Wow, how amazing that Yoel is not familiar with the House of (school of )Hillel. In the USA universities, Jewish clubs are named after Hillel who lived in Babylonia (today’s Iraq) about 1200 yrs before the Ramba”m (Maimonides). The Hebrew says “Don’t do to to your friend what’s hateful to you,” as well as “Love your friend as you love yourself.” So self love/esteem (Ayn Rand’s provocative, but healthy “Virtue of Selfishness”), also came from Hillel and “If I am not for myself, who will be.” Cool, basic stuff, especially, when coming from someone who grew up in the Catholic tradition.
I read the "Rabbi Hillel" article after listening to this podcast. I didn't find the promised documentation for some of the historical claims. I'm Jewish, Hebrew literate, and I've done a lot of digging into this part of Jewish history, so here are some challenges.
I don't see a need to prove that Rabbi Hillel had a greater impact on the West than Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth. (Or to use the latter's actual name, Yeshua.) The two were not competing. Also, the controversy in the second Temple era wasn't just Yeshua vs. the Pharisees. "The Jews" of the New Testament could include a lot besides followers of Hillel or Shammai - there were Hellenists, Essenes, Zealots, and just "am ha-aretz" (simple working-class Jews). But the NT also singled out the Sadducees, who aren't mentioned at all in your history of that time.
The Pharisees had a big problem with the Sadducees, who were the elite. They controlled the Temple wealth, the priesthood, the Sanhedrin court system, and access to the Roman rulers. A careful reading of the New Testament shows that the Sadducees were far more hostile than the Pharisees to Yeshua, for strictly political reasons, and they led the demand for his death. Some Pharisees collaborated on that demand, because they resented his challenge to their lawmaking authority. But it was noted in the gospels that prominent Pharisees mourned his death. The book of Acts says that lots of Pharisees became followers of Yeshua, which sparked a debate about the Gentile followers.
I also challenge the idea that Gentiles wrote the NT. There are too many insider references to Jewish customs, Hebraic expressions that survive despite being written in Greek, and other beliefs that Greeks or Romans of that day would know nothing about.
That includes the debates over the nature of the Jewish Messiah foretold in the Torah and Prophets. There are Jewish scholars like Talmudist Daniel Boyarin, whose research shows that the first-century Jews were actually open to the idea of a divine Redeemer who was destined to "sit at the right hand of GOD".
The issue for many of the Pharisees, according to the NT accounts, and implied by Boyarin, was actually that Yeshua was too human to be that divine Son of Man / Son of God. When he did signs to prove his claims, they had a real dilemma and a lot of infighting. The Sadducees OTOH (priests and scribes) had no infighting. They didn't believe in anything divine - not angels, not miracles, and certainly not Daniel's visions of the Son of Man coming in the clouds.
Most relevant is the NT insisting that the Resurrection of Yeshua was a real event, and that he himself foretold it, which had an impact on both Pharisees (who believed that GOD can raise the dead) and Sadducees (who did not). Very few historians today deny that Yeshua lived, and that he died by crucifixion. The leaders in that generation had every reason to recover the crucified corpse from the Romans, display it, and kill off the rumor. Instead they tried to kill off the people who were publicizing it.
Not only did the rumor not die, but by the time the Temple fell in 70 CE, there were so many Jewish Yeshua followers (called Nazarenes) that Rabbi Gamliel II commissioned a curse to purge them from the synagogues. Even Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus was sympathetic to Nazarenes. These stories are in the Mishnah.
That history cannot be skipped over, nor can it be attributed to Greek Christians who had an axe to grind against the Jews. Gamliel II was Nasi of the Sanhedrin in 90 CE, centuries before Jesus became off-limits to Jews.
THIS IS THE CONTINUATION OF MY REPLY (FIRST PART IS BELOW)
Next you say: “I also challenge the idea that Gentiles wrote the NT. There are too many insider references to Jewish customs, Hebraic expressions that survive despite being written in Greek, and other beliefs that Greeks or Romans of that day would know nothing about. That includes the debates over the nature of the Jewish Messiah foretold in the Torah and Prophets. There are Jewish scholars like Talmudist Daniel Boyarin, whose research shows that the first-century Jews were actually open to the idea of a divine Redeemer who was destined to ‘sit at the right hand of GOD.’ ”
Yes, obviously, some Jews were open to this. The influence between pagan Greco-Roman culture and Jewish culture was bidirectional. But there is nothing new in that (and it is happening still). You have merely to read the books of Chronicles and Kings to see just how obsessed the prophets were with the question of pagan influence on the Jews. And some Jews did join the (mostly Greek) Jesus movement created by Paul.
