When accusing an author of bad scholarship, it's always important to see if you've misrepresented them, and here you've done this in multiple ways because you only read a small sample of my writing and didn’t bother to engage with the copious endnotes in this book and others I've written.
From the beginning of my writing, I've had a policy of pointing out to readers my concern about anachronistically placing Jesus in a later rabbinic context, and I addressed this in an endnote in my earlier book, Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus (Zondervan, 2009). This is what it says:
>> "In the 1970s and 1980s, many scholars felt that early Jewish sources like the Mishnah were not useful for describing Jesus’ setting because they were written down later, although they appear to quote sayings and describe traditions from the first century. The influential Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner is well known for raising these concerns. In the past decade, however, confidence has grown that these sources are reliable when used with care. See David Instone-Brewer, Traditions of the Rabbis from the Era of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 28–40, and the review article by Instone-Brewer, “The Use of Rabbinic Sources in Gospel Studies,” Tyndale Bulletin 50 (1999): 281–98.
Some of the works that were criticized for using rabbinic sources to interpret the New Testament are now being reprinted. For instance, the book Memory and Manuscript by Birger Gerhardsson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998, first published in 1961) was discounted for decades because it compared Jesus’s teaching methods to those of the early rabbis. Neusner, who had strongly criticized the book, advocated its republication and even wrote an apologetic foreword in the 1998 version.
In Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus, we have made every effort to use early sources rather than later rabbinic material to describe the setting of Jesus. We do occasionally quote Jewish wisdom from the Babylonian Talmud and later works, without assuming that they describe the reality of Jesus’s time." <<
I put a much shorter endnote to this effect in Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus (Zondervan, 2012). I admit that I neglected to put another endnote in Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus, for the sake of readers like yourself who would automatically assume that this was my point of view and accuse me of doing this very thing. What an error I made!
When I wrote Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus, the scholarly editor at Zondervan who reviewed it, Verlyn Verbrugge, wrote a long letter to me saying that he had feared that I would anachronistically portray Jesus as a "classically trained rabbi" as other lay-teachers like the ones you mentioned had done, but how relieved he was that I had not done this!
It appears that without reading much of my work you simply assumed that this was what I was doing, and then in order to make your point, you distorted the samples of my writing that you had. As you can imagine, I found this quite infuriating.
I started writing a much longer response to your other critiques, which were often unfair because they tended to oversimplify and misrepresent the points that I was making. As a Christian, I will not attack you publicly in the way that you've attacked me. If you would like to discuss this in private, my email is Tverberg@OurRabbiJesus.com.
As you could probably see from this article, Sitting at the Feet was the book I couldn't find a copy of. I didn't read all the end notes of Walking in the Dust. As is common with readers, I flipped to the back of the book to look at the end notes when I wanted more information. I think that by focusing on the macro arguments of the book and not specifically the end notes, I had more or less the experience that the average reader of your book would have - which, I think for the purposes of reviewing a book, is the most relevant. I definitely would have appreciated seeing that note in the text of the book itself (I think it would have made the conscious quotes of later centuries more clear - I was not picking up on the idea that this was meant to be general wisdom and not cultural color from the text itself).
Now, I absolutely understand why a Zondervan editor breathed a sigh of relief looking at this because I'm sure he's used to looking at texts where Jesus is assumed to celebrate Chanukah and eat at a seder. I hope I did not suggest in this article that you literally made every mistake that a person can make on this subject. It wasn't how I felt about this at all. But I actually think that I kept my concerns about Jesus as rabbi very limited to a very foundational claim which I (I think reasonably) saw as central to your text and where I think I have pretty good evidence I'm right - and that's the claim about young aspiring Jewish boys learning Hebrew as a matter of course. In my review, that was where I focused my attention, because I think it's where you focused your attention too. And I think the evidence I have that Safrai was wrong is pretty good! If Ben Tema taught after the destruction of the Temple, he couldn't have been setting standards for Jewish education when Jesus was a child. As I argued, the more reserved (but still pretty motivated and likely representative of more well off figures) from Josephus and Philo) are probably closer to the truth.
And if that's the case - that Jesus was not necessarily trained in reading Hebrew extensively, and he taught in Aramaic -- then I think that raises some very fundamental questions about what it means to be a rabbi, which makes it very difficult to compare the kind of rabbi we see Jesus acting as in the Gospels with what came later. Even relatively shortly later. And, it calls into question the utility of using Hebrew to study the New Testament, ESPECIALLY in light of the fact that we just don't have access to very many Aramaic words of Jesus at all, except for a handful in Mark!
I think even with that endnote, those concerns (which do make up the bulk of this article) are fair. I'm happy to email more about this.
Laura, I don't have your email, but I gave you mine. So it will need to be you writing to me, not the other way around.
Regarding Jewish education, that quote from ben Tema was not my only source. There is also the fact that Shimon ben Shetach (140-160 BCE), one of the earliest leaders of the Sanhedrin, was credited with the establishment of schools during his career. He founded schools in larger cities, so it would be reasonable to assume that a century or so later, when Jesus was a kid, he might have attended one in Nazareth.
As far as learning in Aramaic, from Targums, you are the one who needs to update her studies. All the Targums that have been found were written at the end of the 2nd century CE or later. See this paper for a detailed discussion:
Maybe you didn't hear that the Dead Sea Scrolls contained copious numbers of documents written in Hebrew, and few in Aramaic. Only one Aramaic Bible translation was found, to the book of Job, and a few verses from Leviticus. Why didn't they have lots of Targums that NT scholars assume that they would need? Because Hebrew was a living language that had gone through a revival during the Hasmonean period. There is actually much literary, epigraphic and archeological evidence to support this. My source is "Was there a Revival of Hebrew during the Hasmonean Period? A Reassessment of the Evidence" Journal of Ancient Judaism (2021) 217-80. I can send you this paper if you like.
