Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [367]
Two Talmuds exist because there was not enough central authority in Jewish life to unify the material into a single book like the Mishnah. There may not have been any desire to organize the Talmudic material either. Certainly, any editorial activity as stringent as Rabbi Judah the Prince’s during the Amoraic period would have drastically reduced the creative energy inherent in the literature. As it is, part of the excitement of reading Talmud is to see the Rabbis grasping at legal analogies from other parts of the law and even analogizing from custom and ceremonies in the community to clarify a difficulty in legal interpretation. As a result, Jewish law and particularly Jewish lore contain a vast variety of sometimes seemingly contradictory material.10
Rabbinic tradition was written by the people the New Testament regarded as opponents. To read Rabbinic literature with any understanding, one has to be able to take the New Testament’s judgment as a mark of the Pharisees’ social and historical position, not as a judgment on their intentions. It will be useful to specify the kinds of issues the Rabbis usually deal with before getting into their discussion of life after death, which is an unusual subject for them to discuss in the abstract.
Here, for example, is a Tannaitic discussion of procedure at an execution, which touches on the issue of life after death:
Mishnah: When he is about ten cubits away from the place of stoning, they say to him, “Confess,” for such is the practice of all who are executed, that they [first] confess, for he who confesses has a portion in the world to come….
And if he knows not what to confess, they instruct him, say, “May my death be an expiation for all my sins.” R. Judah said: if he knows that he is a victim of false evidence, he can say: “May my death be an expiation for all my sins but this.” They [the sages] said to him: If so, everyone will speak likewise in order to clear himself. (M. Sanh. quoted from b. Sanh. 43b)
Here is an example of the Mishnah dealing with a more atypical subject. They are specifying how an execution should take place. They affirm that the confession of a person convicted of a capital crime is enough to assure his entrance into the life to come.
From a historical perspective, this scene is problematic. It is dubious that the Rabbis who produced the Mishnah in 220 CE had ever seen a Rabbinic execution or would ever get the chance to organize one, as the powers of the state had been firmly in the hands of the Romans for two centuries. This merely begs the question: From where do these traditions come? Did the Romans cede them power in religious cases, otherwise unattested? Are the Rabbis deliberating on traditions that have been passed down for two centuries, even though they have not been practiced? If so, and in spite of their very considerable powers of accurate transmission, do we have accurate information about Second Temple procedures for execution? If that is so, why do these traditions differ so much from stories in the New Testament, as in the martyrdom of Stephen?
We learn an important fact from this passage, one that certainly was important to the Tannaim after the destruction of the Temple-namely, that a person’s own death can be thought of as expiation for sin. This is an especially important topic for the Rabbinate after the Second Temple’s destruction. The Temple was the location of a sacrificial cult, one of whose purposes was to atone for the sins of the people with God, when adequate and just compensation had been made. After the destruction of the Temple, the Rabbis had to answer the question: “How may the sins of Israel be atoned, now that the Temple is in ruins?”
Many answers developed; one approach even comes from this passage concerning the final confession of a condemned criminal. If