Report on the "Christology Within Judaism" Enoch Seminar

RELIGION PROF: Christology Within Judaism (Enoch Seminar June 2026) (James F. McGrath).

Our focus at this meeting was on messianisms (including Christology) and “monotheism” (the scare quotes acknowledging the problematic nature of that term). I have used the phrase “Christology within Judaism” because on the one hand, it links to the wider efforts to situate Christian origins as a phenomenon within the Judaism of that time, and on the other hand it highlights the unhelpful historic tendency to study “Christology” (things said about Jesus) as something distinct and potentially separate from Jewish messianism in the same time period.

I was a member of the Early High Christology Club. I still have my mug.

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Chazon on the origin of fixed communal prayer

PROF. ESTHER CHAZON: The Origin of Fixed Communal Prayer: Evidence from Qumran (TheTorah.com).

The discoveries from the caves of Qumran yielded hundreds of psalms and prayers. Some of these derived from the sectarian community known as the Yaḥad, who lived there. Others came from diverse Jewish communities, and were preserved and presumably used by the Yaḥad as part of their twice-daily “offering of the lips” as an alternative to the “defiled” sacrifices being offered in the Temple. These documents offer invaluable evidence concerning the origin of fixed communal prayer in Judaism.

Some years ago I published a critical commentary on the liturgical texts from Qumran:

James R. Davila, Liturgical Works (Eerdmans Commentaries on the Dead Sea Scrolls; Eerdmans, 2001)

Also, congratulations to Professor Chazon on the Orion Center event tomorrow celebrating her recent Festschrift, which I noted here.

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ERC awards "Tracing Scribes and Scrolls" project €2.5M

RESEARCH FUNDING: Mladen Popović awarded ERC Advanced Grant to trace the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Professor Mladen Popović has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant of €2.5 million. Under the project title ‘Tracing Tribes and Scrolls’, he and his team will spend the next five years working in the laboratory and using AI to trace the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls. ... (University of Groningen). HT the Bible Places Blog.

About Popović’s project
In the ‘Tracing Scribes and Scrolls’ project, Popović (Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society and interim dean of the Faculty of Arts) and his colleagues aim to trace the origins and creation of the Dead Sea Scrolls by adopting an interdisciplinary approach to the issue: using analytical chemistry, AI and palaeography (the study of handwriting), they aim to determine where the scrolls were made and written. This could shed new light on the historical and cultural context of the scrolls.

[...]

Congratulations to Professor Popović and his team!

Cross-file under Material Culture, Paleography, and Algorithm Watch.

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Barer, Going Off Script (OUP)

NEW BOOK FROM OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS:

Going Off Script

Improvisational Judgment in the Talmud

Deborah Barer

£68.00
Hardback
Published: 13 May 2026
152 Pages
235x156mm
ISBN: 9780197807859

Also Available As:

E-book

• Situates the contested phrase lifnim mi-shurat ha-din with a novel conceptual framework
• Uses concepts from behavioral economics to analyze rabbinic action
• Uses case studies to articulate the broader legal and hermeneutic assumptions of the Talmudic editors

Description

Going Off Script offers a novel explanation of what it means to act lifnim mi-shurat ha-din (within the line of the law). Tracing the development of this phrase within classical rabbinic literature, the book intervenes in longstanding debates over what this phrase signals about the relationship between Jewish ethics and Jewish law. Deborah Barer breaks with previous scholarship to argue that lifnim mi-shurat ha-din does not represent a particular type of moral or legal action, but rather a way of making decisions. When rabbis act lifnim mi-shurat ha-din, they improvise, deviating from established norms of behavior in order to pursue a specific, case-based outcome.

The creation of this category helps the Talmudic editors make sense of otherwise confusing accounts of rabbinic conduct. It also enables them to solve apparent conflicts between their inherited sources, thus resolving a specific set of legal and hermeneutic challenges that arise in the process of producing the Talmud. Once created, however, this category takes on a life of its own. Later generations of Talmudic readers and interpreters develop lifnim mi-shurat ha-din as a particular type of moral action, rather than as a way of making decisions, and they import those assumptions back onto their reading of the Talmudic text.

By identifying lifnim mi-shurat ha-din as a mode of decision-making, Going Off Script disentangles these later assumptions from the textual record, clarifying the extent to which, at the level of the Talmud itself, lifnim mi-shurat ha-din is a morally evaluative term. It identifies improvisation as a type of decision-making that introduces new moral possibilities, and traces how the Talmudic editors contend both with the destabilization that improvisation introduces as well as the beneficial outcomes it makes possible.

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