What happened when a heretic walked into a rabbinic bet midrash? Or better put, how did the rabbis imagine conversing with this heretic? Would they even engage with what they considered heretical views? In my new book, Jewish-Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity: Heretic Narratives of the Babylonian Talmud, I set out to show that the Babylonian Talmud, in at least some of its minim stories, is doing just that: the Talmud engages with contemporaneous Christian readings of biblical verses in a satirical and polemical ways.Cross-file under Talmud Watch and New Book.
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