Precisely because this influence was bidirectional, many Gentiles understood quite a lot about Judaism. In fact, thousands upon thousands of pagans were converting to Judaism. And many, many people in the Mediterranean, Jews and Gentiles alike, were convinced that the future would be determined by Judaism, which made the ‘proper’ interpretation of Judaism a matter of grave concern. You have only to look at all the ‘Gnostic’ movements that arose—and these were all Gentile movements—which sought to give their own interpretations of the Torah. Torah interpretation was THE big game, and many Gentiles participated, because even outside of Judaism lots of people were convinced that Judaism was the thing that mattered.
This is still going on.
On the question of Gentiles writing the New Testament, Acts of the Apostles is quite clear on this point: Paul was preaching to the Greek Gentiles who flocked to the synagogues; the Jews were not interested in his message. That’s why the entire New Testament was written in Greek. Acts is in fact quite explicit on this question, for it alleges there was a ‘Council in Jerusalem’ where the apostles supposedly authorized Paul to preach to the Gentiles, while they would preach to the Jews.
The fact that the Gentile authors of the New Testament were knowledgeable about matters of Jewish Scripture perhaps needs a special explanation for modern audiences, but once explained it should elicit zero controversy: plenty of Gentiles, as stated above, were quite knowledgeable about Judaism because literally everyone was thinking about Judaism at the time.
This is something that has somehow been erased from popular consciousness. Nobody seems to notice that if the entire Mediterranean became Christian that is because the entire Mediterranean (I am approximating) was thinking of becoming Jewish. The Greek Jesus movement is the way of becoming ‘Jewish’ that most Gentiles were seduced by for reasons that I will explain in a future article in this series, but everyone was in that religious market to become some kind of Jew. This is precisely why Paul marketed his movement, which was a movement directed at Gentiles, as the ‘New Israel.’ Everybody wanted to be part of ‘Israel.’ The prestige and influence of the Jews was tremendous, and you can see that expressed in the quotes from the Romans that I provided in my article (there are many other such Roman testimonies).
The New Testament is witness to all this. Thus, for example, in Matthew 23:15, we have:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of Gehenna as yourselves.”
They are called “hypocrites” (this is the anti-Pharisaic propaganda). But notice the matter-of-fact recognition of what everybody knew to be true: that the Pharisees, the rabbis, were missionaries who “traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte [convert].”
In Acts of the Apostles (2:5-11) there is a testimony of the tremendous Pharisaic success in this enterprise, for “there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven.” In other words, “every nation” had Jews because the Jews, with enormous success, were converting everyone to Judaism. Acts then lists some of the Jews from “every nation” that dwelled in Jerusalem: “Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians.”
Wow. I insist: the Jews were converting everyone. And that is precisely why interpreting Judaism had become THE game for both Jews and Gentiles, and why so many Gentiles, even before the Jesus movement, were trying to snatch the authority of Torah and Tanach interpretation from the Jews, making syncretic pastiches of Judaism and pagan ideas (again, think of Gnosticism). It's the same kind of thing that happened in Arabia centuries later, when Mohammed and his followers made their own bid to interpret Judaism just as the Arabs were all becoming Jewish. The reason Arabs were interested in Mohammed's version is that they were all interested in Judaism already, and many Arabs were already Jews (these were exterminated by Mohammed).
In the first century Mediterranean, Gentiles who competed with Jews in the game of interpreting Jewish Scripture needed to read it carefully. There is nothing to be amazed at in the fact that the Greek leaders of the Christian Jesus movement had knowledge of many details of Jewish religion. It is also telling, however, that these authors make many simple mistakes that no learned Jew--certainly no Pharisee--would make. The New Testament contains a great many (many) simple errors of interpretation, whether from ignorance or from the propaganda needs of Christology (for example, privileging the Septuagint--or Greek version of Tanach--mistranslation of the Hebrew “young woman” in Isaiah 7:14 into “virgin”).
As for the last portion of your comment, if I am reading you correctly, you seem to think that we should consider the New Testament claims as historical. As should already be obvious from my replies above, I think we should treat the New Testament claims with great skepticism. And claims that defy nature, such as the claim that Jesus arose from the dead, we are under absolutely no scientific obligation to accept, as would be the case with any other text that claims something against nature happened. Extraordinary claims are not automatically true because they are contained in an ancient text.