My scholarship doesn't come from just regurgitating rumors from popular teachers. I've been studying with a group of Christian and Jewish scholars who have been investigating the Jewish context of Jesus for about 50 years now, and their work is not yet widely known. They published a Brill volume called, "The Language Environment of First Century Judaea" that establishes that Jesus did indeed use Hebrew to do exegesis and preach parables. So Jesus likely spoke both Hebrew and Aramaic, but much of his teaching was done in Hebrew. See https://www.academia.edu/9228226/Hebrew_Only_Exegesis_A_Philological_Approach_to_Jesus_Use_of_the_Hebrew_Bible
Regarding Neusner's comment about Safrai, as I said before, Neusner actually reversed his own opinions about whether rabbinic literature was pertinent to the study of the Gospels, and he republished Birger Gerhardsson's book in 1998 that he had panned in 1961. Safrai's book "The Jewish People of the First Century" that he recommended against was published in 1974, during the era when Neusner said that all rabbinic literature is very late and only describes the era in which is written.
I'm guessing that you don't know much about Neusner. He had a habit of writing vitriolic commentary against every scholar who disagreed with him. He pretty much destroyed Gerhardsson's career by his disparagement of his book, which he later decided had much merit. Shmuel Safrai actually won the highest prize for his scholarship that is given, the Israel Prize.
The other issues you raised I'm happy to discuss in another place.
I’m including this in the comments and sending this to your email, because I think that public discussion is itself a form of pedagogy and I think it can be helpful to learn from it. But we can move entirely to email if you prefer.
Personal stuff:I don’t think I ever said that I thought you repeated stuff from popular teachers. I noticed the Vander Laan connection because 1) he wrote the forward in one of your books and 2) it seemed of a piece with that writing. I actually have exhaustively looked at a recent instance of what I actually do think is a true game of telephone misinformation and that’s not what Walking looked like to me at all.
Language:It's admittedly speculative to propose Jesus may have learned scripture from Aramaic texts, but so is the claim that he learned it from Hebrew. There’s just very little data to play with here. Yes, the texts of the Targums themselves are second century, but it's not as though they're coming up over the top of a proliferation of Hebrew writing in Galilee. The scarcity of texts is just that -- scarcity, and Targums start to show up more and more in Galilee alongside more and more synagogues. It's not as though the archeological evidence points to widespread Hebrew use in synagogues in the first century, and then switches to Aramaic. It's that Targums spread with synagogues. So I don't think it's implausible to suppose that they may have been around in Galilee -- just as with the Gospels, just because we don't have the earliest texts doesn't mean they never existed at all.
The evidence that Aramaic was the more common language is pretty widely established. In Galilee, inscriptions in and around Sepphoris are primarily Greek (no surprise there). There's a jar fragment with Hebrew on it in Sepphoris (Sepphoris in Galilee, 113-114). But there's a fair amount of evidence for Aramaic literary culture.
In your email, you'll see some pages from Heszer here.
Does the DDS contain a lot of Hebrew? Sure. But remember this is a religious, pietistic community. The fact that the Essenes keep Hebrew copies of their scriptures is not itself evidence that most Jews could read and speak Hebrew. The Essenes are not representative of general Jewish life. They’re a big deal to us, because they’re the ones whose books we found. But they’re not representative of common Judaism. A more mixed source are the Bar Kokbha letters, which are covered in Michael Wise’s book, which argues more for a literary form of Hebrew that is best attested in scribal communities:
And let’s not forget: the transliterated words of Jesus in Mark are in Aramaic. When Mark wanted to record the words of Jesus as he actually said them, that's what he used.
Schools:
As for Simeon ben Shetah establishing schools: this is tricky. Ben Shetah is credited with establishing schools in the Jerusalem Talmud (8:5). But in the Bavli (Bava Batra 21a) it’s Yehoshua ben Gamla who lived in the 60s. So this is another contested tradition. And, of course, remember both of these texts are in fact several centuries after these people lived. Often when we are looking at this passages that describe how the pre-70 CE sages preserved Torah and kept it from fading, we are looking in part at an apologetic project that insists on continuity of rabbinic leadership with Pharisaic leadership. That doesn’t mean it has nothing to do with earlier centuries. But there’s very little we can definitively hang our hats on. I think a better course is noticing when there are tradents in the Mishnah or rabbinic lit that parallel material in older sources – like the Gospels! A great example of this is the divorce debate between Shammai and Hillel, which has a very obvious parallel in Matthew. Same with “that which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor,” or the use of “I desire mercy not sacrifice” to cope with the destruction of the Temple (which shows up twice in Matthew). What’s significantly dodgier is trying to take the Bavli to explain life in the first century – ie., if the Bavli says children must start school at six, then Jesus started school at six. That’s much trickier.
Big picture: This is where I keep landing – there’s very little to hang our hats on. What can we actually know about Jesus through trying to back date genuine first century traditions from the Bavli, from Essene caves, and from the Bar Kokbha letters? Frankly, not a ton. It’s through a glass darkly, so to speak. There certainly may be material there that can give us insight into first century Galilee, but it’s fuzzy and lives in the realm of interpretations over the little information we have.
