Quote:
Originally Posted by Cheese
...the rabbinic materials are primarily valuable for providing information concerning second-, third- and fourth-century Judaism, and even here they must be read critically. Like the pagan sources, however, they provide little information for the historian seeking to construct a life of Jesus.
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The problem with reading rabbinic materials critically is similar to that of attempting to gain an understanding of the earliest Christian traditions about Jesus life and death. Both the rabbinic and the Christian communities were largely oral, and the thousands upon thousands of rabbinic traditions floated around as spoken tractates for centuries before they were ever written down. Does this mean that such traditions were unreliable or inaccurate until changes in technology and custom provided for the formation of the Talmud and the Mishnah? Most scholars do not think so. Wading through the rabbinic texts is incredibly daunting, and it does not lend itself at all well to historical-critical methods. Much of it is fluid, non-linear, and most certainly not chronological. This is in large part why there has never been any serious historical-critical investigation of the rabbinic materials, and why they likely never will be. Dealing with oral traditions so long after the fact is always sketchy at best. But given what we do know about oral traditions, oral communities and how these things function, there is every reason to think that the rabbinic tractates as well as the Gospel accounts are founded upon decades and centuries of spoken narrative. It is how myths survived long before they were ever written down. Furthermore, it needs to be noted that the distinction between "myth", "legend", "history" and "fact" would have been indistinguishable for most peoples in the ancient world. Mythology was a type of historiography, and this creates a great deal of frustration and confusion when it comes to determining what actually happened in the distant past.