But again, in all this, I still don’t see what it is that you considered a problem with my documentation, which is how you framed your comment at the top.
I hope this clarifies some issues. Many thanks for your comment!
Apparently I need to cut my response into more than one comment, because it got long.
You write: “I read the 'Rabbi Hillel' article after listening to this podcast. I didn't find the promised documentation for some of the historical claims. I'm Jewish, Hebrew literate, and I've done a lot of digging into this part of Jewish history, so here are some challenges.
I don't see a need to prove that Rabbi Hillel had a greater impact on the West than Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth. (Or to use the latter's actual name, Yeshua.) The two were not competing.”
Up to here what I see is a category problem. The problem you claim to have identified is that there is missing documentation for my claims. Then you say that you don’t “see a need” for me to make my claims. Or a need to use the name ‘Yeshua’ (though you yourself used that name in the rest of your comment, so perhaps I misunderstood your point there). The needs of my readers, and of this author, may be different than yours. But that is neither here nor there. And it is not the same as flagging a problem with documentation.
Whether Hillel and Jesus were competing with each other (they were not, I agree) is a separate issue from the question of giving Hillel proper credit for something that Jesus gets the credit for. And that was my issue.
Next: “Also, the controversy in the second Temple era wasn't just Yeshua vs. the Pharisees. ‘The Jews’ of the New Testament could include a lot besides followers of Hillel or Shammai - there were Hellenists, Essenes, Zealots, and just "am ha-aretz" (simple working-class Jews). But the NT also singled out the Sadducees, who aren't mentioned at all in your history of that time.
The Pharisees had a big problem with the Sadducees, who were the elite. They controlled the Temple wealth, the priesthood, the Sanhedrin court system, and access to the Roman rulers. A careful reading of the New Testament shows that the Sadducees were far more hostile than the Pharisees to Yeshua, for strictly political reasons, and they led the demand for his death. Some Pharisees collaborated on that demand, because they resented his challenge to their lawmaking authority. But it was noted in the gospels that prominent Pharisees mourned his death. The book of Acts says that lots of Pharisees became followers of Yeshua, which sparked a debate about the Gentile followers.”
You are correct that I did not mention this context. But this is where I think we are talking past each other. Of course, I agree that Second Temple Judaism was quite diverse. There were a bunch a different movements: Essenes, Terapeutae, Baptists, Pharisees, Sadducees, Samaritans, Zealots, … They had competing visions of what Judaism should be and what to do about the Romans. If my article had been about this diversity, I would have mentioned all of these groups. But my article is not about that. It’s about the Pharisaic or rabbinical movement. After the Second Temple was destroyed, these other movements disappeared. The Sadducees lingered on for a bit, then they disappeared too. After the destruction of the Temple, Judaism became rabbinic Judaism. And that is what has come down to our days. So Judaism, as it is still practiced today, is a legacy of Rabbi Hillel. I was interested in explaining Hillel’s impact on the Judaism that is still practiced today, and therefore on Western Civilization, and that is why I didn’t mention the diversity that you are talking about. I did, however, speak of the diversity within rabbinic Judaism, because the Pharisees didn’t all agree, and the most important controversy—at least from the legal point of view—was between Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai.
To conclude this point, yes, there was a lot of diversity in the Second Temple period that I didn’t mention in my article, but for the purposes of this particular article I did not consider it too relevant. I can add a note about this diversity so that other readers don’t get the idea I am claiming the diversity within the Pharisaic movement was the only diversity happening in Judaism at the time. Certainly, it wasn’t.
On the question of hostility to Jesus, if I am reading you correctly, you seem to think that I claimed that the Pharisees were more hostile to Jesus than the Sadducees. But I made no such claim. I simply said that most Jews did not accept Jesus as the Messiah. The question of hostility, as such, to Jesus is a big part of the tendentious propaganda aspect of the New Testament, in my view. I think it is mostly made up, because the propaganda needs of the Greek Jesus movement required them to represent the Jews as hating Jesus. Why? Because the entire point of the New Testament is to claim that the Jews murdered the Messiah, which then leads God to want to make a New Covenant with the ‘New Israel’: Christians. Whether the New Testament presents the Sadducees as an even bigger ‘evil’ than the Pharisees is neither here nor there, and it is certainly irrelevant to a discussion of the controversy between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, which was my concern in this piece.
Once again, however, this is not a problem with my documentation.
