Christianity in the Babylonian Talmud

The Babylonian Talmud in its cultural context

“…The most likely catalysts for this recent push perhaps include: (1) a growing desire to blaze new trails and break away from the more traditionally insular focus of Talmudic studies; (2) the increased accessibility of Middle Persian and Syriac texts online and in translation, as well as the creation of study groups and new programs to facilitate learning these languages; and (3) the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the Humanities and the push to produce research that speaks to multiple fields. This increased interest in cultural context is perhaps most obvious when one notes two key programmatic monographs – Shai Secunda's The Iranian Talmud () and Michal Bar‐Asher Siegal's Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud (). These works make the case for the importance of studying the Babylonian Talmud in light of Sasanian and Christian (Greek and Syriac) monastic literature, respectively.…”

“…While there were a number of early studies on Judaism in light of Syriac Christian sources (noted above), a more rigorous comparison of the rabbinic and Syriac corpora started taking shape in the 1990s (e.g., Gero, ; Hezser, ) and really began blossoming in the twenty‐first century. Michal Bar‐Asher Siegal's important book, Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud (), highlights both formal and narrative parallels between the Apophthegmata Patrum (“The Sayings of the Desert Fathers”) and the Bavli. Beyond Bar‐Asher Siegal's work, recent interest in examining the Babylonian Talmud (and rabbinic Judaism more broadly) in light of Syriac Christianity has moved in a number of directions.…”