I tend to be a pretty cautious scholar, so I think perhaps there’s some better questions to ask that might point us in a better direction. First: what do we have in the Gospels themselves? The Gospels themselves don’t suggest they’re better understood with an appeal to Hebrew. They don’t contain any Hebrew. They’re Greek. And, the Gospels actually aren’t terribly interested in Jesus’s academic credentials. The only person who even comes close to suggesting Jesus has them is Luke, and even then the picture is fuzzy - Jesus is sharp in the Temple, and Jesus reads from a scroll. While it’s certainly fun and interesting to try to reconstruct the world around Jesus, there just isn’t a ton of data to work with, and the most reliable historical data we have simply doesn’t answer these questions. Is there something to be learned from that in itself?
Then there’s a second question: what’s in Paul? When the earliest Christians spread the message of Jesus, did they think we needed to jettison Greek and understand Jesus in Hebrew words? Absolutely not. Paul certainly draws on the Old Testament, but for Paul having the “mind of Christ” is not culturally putting ourselves in Jesus’s place. It’s Jesus’s actions and disposition, in Phil 2.
So I think that may be, both academically and theologically, something of a gentle challenge for historical Jesus research. The gentiles understood Paul’s gospel, which he received from Jesus. He taught them the death and resurrection of Jesus. In Greek. Maybe there’s a lesson here.
For the sake of public discussion for Angela and others, I want to point out another source of data about language usage in the Gospels that hasn't been mentioned up until now. It's the fact that the Greek New Testament text itself identifies the language being used as Ἑβραϊστί (“Hebraisti” - meaning Hebrew) in several places. Here are three:
Many of the Jews read this inscription, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Hebrew (Ἑβραϊστί), in Latin, and in Greek. (John 19:20)
And when he had given him permission, Paul, standing on the steps, motioned with his hand to the people. And when there was a great hush, he addressed them in the Hebrew language... (Acts 21:40)
I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads." (Acts 26:14)
In contrast with all these places that Hebrew is named, the word for Aramaic, Συριστι, (“Suristi,” Syriac), is not found anywhere in the Greek NT. Yet it's used in a half dozen places in the LXX translation of the OT, like in 2 Kings 18:26:
Then Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, and Shebnah, and Joah, said to the Rabshakeh, “Please speak to your servants in Aramaic (Συριστι), for we understand it. Do not speak to us in the language of Judah within the hearing of the people who are on the wall.”
So the Greek New Testament itself names the language being used as "Hebrew." Why have you never noticed this in your English translation? Because a few decades ago, some translators decided override the NT authors and simply translate Ἑβραϊστί as "Aramaic."
This is not at all defensible, says Randall Buth, a linguist who specializes in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic/Syriac. The two languages were never confused with each other in ancient sources. Words that sound like they were Aramaic, like "rabboni", were found in some dialects of Hebrew too. So when John 20:16 says that Mary was speaking Hebrew when she called Jesus "Rabboni," there's no reason to declare that John was wrong and she was speaking Aramaic instead.
I'm getting this all from a chapter that Buth wrote called "“Hebraisti in Ancient Texts: Does Ἑβραϊστί ever mean Aramaic?" in the Brill volume called "The Language Environment of First Century Judaea." You can read it on Academia at this link:
The overall conclusion of the book is that there is plenty of evidence that the New Testament existed in a trilingual environment (Greek-Aramaic-Hebrew) because Hebrew was a living language in use at time. They reject the idea that the Qumran community alone used the language. Of the Bar Kokhba letters, about half were in Hebrew, and half were in Aramaic, and a couple were in Greek. Many people were bilingual.
Sorry for the digression, but I wanted to make it clear that the NT actually does name Hebrew as the language of discourse in several places. This is not just silly speculation of Hebraic roots teachers.
But going back to your comments on my book, you are totally right that it would be odd to talk about Hebrew if I was only thinking of the New Testament. My reason for including a chapter on Hebrew words because the book was about reading the *Bible* with Rabbi Jesus, which refers to *both* testaments, not just the New Testament. (The Scripture that Jesus knew and taught from was the Hebrew Bible, not the New Testament.) In fact, the whole last section of my book (ch. 9-13) was specifically about how the Hebrew Bible was being read and interpreted in the early synagogue, and how it lent itself to Jesus’ Messianic claims.
I need to also clarify that the book had no agenda of being "anti-Greek." The Greek Brain/ Hebrew Brain chapter had no intention of telling people to reject Western intellectualism. First I was explaining to a lay-audience what abstract rationalism and syllogistic reasoning is and how Westerners recognize these as intellectually sophisticated. But then I go on to say that non-Western cultures *do think logically* but often communicate intelligent, sophisticated ideas in other ways.
Laura, I admit that I can now see that using John the Baptist's rebuke of the religious leaders as an example wasn't good because my point was not to contrast emotionalism with intellectual argumentation. It was to contrast the non-Western use of concrete metonyms with the Western tendency to use abstract nominalization.
My point was better served by the next example, where I contrasted a quote from Ecclesiastes with one from an essay by George Orwell on politics and language. Ecclesiastes says,
"Again I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, or the battle to the strong, or bread to the wise, or riches to the discerning, or favor to the skillful; rather, time and chance happen to all of them." (Eccles. 9:11)
Orwell expresses the same idea this way:
"Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."
Westerners see the second statement as more intellectual, not recognizing that the biblical quote is communicating the same high level ideas but in a different way. Ecclesiastes is using metonyms - concrete images that stand in for broad categories and ideas. “Under the sun,” describes everything in the experience of human life. “Bread” refers to all food, the “battle” refers to military aggression and warfare.
My point is NOT to say that Hebraic thought is about loose emotionalism that has no intellectual logic behind it. It is to say that brilliant, profound ideas can be expressed in ways that don't quite fit with Western rationalism, so they don't feel very "intelligent" to us.
(Thanks for letting me go on and on in this long response.)
I honestly do not mind being challenged on my thinking. Your welcome to ask me about anything else that I've written.