Wow, how amazing that Yoel is not familiar with the House of (school of )Hillel. In the USA universities, Jewish clubs are named after Hillel who lived in Babylonia (today’s Iraq) about 1200 yrs before the Ramba”m (Maimonides). The Hebrew says “Don’t do to to your friend what’s hateful to you,” as well as “Love your friend as you love yourself.” So self love/esteem (Ayn Rand’s provocative, but healthy “Virtue of Selfishness”), also came from Hillel and “If I am not for myself, who will be.” Cool, basic stuff, especially, when coming from someone who grew up in the Catholic tradition.
I learned a lot from this interview, and I'm looking forward to reading your response to Hannah W's points. Good historical work.
I read the "Rabbi Hillel" article after listening to this podcast. I didn't find the promised documentation for some of the historical claims. I'm Jewish, Hebrew literate, and I've done a lot of digging into this part of Jewish history, so here are some challenges.
I don't see a need to prove that Rabbi Hillel had a greater impact on the West than Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth. (Or to use the latter's actual name, Yeshua.) The two were not competing. Also, the controversy in the second Temple era wasn't just Yeshua vs. the Pharisees. "The Jews" of the New Testament could include a lot besides followers of Hillel or Shammai - there were Hellenists, Essenes, Zealots, and just "am ha-aretz" (simple working-class Jews). But the NT also singled out the Sadducees, who aren't mentioned at all in your history of that time.
The Pharisees had a big problem with the Sadducees, who were the elite. They controlled the Temple wealth, the priesthood, the Sanhedrin court system, and access to the Roman rulers. A careful reading of the New Testament shows that the Sadducees were far more hostile than the Pharisees to Yeshua, for strictly political reasons, and they led the demand for his death. Some Pharisees collaborated on that demand, because they resented his challenge to their lawmaking authority. But it was noted in the gospels that prominent Pharisees mourned his death. The book of Acts says that lots of Pharisees became followers of Yeshua, which sparked a debate about the Gentile followers.
I also challenge the idea that Gentiles wrote the NT. There are too many insider references to Jewish customs, Hebraic expressions that survive despite being written in Greek, and other beliefs that Greeks or Romans of that day would know nothing about.
That includes the debates over the nature of the Jewish Messiah foretold in the Torah and Prophets. There are Jewish scholars like Talmudist Daniel Boyarin, whose research shows that the first-century Jews were actually open to the idea of a divine Redeemer who was destined to "sit at the right hand of GOD".
https://www.thejc.com/judaism/why-a-divine-messiah-was-not-beyond-belief-f2ov2zh1
The issue for many of the Pharisees, according to the NT accounts, and implied by Boyarin, was actually that Yeshua was too human to be that divine Son of Man / Son of God. When he did signs to prove his claims, they had a real dilemma and a lot of infighting. The Sadducees OTOH (priests and scribes) had no infighting. They didn't believe in anything divine - not angels, not miracles, and certainly not Daniel's visions of the Son of Man coming in the clouds.
Most relevant is the NT insisting that the Resurrection of Yeshua was a real event, and that he himself foretold it, which had an impact on both Pharisees (who believed that GOD can raise the dead) and Sadducees (who did not). Very few historians today deny that Yeshua lived, and that he died by crucifixion. The leaders in that generation had every reason to recover the crucified corpse from the Romans, display it, and kill off the rumor. Instead they tried to kill off the people who were publicizing it.
Not only did the rumor not die, but by the time the Temple fell in 70 CE, there were so many Jewish Yeshua followers (called Nazarenes) that Rabbi Gamliel II commissioned a curse to purge them from the synagogues. Even Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus was sympathetic to Nazarenes. These stories are in the Mishnah.
That history cannot be skipped over, nor can it be attributed to Greek Christians who had an axe to grind against the Jews. Gamliel II was Nasi of the Sanhedrin in 90 CE, centuries before Jesus became off-limits to Jews.
THIS IS THE CONTINUATION OF MY REPLY (FIRST PART IS BELOW)
Next you say: “I also challenge the idea that Gentiles wrote the NT. There are too many insider references to Jewish customs, Hebraic expressions that survive despite being written in Greek, and other beliefs that Greeks or Romans of that day would know nothing about. That includes the debates over the nature of the Jewish Messiah foretold in the Torah and Prophets. There are Jewish scholars like Talmudist Daniel Boyarin, whose research shows that the first-century Jews were actually open to the idea of a divine Redeemer who was destined to ‘sit at the right hand of GOD.’ ”
Yes, obviously, some Jews were open to this. The influence between pagan Greco-Roman culture and Jewish culture was bidirectional. But there is nothing new in that (and it is happening still). You have merely to read the books of Chronicles and Kings to see just how obsessed the prophets were with the question of pagan influence on the Jews. And some Jews did join the (mostly Greek) Jesus movement created by Paul.
