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The value and significance of the targums--translations of the Hebrew Bible into Aramaic, the language of Palestinian Jews for centuries following the Babylonian Exile--lie in their approach to translation: within a typically literal rendering of a text, they incorporate extensive exegetical material, additions, and paraphrases. These alterations reveal important information about Second Temple Judaism, its interpretation of its bible, and its beliefs. This remarkable survey introduces critical knowledge and insights that have emerged over the past forty years, including targum manuscripts discovered this century and targums known in Aramaic but only recently translated into English. Prolific scholars Flesher and Chilton guide readers in understanding the development of the targums, their relationship to the Hebrew Bible, their dates, their language, their place in the history of Christianity and Judaism, and their theologies and methods of interpretation.

This Comparative Handbook surveys the Judaic environment of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Analogies are traced with the Pseudepigrapha (together with Philo and Josephus), discoveries related to Qumran, and Rabbinic Literature (inclusive of the Targumim).

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This work sketches the many portraits of the Pharisees that emerge from ancient sources. Based upon the Gospels, the writings of Paul, Josephus, the Mishnah, the Tosefta, and archeology, the volume profiles the Pharisees and explores the relationship between the Pharisees and the Judaic religious system foreshadowed by the library of Qumran. A great virtue of this study is that no attempt is made to homogenize the distinct pictures or reconstruct a singular account of the Pharisees; instead, by carefully considering the sources, the chapters allow different pictures of the Pharisees to stand side by side.

Bruce Chilton and Jacob Neusner study the points of comparisons and contrast between formative Christianity and Judaism. By identifying three categories of authority in each of the two religious worlds, they show how they have both worked in compelling or failing to get someone to do a given action. The arguments are introduced by a general discussion of the founding figures of the two religions, Moses and Jesus, and how their inherent authority distilled itself through the structure of their religious institutions and intellectual thoughts. Jacob Neusner is Distinguished Research Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida and Professor of Religion at Bard College, New York. Bruce Chiltern is Bernard Idding Bell Professor of Religion at Bard College, New York.

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.

The Intellectual Foundations of Christian and Jewish Discourse argues that the Judaic and Christian heirs of Scripture adopted, and adapted to their own purposes and tasks, Greek philosophical modes of thought and argument. The authors explore how the earliest intellectuals of Christianity and Judaism shaped a tradition of articulated conflict and reasoned argument in the search for religious truth that was to be shared through continuing that argument with others. Neusner and Chilton examine, using the formative sources of Judaism and Christianity, the literary media of adaptation and reform: precisely where and how we identify in the foundation writings of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism the new opposing modes of articulated conflict and reasoned argument that through Christianity and Judaism, Greek philosophy and science bequeathed to the West. Jacob Neusner is Distinguished Research Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida and Professor of Religious Studies at Bard College New York. Bruce Chilton is Bernard Idding Bell Professor of Religion at Bard College, New York.

The questions Jacob Neusner has asked have shaped how scholars today approach the rabbinic literature. These essays honor that legacy, addressing topics in early Judaism, Judaism's relationship to Christianity and other religions, American Judaism, and the role of humanistic study today.

This is the first attempt systematically to explain the growth, background and ideology of the Targum to Isaiah. Its principal stages of development between the first and fourth centuries CE are described in order to understand as precisely as possible its hope for God's messianic vindication of his people. Chilton's work demonstrates the paradigmatic significance of the Isaiah Targum within the Prophets Targum as a whole, and convincingly places the Targum in its chronological and theological context.