If I can weigh in on this argument, all learning is learning and influence, regardless if its formal education or not. Oral cultures are like that, and there is a lot of terrific work being done about oral culture recently as well. Also serious education can be done 100% orally with intention as well. In the end it doesn't matter whether Jesus went to school or could read at all (although the Gospels said he could.) He grew up in a milleiu with Jewish teachers running around, many of whom were highly regarded like Gamaliel, immersed in scripture and Jewish tradition, and this is the type of thing he learned by osmosis from his Jewish upbringing. It's what he learned, thought, and had as his "heart language" and theological definitions, regardless of what language it was exactly in, which ends up sort of moot. And plenty of uneducated people right now are trilingual due to living at a crossroads of cultures...exactly like most first century people in the Roman Empire. Most Jews of the last 2000 years have been bilingual of necessity, and some Amish are trilingual in spite of little formal education. I think part of my American bias is forgetting how many ordinary people in the world can speak several languages. I took care of an elderly woman for a while who supported herself her whole life as a French translator for the government even though she was completely illiterate in any language. Didn't matter since she could speak French and English, so she could be a translator for oral settings.
As someone with some Greek and Hebrew, I can testify that there are plenty of things in the NT that aren't anymore intelligible in Greek than in English, and this is exactly why there are endless arguments about things like Romans 6-8 and 9-12. And not trivial ones either! On the other hand, after learning Jewish context and common sense reading (with the corollary of unlearning 45 years of bad fundagelical nonsense) most things open up fairly easily. The problem isn't precisely the Greek words, as much as it is the front loading of them with Reformation theological definitions. Or presuppositions set as far back as the split between Jewish and Gentile Messianics in the 2nd century. It takes a lot of courage and a safety net to leave behind ideas that they told you were the only things saving you from frying in hell, and changing your theological mind about them! Looking at the Hebrew and finding other respectable traditions that have different views is important to thinking you are not falling off the deep end, and also in convincing your friends you aren't a heretic. Whether you are dabbling in Welseyan, Eastern Orthodox, or Jewish theological concepts, the New Perspective on Paul, or a combination of them, you know that you are not alone in thinking that there are better streams than the modern American folk Christianity that you believed in before.
We laymen need to be more into this scholarly back and forth though! So don't hide your arguments in private emails, please! Public discourse is still how most of us learn!
I think it is generally very important to note that in non-text-based cultures, not reading regularly or extensively or having limited literacy is not a handicap. In many oral cultures literacy is no different from being a brick layer - it’s a skill some people have because it’s their trade. The fact that we can’t find exhaustive evidence of Hebrew scribal and literary culture in 1st century Galilee doesn’t mean Jesus was stupid. It means his education may have looked different from ours, and we just don’t know that much about it in any particular detail.
I agree with both of you that being multilingual is common around the world, just about everywhere except the US, and Jesus likely knew multiple languages - Aramaic and Hebrew both, at least.
I also agree that being able to read and write is overly equated with intelligence. Certainly Jesus could have had a very different education than we've had and could be brilliant none the less. We're all agreed on these things. Angela, thanks for sharing.
**Also, let's not forget Greek! There's some massive, new Greek cities going up all around the Galilee during Jesus's twenties. As a teknon, a working knowledge of Greek, at least enough to take instructions or command a crew, would have been really important! Fluent enough to teach in? Maybe not. But working knowledge would have been important.
One other thing I might note about Aramaic is - when Paul (earliest source for this) uses Peter's given name "the rock," it's Cephas. This is from Kephas, which is the Aramiac word for "rock." The closest analogous word in Hebrew is "keph," which means "crags" and is a comparatively rarer word than the far more common word eben in Hebrew. So the name Jesus gave Peter doesn't seem to be Hebrew. It seems to be Aramaic.
This is great as usual. Do you have any suggestions for trustworthy resources for the Jewishness of Jesus? I am curious about other common claims I have heard. Particularly, would love your take on the idea that Jesus was a Pharisee himself, or as close to it to make the distinction unhelpful. And if he wasn't necessarily trained in post-second temple Rabbinical schools, to what extent was he a recognized rabbi in the second temple context?
I guess my concern is, I have seen a number of Jewish people who interact with Christians about the NT make claims similar to these about Jesus status as a rabbi, and a pretty typical one at that. Does that fall into the category of what you are cautioning against here? Or is that an unremarkable claim, historically speaking?
EDIT: I reread and I sound more suspicious than I am actually, so to clarify: I want to take Jewish people speaking about their own tradition seriously when they bring correction to often nonsensical ideas that Christians have about Judaism, but some of these correctives seem close to what you are cautioning against here.
I mean, in the most literal sense Jesus gets called "rabbi" in the Gospels. So yes, some kind of teacher.
I think that's a reasonable step to take. What I don't want to do is impose standards of what we think of as rabbis today, and the traditions for that, onto the first century before we really have records of rabbis in detail.
I think a great intro to early Judaism is EP Sander's books. Other scholars I really like - AJ Levine, Tal Ilan. I'll try to think of some others.
Laura, this is Lois Tverberg.
When accusing an author of bad scholarship, it's always important to see if you've misrepresented them, and here you've done this in multiple ways because you only read a small sample of my writing and didn’t bother to engage with the copious endnotes in this book and others I've written.
From the beginning of my writing, I've had a policy of pointing out to readers my concern about anachronistically placing Jesus in a later rabbinic context, and I addressed this in an endnote in my earlier book, Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus (Zondervan, 2009). This is what it says:
>> "In the 1970s and 1980s, many scholars felt that early Jewish sources like the Mishnah were not useful for describing Jesus’ setting because they were written down later, although they appear to quote sayings and describe traditions from the first century. The influential Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner is well known for raising these concerns. In the past decade, however, confidence has grown that these sources are reliable when used with care. See David Instone-Brewer, Traditions of the Rabbis from the Era of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 28–40, and the review article by Instone-Brewer, “The Use of Rabbinic Sources in Gospel Studies,” Tyndale Bulletin 50 (1999): 281–98.
