Eight Books of Talmudic Exegesis in the Greco-Roman World

pages 1 - 548: Midrash and Lection in Matthew - M. D. Gouder - Wipf & Stock - 2007 Pages 549 - 635: Septuagintal Midrash in the Speeches of Acts - Luke Timothy Johnson - Marquette - 2002 pages 636 - 850: Rabbinic Literature and Greco-Roman Philosophy - H. A. Fishel - Brill - 1973 pages 851 - 1145: Plato and the Talmud - Jacob Howland - Cambridge - 2007 pages 1146 - 1338: Midrash and Multiplicity: Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer and the Renewal of Rabbinic Interpretive Culture - Steven Daniel Sachs - DeGruyter - 2009 pages 1339 - 1575: Midrash, Mishnah, and Gemara - David Weiss Halivini - Harvard University Press - 1986 pages 1516 - 1768: Sustaining Fictions: Intertextuality, Midrash, Translation, and the Literary Afterlife of the Bible - L. C. Stahlberg - T & T Clark - 2008 pages 1769 - 2135: Talmuda de-Eretz Isreal - Archaeology and the Rabbis in Late Antiquity Palestine - Fine & Koller - DeGruyter - 2014 pages 2136 - 2317: Jerusalem and Athens - Jacob Neusner - Brill - 1997 We originally created this in an effort to not have to open eight different .pdfs at one time, which not all .pdf readers will do. The subject, loosely put, is what the Rabbis and Greeks knew about each other circa 350 BCE - 600 CE. While all of these books are available here as separate volumes, we felt that someone might find this a handy reference tool. This challenging and original book questions the accepted conclusions of synoptic research. It argues, first, that Matthew is an adaptation and expansion of Mark by midrash - that is, by standard Jewish expository techniques - depending on no written source other than Mark, and only to a very small extent on oral tradition; and, secondly, that Matthew was written to be read in Christian worship round the year, as a cycle of lessons following the Jewish festal lectionary. Part I establishes the characteristics of the Matthaean manner - his vocabulary, his rhythms and images, the form and mode of his parables. With so much typical of Matthew as a gospel, sources other than Mark become progressively less plausible. Part II is a commentary on the gospel from this base. It finds a basic Marcan text for each new unit and a reason for its development, and works out in detail the correspondence between the five teaching sections of Matthew and the five Jewish festal seasons of Pentecost, New Year-Atonement, Tabernacles, Dedication, and Passover. A striking piece of corroborative evidence is found in the section numbers of the old Greek manuscript tradition. Michael Goulder believes that lectionary schemes also underlie Mark and Luke, and that at least one major part of the Old Testament, the work of the Chronicler, has a similar character. A gospel, in fact, is not a literary genre at all, but a liturgical one. Matthew himself comes into focus as a converted Jewish scribe who possessed the substance of the Pauline teaching, and who has been the dominant influence in forming the Church's image of Jesus in his adaptation of Mark by midrash and through lection.