The Encyclopedia of Religious and Philosophical Writings in Late Antiquity offers easily accessible introductions to the content and historical setting of the main writings of Greco-Roman paganism, early Judaism, and formative Christianity from the period of Alexander the Great to Mohammed. Examining over seven hundred ancient texts, the Encyclopedia provides for each document details of authorship and provenance, a statement of the text's content and place within its religious tradition, a listing of editions and commentaries, and a bibliography of the pertinent scholarly literature. The Encyclopedia of Religious and Philosophical Writings in Late Antiquity is an unparalleled resource both for general readers and for scholars of ancient religion and philosophy. Originally published in hardcover.

This book presents a new examination of ethical dictum 'The Golden Rule' exploring its formulation and significance in relation to the world's major religions.The Golden Rule: treat others as you would like to be treated. This ethical dictum is a part of most of the world's religions and has been considered by numerous religious figures and philosophers over the centuries. This new collection contains specially commissioned essays which take a fresh look at this guiding principle from a comparative perspective. Participants examine the formulation and significance of the Golden Rule in the world's major religions by applying four questions to the tradition they consider: What does it say? What does it mean? How does it work? How does it matter?Freshly examining the Golden Rule in broad comparative context provides a fascinating account of its uses and meaning, and allows us to assess if, how and why it matters in human cultures and societies.

How can Jesus be said to be "missing"? What is "missing" is not by any means reference to Jesus: what is missing is rather an entire dimension of his identity. The "missing" Jesus is Jesus within Judaism. This publication has also been published in hardback please click here for details.

The renewed perception of Judaism's influence Judaism today is too often thought to represent a religious backwater, a highly particularistic, religion with its own esoteric tales and traditions, practices and norms. First Christians, then Jews themselves, have succumbed to this characterization, resulting in dismissal of Judaism's universal religious significance. Bereft of its religious import, Judaism is increasingly thought merely an ethnic designation-and a quickly dissipating one at that. Neusner pleas for vindication of "the universal character and appeal of Judaic monotheism in the mainstream of humanity." Of the three great monotheistic religions, only Judaism has survived without political power, military might, or great numbers of adherents and has done so because its method and message aim to persuade the world of God's dominion and the marks of God's rule.

Understanding the religious perspectives of the Mishnah starts with asking three questions. First, what is the relationship of the Mishnah to Scripture, or "oral torah" to "written torah," for understanding the religion of Judaism? Second, what is the relationship between religious ideas and the world in which those ideas emerged? Third, what is the formal religious significance of the language of the Mishnah? These questions are posed with regard to a Judaism that existed from just prior to the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. until around 200 C.E. and assumes as well the groundwork of Neusner's earlier volume "The Mishnah: Social Perspectives. In the present volume, Neusner condenses years of research on these questions and offers a clear and thorough analysis through a single lens. He looks closely at how the Halakhah of the Mishnah relates to the events prior to the Mishnah's writing (e.g., the destruction of the Temple, ca. 70 C.E., and the Bar Kokhba War, ca. 135 C.E.), through the reconstruction following Bar Kokhba until the close of the Mishnah (ca. 200 C.E.). Readers also profit from a thorough sociolinguistic explication of the rhetorical forms of the Mishnah in the light of the social context of that time. The religious perspectives of the Mishnah do not simply record the rules and regulations of bygone times; rather, they mirror the way of life and the social and religious history of Judaism.
This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.

