Bible Review

The weekly reading of the Torah is traditionally accredited to Moses himself. See Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Prayer, ch. 12, 1. Compare Encyclopedia Judaica, “Torah, Reading of,” vol. 15, pp. 1246–1255.

Regarding the nature of the extensive literature known as adversus Judaeos (Against the Jews), see Introduction and Bibliography, Disputation and Dialogue, ed. F.E. Talmage (New York: Ktav, 1975).

On the historical aspects of Midrash, see bibliographical references in C.G. Montefiore and H. Loewe, A Rabbinic Anthology (New York: Schocken, 1974). An example of its actual application is Gedaliah Alon, The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age, translated and edited by Gershon Levi (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1980).

For a listing of midrashic collections, see Midrash and Literature, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick (Yale Univ. Press, 1986).

For my own picture of the historical Jesus and his significance, see Jesus: A New Vision (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987). [This book is reviewed by Adela Yarbro Collins in the Bible Books section of this issue.-Ed.]

See, for example, S.G.F. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots (New York: Scribners, 1967).

For a fuller discussion of the positive and negative forms of the criterion of dissimilarity and a sustained critique of the latter, see my Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teaching of Jesus (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1984), pp. 20–24, 283–285.

There is near unanimity within mainstream scholarship about this understanding of Jesus’ use of parables and proverbs/aphorisms. For a representative treatment, see the work of John Dominic Crossan, especially In Parables (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), and In Fragments: The Aphorisms of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983). For a very recent treatment, see Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1989).