Some of the works that were criticized for using rabbinic sources to interpret the New Testament are now being reprinted. For instance, the book Memory and Manuscript by Birger Gerhardsson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998, first published in 1961) was discounted for decades because it compared Jesus’s teaching methods to those of the early rabbis. Neusner, who had strongly criticized the book, advocated its republication and even wrote an apologetic foreword in the 1998 version.
In Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus, we have made every effort to use early sources rather than later rabbinic material to describe the setting of Jesus. We do occasionally quote Jewish wisdom from the Babylonian Talmud and later works, without assuming that they describe the reality of Jesus’s time." <<
I put a much shorter endnote to this effect in Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus (Zondervan, 2012). I admit that I neglected to put another endnote in Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus, for the sake of readers like yourself who would automatically assume that this was my point of view and accuse me of doing this very thing. What an error I made!
When I wrote Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus, the scholarly editor at Zondervan who reviewed it, Verlyn Verbrugge, wrote a long letter to me saying that he had feared that I would anachronistically portray Jesus as a "classically trained rabbi" as other lay-teachers like the ones you mentioned had done, but how relieved he was that I had not done this!
It appears that without reading much of my work you simply assumed that this was what I was doing, and then in order to make your point, you distorted the samples of my writing that you had. As you can imagine, I found this quite infuriating.
I started writing a much longer response to your other critiques, which were often unfair because they tended to oversimplify and misrepresent the points that I was making. As a Christian, I will not attack you publicly in the way that you've attacked me. If you would like to discuss this in private, my email is Tverberg@OurRabbiJesus.com.
Hi Lois,
As you could probably see from this article, Sitting at the Feet was the book I couldn't find a copy of. I didn't read all the end notes of Walking in the Dust. As is common with readers, I flipped to the back of the book to look at the end notes when I wanted more information. I think that by focusing on the macro arguments of the book and not specifically the end notes, I had more or less the experience that the average reader of your book would have - which, I think for the purposes of reviewing a book, is the most relevant. I definitely would have appreciated seeing that note in the text of the book itself (I think it would have made the conscious quotes of later centuries more clear - I was not picking up on the idea that this was meant to be general wisdom and not cultural color from the text itself).
Now, I absolutely understand why a Zondervan editor breathed a sigh of relief looking at this because I'm sure he's used to looking at texts where Jesus is assumed to celebrate Chanukah and eat at a seder. I hope I did not suggest in this article that you literally made every mistake that a person can make on this subject. It wasn't how I felt about this at all. But I actually think that I kept my concerns about Jesus as rabbi very limited to a very foundational claim which I (I think reasonably) saw as central to your text and where I think I have pretty good evidence I'm right - and that's the claim about young aspiring Jewish boys learning Hebrew as a matter of course. In my review, that was where I focused my attention, because I think it's where you focused your attention too. And I think the evidence I have that Safrai was wrong is pretty good! If Ben Tema taught after the destruction of the Temple, he couldn't have been setting standards for Jewish education when Jesus was a child. As I argued, the more reserved (but still pretty motivated and likely representative of more well off figures) from Josephus and Philo) are probably closer to the truth.
And if that's the case - that Jesus was not necessarily trained in reading Hebrew extensively, and he taught in Aramaic -- then I think that raises some very fundamental questions about what it means to be a rabbi, which makes it very difficult to compare the kind of rabbi we see Jesus acting as in the Gospels with what came later. Even relatively shortly later. And, it calls into question the utility of using Hebrew to study the New Testament, ESPECIALLY in light of the fact that we just don't have access to very many Aramaic words of Jesus at all, except for a handful in Mark!
I think even with that endnote, those concerns (which do make up the bulk of this article) are fair. I'm happy to email more about this.
Laura, I don't have your email, but I gave you mine. So it will need to be you writing to me, not the other way around.
Regarding Jewish education, that quote from ben Tema was not my only source. There is also the fact that Shimon ben Shetach (140-160 BCE), one of the earliest leaders of the Sanhedrin, was credited with the establishment of schools during his career. He founded schools in larger cities, so it would be reasonable to assume that a century or so later, when Jesus was a kid, he might have attended one in Nazareth.
As far as learning in Aramaic, from Targums, you are the one who needs to update her studies. All the Targums that have been found were written at the end of the 2nd century CE or later. See this paper for a detailed discussion:
https://www.academia.edu/26606061/Hebrew_Aramaic_and_the_Differing_Phenomena_of_Targum_and_Translation_in_the_Second_Temple_Period_and_Post_Second_Temple_Period
Maybe you didn't hear that the Dead Sea Scrolls contained copious numbers of documents written in Hebrew, and few in Aramaic. Only one Aramaic Bible translation was found, to the book of Job, and a few verses from Leviticus. Why didn't they have lots of Targums that NT scholars assume that they would need? Because Hebrew was a living language that had gone through a revival during the Hasmonean period. There is actually much literary, epigraphic and archeological evidence to support this. My source is "Was there a Revival of Hebrew during the Hasmonean Period? A Reassessment of the Evidence" Journal of Ancient Judaism (2021) 217-80. I can send you this paper if you like.