"The Mishnah is the crown jewel of Rabbinic Judaism in its formative age," so says the distinguished author of this book. Initiated in the aftermath of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, and developed and amplified over the next five centuries, the Mishnah is the product of an age of calamity giving birth to a renewed search for recovery. As such, it speaks to every age, but to none more particularly and clearly than to our own which has witnessed the destruction wrought by the Shoah and the return to the land of Israel.
Nevertheless, the Mishnah does not explicitly address the agenda of the contemporary world. To reduce the social theology and legal system of the Mishnah to a specific historical setting would be to distort its religious mission which, as Jacob Neusner affirms, is to influence while transcending the world of time and circumstance.
The Mishnah is not a series of niggling precepts, as its misinterpreters contend, but neither is it simply a source of interesting information or of legal directives for shaping everyday life. Rather, the central theme of Making God's Word Work is that throughout the rules and norms of the Mishnah, and beneath their surface, is a governing theological pattern which both defines the detail relating to social conduct as well as brings to the fore a coherent system of analysis, thought, and argumen. "The Mishnah is a law code in form, a work of philosophy and theology in substance, and a work of natural history in execution. Its medium of expression and mode of thinking mark it as close to unique among philosophical and theological writings."
Making God's Word Work will be of interest not only to students of Judaica or those who practice Judaism, but also to students of the history of religions and of comparative religion. Additionally, the book will fascinate philosophers, theologians, literary critics, and humanists in general for its remarkable insights into a way of discursive analysis and rigorous argumentation that is without parallel among the foundational documents of the great world religions.

Twenty-two essays, written by top scholars in the fields of early Christianity and Judaism, focus on methodological issues, earliest Christianity in its Judaic setting, Gospel studies, and history and meaning in later Christianity. These essays honor Bruce Chilton, recognizing his seminal contribution to the study of earliest Christianity in its Judaic setting. Chilton's scholarship has established innovative approaches to reconstructing the life of Jesus, a Jew whose religious ideology developed and therefore must be understood within the Judaism of the first centuries. Following upon Chilton's approaches and insights, the essays collected here illustrate the centrality of the literatures of early Judaism to the critical exegesis of the New Testament and other writings of early Christianity.

One of the world's experts on classical Jewish history and literature offers an authoritative interpretation of the three major periods of Jewish history from the time of the Bible up to the present. What emerges is a captivating account of the life-forming nature of a dynamic religion in vastly differing historical contexts. Glossary, maps, illustrations, photographs.

The oldest of the world's major faiths, Judaism as practiced today represents a tradition that goes back nearly 6,000 years. Accessible and wide-ranging, Judaism: The Basics is a must-have resource covering the stories, beliefs and expressions of that tradition.

Key topics covered include:

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• the Torah
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• Israel - the state and its people
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• Passover
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• Reform Judaism, Orthodox Judaism and Zionism
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• the impact of the Holocaust.

With a glossary of terms and extensive suggestions for further reading, Judaism: The Basics is an essential guide through the rich intricacies of the Jewish faith and people.

Judaism and Islam compare because they concur that God cares deeply not only about attitudes but actions, not only about what one says to God but how one conducts affairs at home and in the village.
In this sourcebook, the authors have selected key passages from the laws of Judaism and Islam which allow a close examination of their mode of expression and medium of thought as well as the substance of the laws themselves. The selected passages concentrate on areas critical to the life of piety and faith as actually practised within the two faith-communities - the relationship between the believer and God, between and among believers, at home in marriage, outside the home in the community and between the faithful and the infidels (for Islam) or idolaters (for Judaism).
Judaism and Islam in Practice presents an invaluable collection of sources of Jewish and Islamic law and provides a unique analysis of the similarities and contrasts between the two faiths.

The sanctification of Israel, the people, endures 1] in the absence of the cult and 2] in alien, unclean territory and 3] whatever the source of the food that Israel eats. Israel s sanctity is eternal, un-contingent, absolute. The sanctification that inheres in Israel, the people, transcends the Land and outlives the Temple and its cult. Since the sanctity of Israel, the people, persists beyond the Temple and outside of the Land, that sanctity stands at a higher point in the hierarchy of domains of the holy that ascend from earth to heaven and from Man to God. That theological construction (Chapters One, Two and Three) gained support from a science and a philosophy (Chapters Four, Five, and Six) that accomplished the hierarchical classification of nature and of the social order. Nature and society arose from the complex to the simple, and conversely the many descended from the one. These represented the theological givens, sustained by the philosophical premises, of Judaism. The law constructed its propositions upon generalizations that pertained universally, so bringing the Israelite norms into accord with natural law. This emerges in the way in which the law sorted out mixtures by their types, fully in line with the Stoic theory of mixtures. The philosophical categorization and classification of the power of intentionality, shaded over into the consideration of classes of causation and responsibility in the Aristotelian manner from deliberate to inadvertent. But how does Judaism integrate into a coherent system its premises, the theological propositions, and its recurrent analytical protocols, the philosophical principles. The book sets forth the integrating conceptions in Chapters Seven and Eight. The philosophical and theological components are integrated in an encompassing composition.

