Rabbis, monks and bats: A religion scholar and a zoologist find a new way to map early Jewish-Christian relations

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"What did rabbis of late antiquity know about Christianity?

To find out, an Israeli religion scholar turned to an Israeli zoologist who studies bats.

Their strange-bedfellows paper on the topic uses network analysis — a mathematical field used to visualize data — to map the connections of the rabbis of the Talmud with Christians who were writing and teaching at the same time, including new insights into how the literature of Christian monks made its way into Jewish thought. ...

their approach, once it becomes widely used, could revolutionize the field of Jewish-Christian studies.

Their visualizations — picture color-coded dots representing rabbis and church elders connected by a spider web of relationships — are “a snapshot of a multi-faceted reality spread over many decades and thousands of kilometers in which Jews and Christians interact in various ways with one another,”...

The Babylonian Talmud, a vast anthology of rabbinic law and lore, was produced in present-day Iraq between the 3rd and 7th centuries CE. At the same time, Christianity was evolving from a heretical Jewish sect to a religion with growing influence across the waning Roman Empire. Like most scholars of rabbinic Judaism ... rejects a dated theory that Jews and Christians “parted ways” in the early centuries of the Common Era and had limited contact. But she also wanted proof beyond the painstaking scholarly method of comparing passages in Jewish and Christian texts. ...
In one example, they demonstrate the extent to which the “Sayings of the Desert Fathers” — a 5th-century collection of Christian monastic literary traditions — feature in multiple rabbinic passages.  ...
The authors acknowledge that their paper is only a “proof of concept” [this is also my impression] and that traditional methods have long revealed the different types of literary interactions between the rabbis and Christians, from fierce anti-Christian polemics to shared theological concepts to the occasional parody.  ..."

From the abstract:

"The development of the two religions: Christianity and Judaism, is a topic of much debate. Whereas Judaism and Christianity are known as separate religions, in fact, these two religions developed side by side. While earlier researchers conceptualized a “parting-of-the-ways,” after which the two religions evolved independently, new studies reveal a multi-layered set of interactions throughout the first several centuries CE. Until recently, this question was explored with the limited source material and limited tools to analyze it. While working on a limited set of data, from a specific corpus, this project offers a new set of methodological tools, borrowed from computer sciences, that could ultimately serve for understanding the connections between Jews and Christians in late antiquity. We generated models of inter-religious Christian–Jewish networks that demonstrate the scope, nature, and advantages of network analysis for revealing the complex intertwined evolution of the two religions. The Jewish corpora chosen for this research are rabbinic writings from late antique Babylonia and Palestine. Christian texts range from the first through sixth centuries CE. Instead of representing interactions between people or places, as is typically done with social networks, we model literary interactions that, in our view, indicate historical connections between religious communities. This novel approach allows us to visually represent sets of temporal–spatial–contextual relationships, which evolved over hundreds of years, in single snapshots. It also reveals new insights about the relationships between the two communities. For example, we find that rabbinic sources exhibit a largely polemical approach towards earlier Christian traditions but a non-polemical attitude towards later ones. Moreover, network analysis suggests a temporal–spatial familiarity correlation. Namely, Jewish sources are familiar with early, eastern Christian sources and with both Eastern and Western Christian sources in later periods. The application of network analysis makes it possible to identify the most influential texts—that is, the key “nodes”—testifying to the importance of certain traditions for both religious communities. Finally, the network approach is a tool for pointing scholarly research in new directions, which only reveals itself as a result of this type of mapping. In other words, the network not only describes the known data, but it is itself a way to enlarge the network and lead us down new and exciting paths that are currently unknown."

Rabbis, monks and bats: A religion scholar and a zoologist find a new way to map early Jewish-Christian relations - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

What do bats, priests and rabbis have in common? Network analysis reveals insights

Network analysis reveals insights about the interconnections of Judaism and Christianity in the first centuries CE (open access)

Fig. 1: Inter-religious literary networks.