Originally posted by vistesd
I’ll note quickly that midrash is mostly sort of a “proto-postmodern” approach, closer to a postmodern literary-critical approach than to a historical-critical approach to the texts. The written Torah is a springboard. Whatever the original authors—E or J or P, as they have been designated by form criticism—intended to convey at that point in history is a ...[text shortened]... s history. All have meaning to offer.
That’s all I can get in before Shabbos. See ya later.
Having read through the material (although really skimming some chunks of it), here are my comments:
First, with regard to the opening comments about midrash and aggadah, I generally concur; and I especially liked the notion of midrash/aggadah being “a species of hypertext”, since the process (as seen in the written Midrashim) seems a lot like “hyper-texting” from source to source on the web.
Second, Jewish listeners/readers in the first century C.E. would have been familiar with, and recognized, various midrashic approaches.
Third, as
written midrash/aggadah, the gospels would be among the earliest—if not the earliest—attempts to put Oral Torah into writing. There was a general prohibition on reducing the Oral Torah to written form—but with the dispersion following the destruction of the second temple on 70 C.E., fear of losing the stories (and halakhic rulings) from the collective memory led to written collections of Oral Torah, the first being generally thought to be the Mishnah, completed by Judah Ha’Nasi around 200 C.E. (The prohibition on reducing the Oral Torah to writing seems to be generally viewed as a guard against dogmatizing.)
Fourth, We do, as is pointed out in the paper, undoubtedly lose hints and allusions (and puns) in translation that readers familiar with the original languages would likely pick up on. The example in the paper is Jairus—but that does not mean that the analyst’s conclusion is necessarily correct. (A more interesting one, to me, would be Jesus Barabbas—bar Abbas: “son of the father”.)
Finally, there is an aspect of the analysis in the paper that I find troubling. It is as if one extreme view goes something like: “
Our stories are totally distinct from any parallels in other cultures—see how our virgin births are totally different in detail from those other virgin births. Well, those are stories, ours is fact…” Etc, etc. While the other extreme, which this paper seems to lean toward is that similarity must mean copying, or borrowing and reworking—the later work, of course, always being derivative of earlier work. But—
How many bare-bones life stories are there? How many root-myths and archetypes in the human psyche—and does the almost infinite possibility for variations on a theme mean either (1) that there are really no common existential themes, on the one hand; or (2) there are
only common themes, in which the variations are simply discountable? Is the
story of my life simply discountable because it follows the same “born-live-die” pattern common to all of us? Are not our individual
stories (and “
myth-tories”!) both individually distinctive, and yet also part of the same common existential themes that enable us to relate to one another?
In the case of the aggadah, there is the fact that we are dealing with a common literature: the Hebrew Bible. And, perhaps, Greek mythology as well. But, it gets a bit like claiming that Hemingway—who surely had access to Greek myth as well—painstakingly, line by line, reworked sections of Homer to produce
The Old Man and the Sea!
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I am not going to comment directly on the Christian scriptures at all. With regard to the Hebrew Scriptures (the
Tanach), there are numerous kind of literature—narrative story, poetry (and highly poetic prose), essay of a kind (e.g., Ecclesiastes), perhaps proto-drama (Job, with its dialogic form, and chorus of voices in “the friends” ). Underlying some of it is likely some history (e.g., some Israelites escaped from Egypt). But whatever history is there was woven into
story. And it is the
story that the midrash “hypertexts” to spin new story.
Here, once again, is one of my favorite stories about Torah and
story, as told by Rabbi Rami Shapiro:
One Shabbos afternoon, Reb Reuven called me into is study. He was sitting behind his desk and motioned me to take the chair across from him. A volume of the
Zohar was lying open in front of him.
“Do you know what the
Zohar is?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said. “It is a mystical commentary on Torah written by Moshe deLeon, a thirteenth century Spanish kabbalist who....”
“Nonsense!” he yelled at me, half rising out of his chair. “The
Zohar isn’t just a commentary; it’s a Torah all by itself. It is a new Torah, a new telling of the last Torah. You do know what Torah is, don’t you?”
Suspecting that I didn’t, and afraid to invoke his wrath a second time, I waited silently, certain that he would answer his own question. I was not disappointed.
“Torah is story. God is story. Israel is story. You, my university-educated soon-to-be a liberal pain in the ass rabbi, are a story. We are all stories! We are all Torahs!...Listen, Rami,” Reuven said in a softer voice. “Torah starts with the word
b’reisheet,* ‘Once upon a time!’”
—Rabbi Rami Shapiro,
Hasidic Tales
* Conventionally translated “in the beginning” or “with beginning.”
07 Jan '10 18:43
The Jesus Myth
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