Two eminent scholars, each expert in his own tradition, take Jewish-Christian dialogue to a new level. Aiming at neither mere description nor conversion, each presents the classical elements of his traditions understanding of three fundamental, common religious questions: where to meet God, how to live, and what to hope for. The other then responds. Neusner and Chilton's analytic comparisons of two great traditions intertwined at the roots serves as a primer on the defining energies of both traditions. The reader is invited to identify the traditions' unity of questions and the equally strong differences in answers and thereby illumine one's own faith commitments about belief, piety, and the purpose of human life.

First published in 1993, Israel and Zion in American Judaism: The Zionist Fulfillment is a collection of 24 essays exploring the concept of who or what is "Israel" following the establishment of the Jewish State in 1948 and the subsequent crisis of self-definition in American Jewry.

First published in 1993, Israel and Zion in American Judaism: The Zionist Fulfillment is a collection of 24 essays exploring the concept of who or what is "Israel" following the establishment of the Jewish State in 1948 and the subsequent crisis of self-definition in American Jewry.

From the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the Jews were a conquered nation. Yet Jewish sages and holy works preached a doctrine of both interior and exterior virtue that allowed the Jewish people to feel and believe in the dignity and nobility of their earthly condition. Neusner's book explores the attitudes in Jewish canonical writings and asks how these virtues relate to the politics of the Jews as a vanquished people. Jacob Neusner, the author of over 166 books on Judaism and Jewish history, is a frequent lecturer both in America and throughout the world. He has been a Fulbright Fellow at the Hebrew University, and twice has been a Guggenheim Fellow.

Jesus was a Jew and not a Christian. That affirmation may seem obvious, but here an international cast of Jewish and Christian scholars spell out its weighty and often complex consequences for contemporary Jewish-Christian dialogue. Soundings in the Religion of Jesus contextualizes Jesus and the writings about him that set the stage for Jewish-Christian relations for the next two thousand years. Of equal importance, this book considers the reception, celebration, and (too often) the neglect of Jesus' Jewishness in modern contexts and the impact such responses have had for Jewish-Christian relations. Topics explored include the ethics of scriptural translation, the ideological motives of Nazi theologians and other "quests" for the Historical Jesus, and the ways in which New Testament portraits of Jesus both help and hurt authentic Jewish-Christian dialogue.

Classical Judaism imagined the people Israel's situation in three aspects to be unique among the nations of the earth. The nations lived in unclean lands contaminated by corpses and redolent of death. They themselves are destined to die without hope of renewed life after the grave. They were prisoners of secular time, subject to the movement and laws of history in its inexorable logic. Heaven did not pay attention to what they did and did not care about their conduct, so long as they observed the basic decencies mandated by the commandments that applied to the heirs of Noah, seven fundamental rules in all. That is not how Israel the holy people was conceived. The Israel contemplated by Rabbinic Judaism lives in sacred space and in enchanted time, all the while subject to the constant surveillance of an eye that sees all and an ear that hears all and a sentient being that recalls all. Why the divine obsession with Israel? God yearned for Israel's love and constantly contemplated its conduct. The world imagined by the Rabbis situated Israel in an enchanted kingdom, a never-never-land and conceived of God as omniscient and ubiquitous. Here Neusner shows that in its generative theology Rabbinic Judaism in its formative age invoked the perpetual presence of God overseeing all that Israelites said and did. It conceived of Israel to transcend the movement of history and to live in a perpetual present tense. Israel located itself in a Land like no other. And it organised its social order in a hierarchical structure ascending to the one God situated at the climax and head of all being.

