walls, a fourth that it is a cow or a goddess
. . . . But a story-teller recounting any one such myth need pay no
attention to other beliefs about the sky, and he would hardly have been
troubled by any inconsistency between them. Nor, one may assume, did
he feel that his own account was in competition with any other in the
sense that it might be more or less correct or have better or worse
grounds for its support than some other belief.
When we turn to the early Greek philosophers, there is a fundamental
difference. Many of them tackle the same problems and investigate the
same natural phenomena [as Egyptian and other sciences], but it is tacitly
assumed that the various theories and explanations they propose are
directly competing with one another. The urge is towards finding the
best explanation, the most adequate theory, and they are then forced to
consider the grounds for their ideas, the evidence and arguments in
their favor, as well as the weak points in their opponents’ theories.
(G. E. R. Lloyd)1
In this book we set forth the ways in which, from the very beginning of
their work, the Judaic and Christian heirs of the Scripture of ancient Israel
made their own Greek philosophical modes of confronting conflict and
conducting argument. Our thesis is that at their deepest foundations,
Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism take their place wholly within Greek
philosophical modes of articulating contradictory propositions and
proposing explicit arguments and evidence to show that one is right, the
other wrong. In general people understand that these principles of thought
vii
PREFACE
form the foundations of Western knowledge. What we propose to demonstrate
is that at the very primary stages in the presentation by both heirs of
Israelite Scripture and faith, these same principles of thought governed –
because Christian theologians and Judaic sages in the Land of Israel could
do their work in no other way.
Along these same lines, many take the quite reasonable view that in one
way or another Judaism and Christianity accommodated their Israelite
inheritance to the Graeco-Roman intellectual context. But in our view,
from the very outset the Israelite heritage was perceived through the
intellectual prism of that philosophy. Our argument is that, from their
first writings, Paul’s letters and the Mishnah, through their climactic
statements out of late antiquity, Augustine’s City of God and the Talmud of
Babylonia, Christianity and Judaism undertook their generative and
formative thought wholly within, completely at home in, the Greek
philosophical milieu, so far as that intellectual world required the explicit
articulation of dispute and validation through rigorous argument of one
position over the other, contradictory one.
When Judaism and Christianity from their initial writings made their
own these Greek philosophical modes of framing propositions and arguing
their merits within a shared rationality, the Western Judaic and Christian
tradition of science and philosophy was born. And, as we show here, that
intellectual appropriation of a mode of thought alien to ancient Israel in its
nurture of home-born, revealed truth took place among the very founders
of Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, the sages of the Mishnah, Talmud,
and Midrash of Judaism, and the apostle St Paul and the Fathers of the
Church of Christianity, respectively. It was wholly within the framework of
Greek philosophy that the Judaic sages and Christian theologians learned
those lessons concerning the logic that forbade holding contradictory
propositions and compelled sound, analytical argument to validate or
disprove a fiercely defended position. And, we cannot stress too much, it
was at the very beginnings, the point at which both religions were taking
shape, that the intellectual revolution represented for the heirs of Israelite
Scripture by the appropriation of Greek philosophy and science took place.
So both religions, each fairly claiming continuity with the ancient Israelite
heritage, took shape within the effort to effect a remarkable innovation in
that heritage. Christian theologians (“saints”) and Judaic sages (“our sages
of blessed memory”) faced a dual task, both intellectual and aesthetic. It was
a labor not only of thinking in ways for which Scripture did not prepare
viii
PREFACE
them. It also required their substantiating their views in a manner of dialectical
argument and analytical demonstration formerly not contemplated at all.
The new age of reason required finding a language and aesthetics for expressing
in the new modes of thought the distinctive modes of thought and argument
that now concerned them – a new way of setting forth the results of a new
way of thinking without precedent in the Israelite heritage.
Along the way new modes of thought required new media of expression,
so the Fathers of the Church and our sages of blessed memory had to
invent new ways of talking about what we now deem new truth. This new
truth spoke of God made flesh, on the one side, the whole Torah, oral as
well as written, on the other. For the Greeks studied the here and now of
nature and society, but the theologians and sages took up issues of the
nature of God, on the Christian side, and the meaning of sanctification, on
the Judaic. That is why the problem facing Scripture’s heirs required not
merely a new vocabulary for familiar things, but a new way of thinking
about what was, in fact, quite unfamiliar. It was as if for communication of
a fresh message they had to adapt, to a quite new set of rules of syntax, a
language that had for ages used its own vocabulary and grammar to make
its own statements. In the initial contrast portrayed in the opening two
chapters between how Jesus and Paul confronted and articulated conflicting
opinions, on the one side, and how Scripture, the Damascus Covenant, and
the Community Rule of the Qumran library and the Mishnah lay out laws,
on the other, we see the nature of the intellectual challenge that the Fathers
of the Church and our sages of blessed memory successfully met.
In ancient Israel the articulated and systematic exchange of conflicting
views, together with arguments in favor of the one and opposed to the
other, for which the German word, Auseinandersetzung, serves best, was
unknown. Prophesy, laws with accompanying myths of origin and authority,
narrative of exemplary times past, prayer, poetry, and wise aphorisms –
these afforded no expression to arguments concerning the truth or falsity
of general propositions. Prophesy did not argue but declared truth in
God’s name. The law invoked its own myth at nearly every clause: “The
Lord spoke to Moses saying, speak to the children of Israel and say to them
. . . .” The aphorisms of sagacity hung suspended in air, lacking argument
and denied the reenforcement of challenge met and overcome. Above all,
narrative of times past cobbled together diverse viewpoints and propositions
and recorded the result as though in a seamless story. So in Israelite literature
prior to the Mishnah of c. 200 CE, for Judaism in Hebrew and Aramaic,2
ix