If it sounds surprising to you that there is any place where the Christian New Testament* and the Jewish Talmud are on the same page, so to speak, it did to me at first, too. But now, the more I study, the more I discover there are a great many places where both the Jewish sages and the Christian writers appear to be saying the same things, and often from a similar perspective.

My first exposure to this phenomenon was through Dr. A. Cohen’s Everyman’s Talmud, E.P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1949. Dr. Cohen writes from an educated Conservative Jewish perspective, not from a Christian or Messianic Jewish one. So when I saw the sayings of Jesus reflected over and over again in rabbinical parables and precepts, I began to realize that there was a lot more in common between the two supposedly divergent streams of teaching than I had previously considered or ever heard. And I got some pretty strange looks whenever I mentioned it to my fellow Christian believers.

And I’m not just talking here about the well-known fact that many different cultures have some form or another of “the golden rule.” That’s just basic human social sense. The correspondence between Gospel precepts and parables and their Talmudic counterparts are more detailed, and sometimes very much out of synch with common social wisdom. You may have read Matthew 5:28, “I say to you that whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” but you may not have read this in the Talmud: "He that looks upon a woman’s heel,  is as if he looked upon her belly:  and he that looks upon her belly,  is as if he lay with her."

Or Luke 24:5  “And as they were afraid, and bowed their faces down to the earth, they said to them, Why do you seek the living among the dead?” is very much like this rabbinical quote found in Cohen: “a person who lost his son went to inquire for him in a cemetery …is it the way to inquire for the dead among the living or the dead? Surely it is always the practice of the living to attend to the needs of the dead, not vice versa!”

Luke 8:18,  “Therefore be careful how you hear. For whoever has, to him shall be given; and whoever has not, from him shall be taken even that which he seems to have,”  is not much different from this: “God’s measure is not like the measure of flesh and blood.  The measure of flesh and blood is this:  ‘An empty vessel is receptive,  but a full one can take in no more.  But God’s measure is this,  The full vessel is receptive of more,  but the empty vessel receives nothing;  according as it is said,  If hearing thou wilt hear;  that is,  If thou hearest thou shalt hear;  if thou dost not hear,  thou shalt not hear.”

Those are just a few instances of what I began to run into. I started bookmarking them as I came to them, but the book began filling with slips of paper citing Gospel verses where they matched the Talmudic reading under discussion. Too much to be mere coincidence. This got me to wondering if perhaps the sages, since they historically followed Jesus and the apostles, were maybe just copy-catting, but then I considered that it seemed more likely that both Jesus and the sages followed the same stream, which ultimately comes from the same source: the Torah.

Which makes complete sense, if we dare allow ourselves to go there in our minds. Another one of the books I mention on my Resources page lays it all out rather clearly: that Jesus was (and therefore still is) a Jewish Rabbi of the first order, in love with the Torah, perfectly diligent to keep every one of its precepts and statutes and judgments with all of his heart and soul and strength. Like no other, before or since. Yet isn’t it his desire for us that we follow his example?

So began a delightful journey over the past several months, looking into contemporary Jewish theological literature and Biblical commentary, not necessarily digging for parallels and correspondences, but keeping an eye out for them, all the while drinking in the richness of the wisdom of men who had been studying the Scriptures for hundreds of years before Martin Luther was even a twinkle in Daddy Luther’s eye.

I’ve become especially fond of the Stone Editions of the Pentateuch (Chumash) and Hebrew Scriptures (Tanach) from Artscroll Mesorah. I began keeping a handwritten journal of choice nuggets as I came across them, and even that is now filling up so much as to be hard to keep track of. I’ve shared a few of these things with friends, and I still get some odd looks, but not as many, and not quite so odd. So I’m going to try to follow along here, as much as is practical. Partly so I can come here myself and use the web browser ‘find’ function to look up something I’d noted earlier, and partly to share. If no one else comes here, that’s OK; I’ll still find this method useful for my own purposes. But if anyone does wander this way, maybe they’ll be blessed, or at least piqued to poke around the powerful principles which tend to pile up where the Talmud and New Testament meet.

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(*Just to mention it here, one of the important principles I learned in Gruber’s book Copernicus and the Jews – see my Resources page – is that the use of the term New Testament to refer to the Scriptures written after the close of the Hebrew canon is, if you’ll pardon my saying, completely unscriptural. Gruber thoroughly explains this in his chapter Dr. Frankenstein’s Neighborhood Bible Club. I’d love to spend some time with you quoting and summarizing, but I’ll restrain myself here, and bow to common usage, in order to be understood without having to go over the matter every time I post. A similar deference I’ll make is with respect to the use of the term “Christian.” Gruber also spends a chapter on this, but simply put, it’s not at all clear from “New Testament” Scripture that the early disciples ever thought of themselves by that term, and certainly not primarily. Interesting stuff, really, once you get into it, but not necessary at this point. Also please note my use of the term Talmud is in the most general sense. I refer the interested reader to Dr. Cohen’s book for a very good explanation of what that entails.)