My scholarship doesn't come from just regurgitating rumors from popular teachers. I've been studying with a group of Christian and Jewish scholars who have been investigating the Jewish context of Jesus for about 50 years now, and their work is not yet widely known. They published a Brill volume called, "The Language Environment of First Century Judaea" that establishes that Jesus did indeed use Hebrew to do exegesis and preach parables. So Jesus likely spoke both Hebrew and Aramaic, but much of his teaching was done in Hebrew. See https://www.academia.edu/9228226/Hebrew_Only_Exegesis_A_Philological_Approach_to_Jesus_Use_of_the_Hebrew_Bible
Regarding Neusner's comment about Safrai, as I said before, Neusner actually reversed his own opinions about whether rabbinic literature was pertinent to the study of the Gospels, and he republished Birger Gerhardsson's book in 1998 that he had panned in 1961. Safrai's book "The Jewish People of the First Century" that he recommended against was published in 1974, during the era when Neusner said that all rabbinic literature is very late and only describes the era in which is written.
I'm guessing that you don't know much about Neusner. He had a habit of writing vitriolic commentary against every scholar who disagreed with him. He pretty much destroyed Gerhardsson's career by his disparagement of his book, which he later decided had much merit. Shmuel Safrai actually won the highest prize for his scholarship that is given, the Israel Prize.
The other issues you raised I'm happy to discuss in another place.
I’m including this in the comments and sending this to your email, because I think that public discussion is itself a form of pedagogy and I think it can be helpful to learn from it. But we can move entirely to email if you prefer.
Personal stuff:I don’t think I ever said that I thought you repeated stuff from popular teachers. I noticed the Vander Laan connection because 1) he wrote the forward in one of your books and 2) it seemed of a piece with that writing. I actually have exhaustively looked at a recent instance of what I actually do think is a true game of telephone misinformation and that’s not what Walking looked like to me at all.
Language:It's admittedly speculative to propose Jesus may have learned scripture from Aramaic texts, but so is the claim that he learned it from Hebrew. There’s just very little data to play with here. Yes, the texts of the Targums themselves are second century, but it's not as though they're coming up over the top of a proliferation of Hebrew writing in Galilee. The scarcity of texts is just that -- scarcity, and Targums start to show up more and more in Galilee alongside more and more synagogues. It's not as though the archeological evidence points to widespread Hebrew use in synagogues in the first century, and then switches to Aramaic. It's that Targums spread with synagogues. So I don't think it's implausible to suppose that they may have been around in Galilee -- just as with the Gospels, just because we don't have the earliest texts doesn't mean they never existed at all.
The evidence that Aramaic was the more common language is pretty widely established. In Galilee, inscriptions in and around Sepphoris are primarily Greek (no surprise there). There's a jar fragment with Hebrew on it in Sepphoris (Sepphoris in Galilee, 113-114). But there's a fair amount of evidence for Aramaic literary culture.
In your email, you'll see some pages from Heszer here.
Does the DDS contain a lot of Hebrew? Sure. But remember this is a religious, pietistic community. The fact that the Essenes keep Hebrew copies of their scriptures is not itself evidence that most Jews could read and speak Hebrew. The Essenes are not representative of general Jewish life. They’re a big deal to us, because they’re the ones whose books we found. But they’re not representative of common Judaism. A more mixed source are the Bar Kokbha letters, which are covered in Michael Wise’s book, which argues more for a literary form of Hebrew that is best attested in scribal communities:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvggx429.5?searchText=&searchUri=&ab_segments=&searchKey=&refreqid=fastly-default%3Aaf896c0a87476ce0a6f641f6e0cea55b&seq=3 (ch 1 is all about Aramaic evidence, too).
And let’s not forget: the transliterated words of Jesus in Mark are in Aramaic. When Mark wanted to record the words of Jesus as he actually said them, that's what he used.
Schools:
As for Simeon ben Shetah establishing schools: this is tricky. Ben Shetah is credited with establishing schools in the Jerusalem Talmud (8:5). But in the Bavli (Bava Batra 21a) it’s Yehoshua ben Gamla who lived in the 60s. So this is another contested tradition. And, of course, remember both of these texts are in fact several centuries after these people lived. Often when we are looking at this passages that describe how the pre-70 CE sages preserved Torah and kept it from fading, we are looking in part at an apologetic project that insists on continuity of rabbinic leadership with Pharisaic leadership. That doesn’t mean it has nothing to do with earlier centuries. But there’s very little we can definitively hang our hats on. I think a better course is noticing when there are tradents in the Mishnah or rabbinic lit that parallel material in older sources – like the Gospels! A great example of this is the divorce debate between Shammai and Hillel, which has a very obvious parallel in Matthew. Same with “that which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor,” or the use of “I desire mercy not sacrifice” to cope with the destruction of the Temple (which shows up twice in Matthew). What’s significantly dodgier is trying to take the Bavli to explain life in the first century – ie., if the Bavli says children must start school at six, then Jesus started school at six. That’s much trickier.
Big picture: This is where I keep landing – there’s very little to hang our hats on. What can we actually know about Jesus through trying to back date genuine first century traditions from the Bavli, from Essene caves, and from the Bar Kokbha letters? Frankly, not a ton. It’s through a glass darkly, so to speak. There certainly may be material there that can give us insight into first century Galilee, but it’s fuzzy and lives in the realm of interpretations over the little information we have.
I tend to be a pretty cautious scholar, so I think perhaps there’s some better questions to ask that might point us in a better direction. First: what do we have in the Gospels themselves? The Gospels themselves don’t suggest they’re better understood with an appeal to Hebrew. They don’t contain any Hebrew. They’re Greek. And, the Gospels actually aren’t terribly interested in Jesus’s academic credentials. The only person who even comes close to suggesting Jesus has them is Luke, and even then the picture is fuzzy - Jesus is sharp in the Temple, and Jesus reads from a scroll. While it’s certainly fun and interesting to try to reconstruct the world around Jesus, there just isn’t a ton of data to work with, and the most reliable historical data we have simply doesn’t answer these questions. Is there something to be learned from that in itself?
