If you are convinced that Jesus was God incarnate and fully diety, then this question is moot. However, it seems to me that while Jesus taught a radical philosophy of “turn the other cheek”, he wasn’t the first. Rabbi Hillel said, years before Jesus gave the Royal Commandments:
Both are basically restating Leviticus 19:18 “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD”
The main difference is that Hillel and Jesus expanded the sense of Neighbor to include all of humanity while strict constructionalists of their day limited neighbor to fellow Jews. Even Jesus’ great commission to the apostles seems to be following the idea the Hillel championed concerning the Ger Toshav - that righteous Gentiles would receive a place in the World to Come (whatever that means).
Why does Hillel get short shrift in the New Testament? Surely Paul and several of the original apostles knew of Hillel. Why does he get ignored when he seems to have been a great influence on Jesus?
Is this your own idea, or are you getting it from somewhere? Please provide evidence of the following assertions:
That Hillel expanded the “sense of neighbor” beyond that of the “strict constructionalists”
That Hillel himself was not a “strict constructionalist”
That Hillel “championed” any ideas about “righteous Gentiles”
I dispute all these assertions. And I don’t see much left to your OP. Hillel thought treating people nicely was a key part of religion. So do a whole lot of other people.
In my opinion Hillel was not a strict constructionalist because he accepted the idea that the righteous Gentiles earned a place in the World to Come by following the Noahide laws. It seems to me a strict constructionalist would ascribe to the idea that the Gentile must be Ger Tzedek and follow all the Laws. Even then some of Hillel’s contemporaries, for instance Rabbi Shammai, did not believe they received a place in the World to Come.
You don’t have to look far to find Hillel commonly quoted as saying "“Be thou of the disciples of Aaron, one who loves peace, pursues peace, loves mankind, and draws them nigh to the Torah.” I believe that supports my opinion that he supported the expansion of the idea of Neighbor to include as much of the world as possible.
I can’t imagine what such an alleged dispute would have to do with being a “strict constructionalist”. Also, I deny that there was any dispute between Hillel and Shamai about this matter. In fact, I’m unaware of any dispute about this matter at all.
I don’t think your opinion about expansion is supported by your quote, and don’t agree that it refers to non-Jews.
Again I ask - what is the source of all this info you are posting?
Are you just are having problems with my particular phrasing of “strict constructionalist”?
I haven’t spent years studying this. It’s just an idea that has been kicking around in my head for a couple of days so I thought I’d run it up the flagpole here to see who salutes. Sure it may not be the most well-researched or profound idea floated here. But it’s certainly not worthy of the scorn you’ve heaped upon it either.
OK, Homebrew, but from where do you see that Shammai (he’s never referred to as Rabbi Shammai) held that Gentiles don’t have a place in the World to Come?
Well, yeah, Hillel was a lot more patient than Shammai, who, honestly, comes across generally as kind of a jerk. I think both of them, though, recognized that Gentiles were subject to the Noachide laws, and I haven’t seen anywhere that Shammai thought that righteous Gentiles couldn’t go to heaven. If you remember where you learned this, I’d appreciate seeing it, because it’s really a suprise to me.
This is also nonsense. One of the main teachings attributed to Shamai was to accept every person with a pleasant countenance. Was is true is that he did not suffer fools or nudnicks gladly. Into which category I would place people who demand to be tought the entire Torah while standing on one foot. (Hillel, on the other hand, was known as an extreme tolerator of nudniks. There is another story in the Talmud of a guy who made a bet that he could anger Hillel. He pestered him all Friday afternoon in the bathhouse with rediculous questions, but was ultimately unsuccesful).
Perhaps. I understood you to mean that Hillel supported creative reinterpretation of the law in order to conform with general principles of brotherly love. There is no evidence for this.
I disagree.
Libertarian
Very misleading. I don’t think there is any rabbinic literature prior to the end of the second century. Certainly nothing extensive.