This is a work of practical theology, a book not about Judaism but of Judaism. Talmud Torah does two things. First, in its pages, which highlight representative sources of the Oral Torah of Judaism, readers study about studying the Torah, which Rabbinic Judaism put forth as the way to God's presence. Second, text by text, readers find that they study Torah everywhere, following the Torah that was set forth by the masters of the normative writings of Rabbinic Judaism. The focus throughout is on text-study, which makes possible both studying about the Torah and the concrete act of studying Torah.

Jacob Neusner has published more than 1000 books and articles, scholarly and academic, popular and journalistic, and is one of the most published humanities scholars in the world. Over a period of fifty years he has made significant, insightful and challenging contributions to the study of Rabbinic Judaism, particularly in the disciplines covered in the three volumes which make up Neusner on Judaism: the study of history (volume 1), literature (volume 2), and religion and theology (volume 3). These unique volumes of selective writings by Jacob Neusner, with new introductions by the author, offer scholars an invaluable resource in the field of Judaic Studies.

In his brilliant introduction on the Mishnah, Jacob Neusner asks: How do you read a book that does not identify its author, tell you where it comes from, or explain why it was written - a book without a preface? And how do you identify a book with neither a beginning nor end, lacking table of contents and title? The answer is you just begin and let the author of the book lead you by paying attention to the information that the author does give, to the signals that the writer sets out. As Neusner goes on to explain, the Mishnah portrays the world in a special way, in a kind of code that makes it a difficult work for the modern reader to understand. Without knowing how to decode the Mishnah, we may read its works without receiving its message. Neusner, one of the world's foremost Mishnaic scholars, demonstrated that the Mishnah's own internal logic and structure form a solid foundation on which to build an understanding of this vitally important Jewish work. Using examples of how the Mishnah's language, logic, and discourse associate and categorize behaviors, events, and objects, Neusner opens the Mishnah to readers who would not otherwise be able to grasp its most fundamental concepts. Since the Mishnah forms the basis of both the Babylonian and the Palestinian Talmuds (which are, in Neusner's elegant terms, "the core curriculum of Judaism as a living religion"), study of the Mishnah is essential to an understanding of Judaism. Drawing on his own new translation of the Mishnah and displaying the enthusiastic dedication that has sparked a whole new body of Mishnaic research, Neusner allows readers with no previous background to join Jews who have studied, analyzed, and delighted in the wisdom of Mishnah for centuries. In addition to giving us a thorough exploration of the Mishnah's language, contents, organization, and inner logic, Neusner also provides us with a broad understanding of how it communicated its own world view - its vision of both the concrete an spiritual worlds. The Mishnah: An Introduction gives us a tour of this sacred Jewish text, shedding light on its many facets - from its view of life to its conception of God and His relation to our world.

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Resisting the tendency to separate the study of religion and politics, editor Jacob Neusner pulls together a collection of ten essays in which various authors explain and explore the relationship between the world's major religions and political power. As William Scott Green writes in the introduction, "Because religion is so comprehensive, it is fundamentally about power; it therefore cannot avoid politics."

Beginning with the classical sources and texts of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism and Hinduism, "God's Rule" begins to explore the complex nature of how each religion shapes political power, and how religion shapes itself in relation to that power. The corresponding attention to differing theories of politics and views towards non-believers are important not only to studies in comparative religion, but to foreign policy, history and governance as well. From early Christianity's relationship to the Roman Empire to Hinduism's relationship to Gandhi and the caste system, "God's Rule" provides a basis of understanding from which undergraduates, seminarians and others can begin asking questions of relationships "both unavoidable and systematically uneasy."