Precisely because this influence was bidirectional, many Gentiles understood quite a lot about Judaism. In fact, thousands upon thousands of pagans were converting to Judaism. And many, many people in the Mediterranean, Jews and Gentiles alike, were convinced that the future would be determined by Judaism, which made the ‘proper’ interpretation of Judaism a matter of grave concern. You have only to look at all the ‘Gnostic’ movements that arose—and these were all Gentile movements—which sought to give their own interpretations of the Torah. Torah interpretation was THE big game, and many Gentiles participated, because even outside of Judaism lots of people were convinced that Judaism was the thing that mattered.
This is still going on.
On the question of Gentiles writing the New Testament, Acts of the Apostles is quite clear on this point: Paul was preaching to the Greek Gentiles who flocked to the synagogues; the Jews were not interested in his message. That’s why the entire New Testament was written in Greek. Acts is in fact quite explicit on this question, for it alleges there was a ‘Council in Jerusalem’ where the apostles supposedly authorized Paul to preach to the Gentiles, while they would preach to the Jews.
The fact that the Gentile authors of the New Testament were knowledgeable about matters of Jewish Scripture perhaps needs a special explanation for modern audiences, but once explained it should elicit zero controversy: plenty of Gentiles, as stated above, were quite knowledgeable about Judaism because literally everyone was thinking about Judaism at the time.
This is something that has somehow been erased from popular consciousness. Nobody seems to notice that if the entire Mediterranean became Christian that is because the entire Mediterranean (I am approximating) was thinking of becoming Jewish. The Greek Jesus movement is the way of becoming ‘Jewish’ that most Gentiles were seduced by for reasons that I will explain in a future article in this series, but everyone was in that religious market to become some kind of Jew. This is precisely why Paul marketed his movement, which was a movement directed at Gentiles, as the ‘New Israel.’ Everybody wanted to be part of ‘Israel.’ The prestige and influence of the Jews was tremendous, and you can see that expressed in the quotes from the Romans that I provided in my article (there are many other such Roman testimonies).
The New Testament is witness to all this. Thus, for example, in Matthew 23:15, we have:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of Gehenna as yourselves.”
They are called “hypocrites” (this is the anti-Pharisaic propaganda). But notice the matter-of-fact recognition of what everybody knew to be true: that the Pharisees, the rabbis, were missionaries who “traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte [convert].”
In Acts of the Apostles (2:5-11) there is a testimony of the tremendous Pharisaic success in this enterprise, for “there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven.” In other words, “every nation” had Jews because the Jews, with enormous success, were converting everyone to Judaism. Acts then lists some of the Jews from “every nation” that dwelled in Jerusalem: “Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians.”
Wow. I insist: the Jews were converting everyone. And that is precisely why interpreting Judaism had become THE game for both Jews and Gentiles, and why so many Gentiles, even before the Jesus movement, were trying to snatch the authority of Torah and Tanach interpretation from the Jews, making syncretic pastiches of Judaism and pagan ideas (again, think of Gnosticism). It's the same kind of thing that happened in Arabia centuries later, when Mohammed and his followers made their own bid to interpret Judaism just as the Arabs were all becoming Jewish. The reason Arabs were interested in Mohammed's version is that they were all interested in Judaism already, and many Arabs were already Jews (these were exterminated by Mohammed).
In the first century Mediterranean, Gentiles who competed with Jews in the game of interpreting Jewish Scripture needed to read it carefully. There is nothing to be amazed at in the fact that the Greek leaders of the Christian Jesus movement had knowledge of many details of Jewish religion. It is also telling, however, that these authors make many simple mistakes that no learned Jew--certainly no Pharisee--would make. The New Testament contains a great many (many) simple errors of interpretation, whether from ignorance or from the propaganda needs of Christology (for example, privileging the Septuagint--or Greek version of Tanach--mistranslation of the Hebrew “young woman” in Isaiah 7:14 into “virgin”).
As for the last portion of your comment, if I am reading you correctly, you seem to think that we should consider the New Testament claims as historical. As should already be obvious from my replies above, I think we should treat the New Testament claims with great skepticism. And claims that defy nature, such as the claim that Jesus arose from the dead, we are under absolutely no scientific obligation to accept, as would be the case with any other text that claims something against nature happened. Extraordinary claims are not automatically true because they are contained in an ancient text.