Then there’s a second question: what’s in Paul? When the earliest Christians spread the message of Jesus, did they think we needed to jettison Greek and understand Jesus in Hebrew words? Absolutely not. Paul certainly draws on the Old Testament, but for Paul having the “mind of Christ” is not culturally putting ourselves in Jesus’s place. It’s Jesus’s actions and disposition, in Phil 2.
So I think that may be, both academically and theologically, something of a gentle challenge for historical Jesus research. The gentiles understood Paul’s gospel, which he received from Jesus. He taught them the death and resurrection of Jesus. In Greek. Maybe there’s a lesson here.
For the sake of public discussion for Angela and others, I want to point out another source of data about language usage in the Gospels that hasn't been mentioned up until now. It's the fact that the Greek New Testament text itself identifies the language being used as Ἑβραϊστί (“Hebraisti” - meaning Hebrew) in several places. Here are three:
Many of the Jews read this inscription, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Hebrew (Ἑβραϊστί), in Latin, and in Greek. (John 19:20)
And when he had given him permission, Paul, standing on the steps, motioned with his hand to the people. And when there was a great hush, he addressed them in the Hebrew language... (Acts 21:40)
I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads." (Acts 26:14)
In contrast with all these places that Hebrew is named, the word for Aramaic, Συριστι, (“Suristi,” Syriac), is not found anywhere in the Greek NT. Yet it's used in a half dozen places in the LXX translation of the OT, like in 2 Kings 18:26:
Then Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, and Shebnah, and Joah, said to the Rabshakeh, “Please speak to your servants in Aramaic (Συριστι), for we understand it. Do not speak to us in the language of Judah within the hearing of the people who are on the wall.”
So the Greek New Testament itself names the language being used as "Hebrew." Why have you never noticed this in your English translation? Because a few decades ago, some translators decided override the NT authors and simply translate Ἑβραϊστί as "Aramaic."
This is not at all defensible, says Randall Buth, a linguist who specializes in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic/Syriac. The two languages were never confused with each other in ancient sources. Words that sound like they were Aramaic, like "rabboni", were found in some dialects of Hebrew too. So when John 20:16 says that Mary was speaking Hebrew when she called Jesus "Rabboni," there's no reason to declare that John was wrong and she was speaking Aramaic instead.
I'm getting this all from a chapter that Buth wrote called "“Hebraisti in Ancient Texts: Does Ἑβραϊστί ever mean Aramaic?" in the Brill volume called "The Language Environment of First Century Judaea." You can read it on Academia at this link:
https://www.academia.edu/6935035/Hebraisti_in_Ancient_Texts_Does_%E1%BC%91%CE%B2%CF%81%CE%B1%CF%8A%CF%83%CF%84%CE%AF_Ever_Mean_Aramaic
The overall conclusion of the book is that there is plenty of evidence that the New Testament existed in a trilingual environment (Greek-Aramaic-Hebrew) because Hebrew was a living language in use at time. They reject the idea that the Qumran community alone used the language. Of the Bar Kokhba letters, about half were in Hebrew, and half were in Aramaic, and a couple were in Greek. Many people were bilingual.
Sorry for the digression, but I wanted to make it clear that the NT actually does name Hebrew as the language of discourse in several places. This is not just silly speculation of Hebraic roots teachers.
But going back to your comments on my book, you are totally right that it would be odd to talk about Hebrew if I was only thinking of the New Testament. My reason for including a chapter on Hebrew words because the book was about reading the *Bible* with Rabbi Jesus, which refers to *both* testaments, not just the New Testament. (The Scripture that Jesus knew and taught from was the Hebrew Bible, not the New Testament.) In fact, the whole last section of my book (ch. 9-13) was specifically about how the Hebrew Bible was being read and interpreted in the early synagogue, and how it lent itself to Jesus’ Messianic claims.
I need to also clarify that the book had no agenda of being "anti-Greek." The Greek Brain/ Hebrew Brain chapter had no intention of telling people to reject Western intellectualism. First I was explaining to a lay-audience what abstract rationalism and syllogistic reasoning is and how Westerners recognize these as intellectually sophisticated. But then I go on to say that non-Western cultures *do think logically* but often communicate intelligent, sophisticated ideas in other ways.
Laura, I admit that I can now see that using John the Baptist's rebuke of the religious leaders as an example wasn't good because my point was not to contrast emotionalism with intellectual argumentation. It was to contrast the non-Western use of concrete metonyms with the Western tendency to use abstract nominalization.
My point was better served by the next example, where I contrasted a quote from Ecclesiastes with one from an essay by George Orwell on politics and language. Ecclesiastes says,
"Again I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, or the battle to the strong, or bread to the wise, or riches to the discerning, or favor to the skillful; rather, time and chance happen to all of them." (Eccles. 9:11)
Orwell expresses the same idea this way:
"Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."
Westerners see the second statement as more intellectual, not recognizing that the biblical quote is communicating the same high level ideas but in a different way. Ecclesiastes is using metonyms - concrete images that stand in for broad categories and ideas. “Under the sun,” describes everything in the experience of human life. “Bread” refers to all food, the “battle” refers to military aggression and warfare.
My point is NOT to say that Hebraic thought is about loose emotionalism that has no intellectual logic behind it. It is to say that brilliant, profound ideas can be expressed in ways that don't quite fit with Western rationalism, so they don't feel very "intelligent" to us.
(Thanks for letting me go on and on in this long response.)
