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In my post on Seth Schwartz's summary of trends in scholarship on rabbinics, I referred to Schwartz's statement that Jacob Neusner agreed with Saul Lieberman that the rabbis were influenced by Hellenism, yet he concurred with E. Goodenough that the rabbis were marginal. Schwartz may be correct, for Neusner has written numerous books, and, in some of them, he may very well have asserted that the rabbis were not as prominent in Late Antiquity as they claimed. But, in my reading of Neusner's Introduction to Rabbinic Literature and Uniting the Dual Torah, I found something different: that the Mishnah was the law in courts of Palestine, Babylon, and Iran, shortly after its promulgation around 200 C.E.
In this post, I will not try to arbitrate the debate regarding the influence of the rabbis in Late Antiquity. But I will talk about the discussion for which Neusner's view in Introduction and Uniting is a starting point: the rabbinic attempt to relate the Mishnah to the written Torah. According to Neusner, the Mishnah was widely influential, and yet it was a mystery. Here the Mishnah was being used in the courts, and people wondered what exactly its basis for authority was. The written Torah was definitely deemed to be authoritative, such that writings that sought to be accepted as revelation interacted with the written Torah in some way---by claiming to have been written by a biblical personage (i.e., the pseudepigrapha), or by imitating biblical Hebrew, or by interpreting the biblical text.
But the Mishnah does not do any of these things. Although it attributes certain opinions to rabbis, the compilers are anonymous, in that the text does not explicitly tell us who they are. The Mishnah also does not imitate biblical Hebrew, but it uses Mishnaic Hebrew instead. And, while there are a few occasions in the Mishnah in which rabbis base their opinions on Scripture, there are even more opinions that are free-standing---they are not supported by Scripture. Another relevant issue is that the Mishnah for years was circulated orally, whereas people wrote down messages that they considered to be divine revelation. So the Mishnah was unlike documents that claimed to be divine revelation or authoritative within ancient Jewish religion.
The rabbis addressed this problem in at least three ways. The first approach was to assert that the Mishnah was oral Torah that was revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai, after which it was transmitted orally down to the time of the rabbis. According to Neusner, a generation after the promulgation of the Mishnah, the first apologetic for the Mishnah, Avot, proposed that the Mishnah's authority went back to Sinai. Avot is now a part of the Mishnah, but it was not originally.
The second approach was to use Scriptures to substantiate items in the Mishnah. This is something that the Tosefta (ca. 300 C.E.) and the Jerusalem Talmud (ca. 400 C.E.) do. And the third approach is that of Sifra Leviticus (third century C.E.): to use the written Torah as the basis for organization, and to show how the Mishnah coincides with Scripture. In Sifra Leviticus, the Book of Leviticus itself shapes the order of the document, and the Mishnah and the Tosefta are used to discuss Leviticus; this is different from the Tosefta and the Talmuds, which follow (or have) the order of the Mishnah and cite Scripture in a discussion of Mishnaic topics.
I do not entirely comprehend Neusner's treatment of Sifra Leviticus, to tell you the truth. On the one hand, Neusner states that the people responsible for Sifra Leviticus believed that the Mishnah was oral Torah and that they were bringing written and oral Torah together---as they sought to understand the mind of God. Perhaps Neusner's point here is that the compilers of Sifra Leviticus saw that there were two independent items of revelation---the written Torah and the oral Torah. Both were from the mind of God, and yet they appeared to be unrelated to each other. But their concepts had to be intertwined with each other in some way, for they were both from the same divine mind! Consequently, those who put together Sifra Leviticus sought to integrate the oral Torah into the written Torah---to demonstrate that the oral Torah was consistent with and based on the written Torah.
On the other hand, Neusner contends that Sifra Leviticus is arguing against the Mishnah's presentation of opinions without Scriptural support. For Neusner, the goal of Sifra Leviticus---and also Sifre Numbers and Sifre Deuteronomy---is to show that human reasoning is inadequate when it is unaided by Scriptural exegesis. The tactic of these documents is to demonstrate that an idea is reasonable, and yet Scripture says something different, showing that reason does not lead a person to the truth. Although Sifra Leviticus does view the Mishnah as authoritative, it appears to subordinate the Mishnah to written Scripture, as if the Mishnah cannot stand on its own as an authority and is wrong to present human reasoning as the determiner of truth. But, if the Mishnah were revealed from Mount Sinai, why doesn't the Mishnah stand on its own as an authority? And the Mishnah is not presenting human reasoning as the determiner of truth, for the Mishnah was revealed by God!
(UPDATE: At the same time, in what I read, Neusner does not say that the people responsible for Sifra Leviticus believed that the oral Torah was revealed at Sinai.)
Tomorrow, I will talk about another view: that the Mishnah is actually based on a version of Sifra Leviticus. Stay tuned!
