This collection of eight essays draws on a half-year of work, the second six months of 2009. Neusner takes up three problems in the history of Religions, four essays on fundamental issues in form-history and the documentary hypothesis of the Rabbinic canon, and one theological essay. The reason Neusner periodically collects and publishes essays and reviews is to give them a second life, after they have served as lectures or as summaries of monographs or as free-standing articles or as expositions of Judaism in collections of comparative religions. This re-presentation serves a readership to whom the initial presentation in lectures or specialized journals or short-run monographs is inaccessible. Some of the essays furthermore provide a précis, for colleagues in kindred fields, of fully worked out monographs, the comparative Midrash exercise, for example.
Autorentext
The real measure of Jacob Neusner's contribution to the study of religion emerges from the originality, excellence, and scope of his learning. He founded a field of scholarship: the academic study of Judaism. He built out of that field to influence a larger subject: the academic study of religion. He created durable networks and pathways of interreligious communication and understanding. And he cared for the careers of others. Ever generous with his intellectual gifts, Neusner is one of America's greatest humanists. In all aspects of his career, he exemplifies the meaning of American learning. In all he has done, Jacob Neusner fulfills the distinctive promise of the academic study of religion in an open and pluralistic society that values religion as a fundamental expression of freedom. -from the Encyclopaedia Judaica, second edition
Inhalt
Chapter 1 Preface
Part 2 On the History of Judaism
Chapter 3 1. Resentment and Renewal: Toward a Theory of the History of Judaism
Chapter 4 2. Restorationist Soteriology in Rabbinic Judaism
Chapter 5 3. Judaism: Tradition and Heritage
Part 6 On the Literature of Judaism: Canon and Category
Chapter 7 4. Canonical Documents and Native Categories
Chapter 8 5. Canonical Narrative and the Documentary Hypothesis: From the Misnah to the Talmuds
Chapter 9 6. Sage-Stories in the Two Talmuds: How the Documents Differ
Chapter 10 7. Explaining an Academic Commentary: A Visual Recapitulation of Bavli Hullin as Translated by Tzvee Zahavy
Part 11 On the Theology of Judaism
Chapter 12 8. Do Monotheist Religions Worship the Same God? A Perspective on Classical Judaism