I honestly do not mind being challenged on my thinking. Your welcome to ask me about anything else that I've written.
Many blessings,
Lois
If I can weigh in on this argument, all learning is learning and influence, regardless if its formal education or not. Oral cultures are like that, and there is a lot of terrific work being done about oral culture recently as well. Also serious education can be done 100% orally with intention as well. In the end it doesn't matter whether Jesus went to school or could read at all (although the Gospels said he could.) He grew up in a milleiu with Jewish teachers running around, many of whom were highly regarded like Gamaliel, immersed in scripture and Jewish tradition, and this is the type of thing he learned by osmosis from his Jewish upbringing. It's what he learned, thought, and had as his "heart language" and theological definitions, regardless of what language it was exactly in, which ends up sort of moot. And plenty of uneducated people right now are trilingual due to living at a crossroads of cultures...exactly like most first century people in the Roman Empire. Most Jews of the last 2000 years have been bilingual of necessity, and some Amish are trilingual in spite of little formal education. I think part of my American bias is forgetting how many ordinary people in the world can speak several languages. I took care of an elderly woman for a while who supported herself her whole life as a French translator for the government even though she was completely illiterate in any language. Didn't matter since she could speak French and English, so she could be a translator for oral settings.
As someone with some Greek and Hebrew, I can testify that there are plenty of things in the NT that aren't anymore intelligible in Greek than in English, and this is exactly why there are endless arguments about things like Romans 6-8 and 9-12. And not trivial ones either! On the other hand, after learning Jewish context and common sense reading (with the corollary of unlearning 45 years of bad fundagelical nonsense) most things open up fairly easily. The problem isn't precisely the Greek words, as much as it is the front loading of them with Reformation theological definitions. Or presuppositions set as far back as the split between Jewish and Gentile Messianics in the 2nd century. It takes a lot of courage and a safety net to leave behind ideas that they told you were the only things saving you from frying in hell, and changing your theological mind about them! Looking at the Hebrew and finding other respectable traditions that have different views is important to thinking you are not falling off the deep end, and also in convincing your friends you aren't a heretic. Whether you are dabbling in Welseyan, Eastern Orthodox, or Jewish theological concepts, the New Perspective on Paul, or a combination of them, you know that you are not alone in thinking that there are better streams than the modern American folk Christianity that you believed in before.
We laymen need to be more into this scholarly back and forth though! So don't hide your arguments in private emails, please! Public discourse is still how most of us learn!
I think it is generally very important to note that in non-text-based cultures, not reading regularly or extensively or having limited literacy is not a handicap. In many oral cultures literacy is no different from being a brick layer - it’s a skill some people have because it’s their trade. The fact that we can’t find exhaustive evidence of Hebrew scribal and literary culture in 1st century Galilee doesn’t mean Jesus was stupid. It means his education may have looked different from ours, and we just don’t know that much about it in any particular detail.
Laura (and Angela),
I agree with both of you that being multilingual is common around the world, just about everywhere except the US, and Jesus likely knew multiple languages - Aramaic and Hebrew both, at least.
I also agree that being able to read and write is overly equated with intelligence. Certainly Jesus could have had a very different education than we've had and could be brilliant none the less. We're all agreed on these things. Angela, thanks for sharing.
**Also, let's not forget Greek! There's some massive, new Greek cities going up all around the Galilee during Jesus's twenties. As a teknon, a working knowledge of Greek, at least enough to take instructions or command a crew, would have been really important! Fluent enough to teach in? Maybe not. But working knowledge would have been important.
One other thing I might note about Aramaic is - when Paul (earliest source for this) uses Peter's given name "the rock," it's Cephas. This is from Kephas, which is the Aramiac word for "rock." The closest analogous word in Hebrew is "keph," which means "crags" and is a comparatively rarer word than the far more common word eben in Hebrew. So the name Jesus gave Peter doesn't seem to be Hebrew. It seems to be Aramaic.
Angela, I see your point about public discourse. I'll try to briefly respond to Laura's points here.
The link for the lateness of Torah education for Jewish boys is to the Virginia Tech proxy server,
https://web-p-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&sid=11d1b120-7c02-47d1-bcbb-244180b41517%40redis
can you give a direct link and/or a reference?
Also, any time y'all want to do more NT Review, please do!
Thanks for your work,
Hi Eric - do you mean for the book reviews of Safrai?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24656620
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3266180
This is great as usual. Do you have any suggestions for trustworthy resources for the Jewishness of Jesus? I am curious about other common claims I have heard. Particularly, would love your take on the idea that Jesus was a Pharisee himself, or as close to it to make the distinction unhelpful. And if he wasn't necessarily trained in post-second temple Rabbinical schools, to what extent was he a recognized rabbi in the second temple context?
I guess my concern is, I have seen a number of Jewish people who interact with Christians about the NT make claims similar to these about Jesus status as a rabbi, and a pretty typical one at that. Does that fall into the category of what you are cautioning against here? Or is that an unremarkable claim, historically speaking?
EDIT: I reread and I sound more suspicious than I am actually, so to clarify: I want to take Jewish people speaking about their own tradition seriously when they bring correction to often nonsensical ideas that Christians have about Judaism, but some of these correctives seem close to what you are cautioning against here.
I mean, in the most literal sense Jesus gets called "rabbi" in the Gospels. So yes, some kind of teacher.
I think that's a reasonable step to take. What I don't want to do is impose standards of what we think of as rabbis today, and the traditions for that, onto the first century before we really have records of rabbis in detail.
I think a great intro to early Judaism is EP Sander's books. Other scholars I really like - AJ Levine, Tal Ilan. I'll try to think of some others.