BGU Scholar Finds Way to Map Early Jewish-Christian Relations
BGU Scholar Finds Way to Map Early Jewish-Christian Relations
July 31, 2023
Israel Studies, Culture & Jewish Thought, Research News, Uncategorized
A page from the Babylonian Talmud.
The Jerusalem Post — Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, a scholar of rabbinic Judaism at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and Yossi Yovel, a zoologist from Tel Aviv University, say their approach, once it becomes widely used, could revolutionize the field of Jewish-Christian studies.
Their visualizations — picture color-coded dots representing rabbis and church elders connected by a spider web of relationships — are “a snapshot of a multi-faceted reality spread over many decades and thousands of kilometers in which Jews and Christians interact in various ways with one another,” they wrote in the May 2023 issue of Human and Social Science Communications.
The Babylonian Talmud, a vast anthology of rabbinic law and lore, was produced in present-day Iraq between the 3rd and 7th centuries CE. At the same time, Christianity was evolving from a heretical Jewish sect to a religion with growing influence across the waning Roman Empire. Like most scholars of rabbinic Judaism, Bar-Asher Siegal rejects a dated theory that Jews and Christians “parted ways” in the early centuries of the Common Era and had limited contact. But she also wanted proof beyond the painstaking scholarly method of comparing passages in Jewish and Christian texts.
“The application of network analysis makes it possible to identify the most influential texts — that is, the key ‘nodes’ — testifying to the importance of certain traditions for both religious communities,” Bar-Asher Siegal said in a statement from BGU.
Read more on The Jerusalem Post >>
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