Jesus, Mary, and Akiva ben Joseph
Early parallels to and commentaries on Massekhet Kallah (a rabbinic text from the Talmudic Period) read the story in it about a woman and her ill-conceived son as being about Jesus and Mary. While some modern scholars have shied away from this reading, I argue in this paper that Massekhet Kallah sho...
| Published in: | Journal of ancient Judaism |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
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| Published: |
Brill
[2018]
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| In: |
Journal of ancient Judaism
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | Early parallels to and commentaries on Massekhet Kallah (a rabbinic text from the Talmudic Period) read the story in it about a woman and her ill-conceived son as being about Jesus and Mary. While some modern scholars have shied away from this reading, I argue in this paper that Massekhet Kallah should be read as engaging its cultural context, particularly its Syriac Christian milieu. In the passage under discussion, Rabbi Akiva tricks the woman into revealing the circumstances under which her son was conceived by falsely promising her life in the world-to-come. False oaths, however, are strictly forbidden in rabbinic literature, which leaves scholars scrambling to justify Rabbi Akiva's behavior. Read as an anti-Christian polemic, this and other anomalies begin to make sense and seem to be crafted to counter Christian ideology. If the narrative is read through this lens, it appears that the author is attempting to establish that Jesus is not the son of God, but the product of adulterous and impure sex; that the "true" revelation is of Jesus' lowly birth rather than his divine conception; and that rabbis, rather than Jesus, have the power to grant a person eternal life. Typical of polemical literature, certain passages, like the one about the child and his mother, attack central Christian tenets, and the broader themes of Massekhet Kallah do appear to be wrestling with its Christian counterparts over the definitions of holiness and sexual asceticism; however, other passages present stories that can be read as consistent with those proliferating in the Christian monastic literature of the Egyptian desert fathers popular in Syriac Christianity. Taken together, the evidence suggests that Massekhet Kallah is a text that is engaging with its Christian milieu - at times striving with it and at times consonant with it. This article, then, is an experiment in reading Massekhet Kallah in that Christian context. |
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| ISSN: | 2196-7954 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of ancient Judaism
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.13109/jaju.2018.9.1.101 |