In general, there are very few teachings attributed to Hillel altogether. A lot to his “school” though.
How in the world could he (Neusner) possibly know this?
My apologies, zev. I meant no offense by appending Rabbi to Shammai. BTW, why is it found with both 1 and 2 m’s?
I may be misremembering that he doesn’t accept the idea of Gentiles in the afterlife, but he was clearly much more strict in his beliefs about what was required of us.
But the Hillel vs Shammai dispute is not the real substance of my OP. It seems to me that Jesus was influenced by Hillel but he gets no credit.
No offense taken. It’s just that before a certain period of time, none of the rabbis in the Talmud were called “Rabbi ____” but simply “_____”.
As for the spelling, since it’s all a transliteration anyway, there is no “proper” English spelling.
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Well, as IzzyR pointed out, there were very few halachic disputes between Hillel and Shammai themselves. Their schools, however, did often argue points of law with Shammai’s school usually taking the stricter opinion in terms of practice.
The writings about Jesus preceded the writings about Hillel. What’s misleading about it? There is no conclusion that Hillel was borrowed from Jesus; there is merely a rebuttal to the assertion that Jesus necessarily borrowed from Hillel.
To answer your main point, I think Jesus tought some very different things than either the school of Hillel or the school of Shammai. I don’t really know if you can put Jesus into Pharaseic Judaism at all. He seems to have had pretty big differences when it came to his teachings on ritual purity, rememberence of the sabbath, and daily living.
This is true, of course. But what’s important is that there is no indication that these derive from a stricter or more lenient attitude towards adherence to, or interpretation of, the written law.
Actually there is that “implication” in the next-to-last sentence of your quote.
But that’s not my point. What Neusner is apparently trying to do is suggest that since no contemporary writings refer to Hillel’s teachings, it is likely that that these were attributed to him posthumously. And what I am saying is that since there were no contemporary writings, you cannot use the abscence of such references to infer anything.
In the alleged “dispute between the schools of Hillel and Shammai,” Jesus’s teachings put him squarely on the side of Hillel, FWIW – IIRC! Perhaps one of you who know the Jewish tradition better than I would expand on the “teach me the Torah standing on one foot” story – because IMHO it has a lot to do with the arguments going on around here about the core of Jesus’s message.
I think that IzzyR resembles Shammai more closely and Zev Steinhardt resembles Hillel more.
When it comes to religion I have found that oftentimes the stuff that is most accepted is the stuff that’s just common sense. I mean, if you treat people around you well, they treat you well, and they treat those around them besides you well, and then those people treat people well, etc… I mean that just makes sense to me. If you are mean to people it puts them in a bad mood and affects you adversely. I don’t understand why they both can’t come to that idea independantly using the same source material.
With me, a lot of my ideas as far as this sort of philosophy goes were gleaned from my own meditations and thinking, and then later I learned more about Judaism (I don’t know much) and it seemed to be very in line with what I was thinking. I also get asked if I am a Taoist quite often, and I’ve never read ANYTHING about Taoism and only a little about Zen and Buddhism. So perhaps you can come up with the ideas and contemplate them independantly using similar source material. Though it is entirely possible that Jesus learned from Hillel, just as it is entirely possible that during his missing years he was in Asia learning Eastern Thought. who knows? Basically the way I see it is that hte truth is the truth, and people seeking the truth will stumble upon it.
Religion is the early source code of society. It was a great way to make a largely unthinking populace work cohesively so that they’d understand that life would be better if they behaved a certain way, but not necessarily understanding the why of it. It was a way of staving off anarchy. Now we are much more aware of how our actions can affect not only us, but those that live continents away, and we are much more willing to accept a higher level of connectivity as being plausible, so the idea that our actions ripple throughout all of humanity doesn’t sound quite as far fetched.
So I think for the most part that people came to this particular thought independently because well, “It just makes a whole lot of sense.”
