In this week’s Daf Yomi reading, the fourth and last chapter of Tractate Ta’anit, I was surprised to encounter a word that, as far as I can remember, has not previously appeared in two years of Talmud reading. That word is “Christians” (notzrim, derived from the name of Nazareth, Jesus’ home). My surprise came not from the fact that the rabbis of the Talmud recognized the existence of the rival faith, but from their ability to ignore it so completely for so long. After all, we hear regularly in the Talmud about the Romans, who ruled Palestine at the time the Talmud was being compiled, and occasionally about the Persians, who ruled Babylonia.
The era of the Talmud’s composition—the third to fifth centuries C.E.—was exactly the period when Christianity went from being a persecuted sect to the official religion of the Roman Empire, and the largest faith in the Near East. It would be natural to expect the rabbis to have something to say about this religion, which emerged out of Judaism and utterly transformed the world in which Jews lived. Indeed, it would be natural to assume that the Talmud itself was in some sense a response to Christianity—a way of defining Judaism as a religion of laws just at the moment when Christianity declared those laws to be obsolete.
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