But again, in all this, I still don’t see what it is that you considered a problem with my documentation, which is how you framed your comment at the top.
I hope this clarifies some issues. Many thanks for your comment!
Apparently I need to cut my response into more than one comment, because it got long.
You write: “I read the 'Rabbi Hillel' article after listening to this podcast. I didn't find the promised documentation for some of the historical claims. I'm Jewish, Hebrew literate, and I've done a lot of digging into this part of Jewish history, so here are some challenges.
I don't see a need to prove that Rabbi Hillel had a greater impact on the West than Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth. (Or to use the latter's actual name, Yeshua.) The two were not competing.”
Up to here what I see is a category problem. The problem you claim to have identified is that there is missing documentation for my claims. Then you say that you don’t “see a need” for me to make my claims. Or a need to use the name ‘Yeshua’ (though you yourself used that name in the rest of your comment, so perhaps I misunderstood your point there). The needs of my readers, and of this author, may be different than yours. But that is neither here nor there. And it is not the same as flagging a problem with documentation.
Whether Hillel and Jesus were competing with each other (they were not, I agree) is a separate issue from the question of giving Hillel proper credit for something that Jesus gets the credit for. And that was my issue.
Next: “Also, the controversy in the second Temple era wasn't just Yeshua vs. the Pharisees. ‘The Jews’ of the New Testament could include a lot besides followers of Hillel or Shammai - there were Hellenists, Essenes, Zealots, and just "am ha-aretz" (simple working-class Jews). But the NT also singled out the Sadducees, who aren't mentioned at all in your history of that time.
The Pharisees had a big problem with the Sadducees, who were the elite. They controlled the Temple wealth, the priesthood, the Sanhedrin court system, and access to the Roman rulers. A careful reading of the New Testament shows that the Sadducees were far more hostile than the Pharisees to Yeshua, for strictly political reasons, and they led the demand for his death. Some Pharisees collaborated on that demand, because they resented his challenge to their lawmaking authority. But it was noted in the gospels that prominent Pharisees mourned his death. The book of Acts says that lots of Pharisees became followers of Yeshua, which sparked a debate about the Gentile followers.”
You are correct that I did not mention this context. But this is where I think we are talking past each other. Of course, I agree that Second Temple Judaism was quite diverse. There were a bunch a different movements: Essenes, Terapeutae, Baptists, Pharisees, Sadducees, Samaritans, Zealots, … They had competing visions of what Judaism should be and what to do about the Romans. If my article had been about this diversity, I would have mentioned all of these groups. But my article is not about that. It’s about the Pharisaic or rabbinical movement. After the Second Temple was destroyed, these other movements disappeared. The Sadducees lingered on for a bit, then they disappeared too. After the destruction of the Temple, Judaism became rabbinic Judaism. And that is what has come down to our days. So Judaism, as it is still practiced today, is a legacy of Rabbi Hillel. I was interested in explaining Hillel’s impact on the Judaism that is still practiced today, and therefore on Western Civilization, and that is why I didn’t mention the diversity that you are talking about. I did, however, speak of the diversity within rabbinic Judaism, because the Pharisees didn’t all agree, and the most important controversy—at least from the legal point of view—was between Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai.
To conclude this point, yes, there was a lot of diversity in the Second Temple period that I didn’t mention in my article, but for the purposes of this particular article I did not consider it too relevant. I can add a note about this diversity so that other readers don’t get the idea I am claiming the diversity within the Pharisaic movement was the only diversity happening in Judaism at the time. Certainly, it wasn’t.
On the question of hostility to Jesus, if I am reading you correctly, you seem to think that I claimed that the Pharisees were more hostile to Jesus than the Sadducees. But I made no such claim. I simply said that most Jews did not accept Jesus as the Messiah. The question of hostility, as such, to Jesus is a big part of the tendentious propaganda aspect of the New Testament, in my view. I think it is mostly made up, because the propaganda needs of the Greek Jesus movement required them to represent the Jews as hating Jesus. Why? Because the entire point of the New Testament is to claim that the Jews murdered the Messiah, which then leads God to want to make a New Covenant with the ‘New Israel’: Christians. Whether the New Testament presents the Sadducees as an even bigger ‘evil’ than the Pharisees is neither here nor there, and it is certainly irrelevant to a discussion of the controversy between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, which was my concern in this piece.
Once again, however, this is not a problem with my documentation.