Virtually without exception, the Bavli is described by its students as a commentary on the Mishnah. This definition is such a commonplace that it is difficult to imagine the need to test or defend it. Its accuracy seems so selfevident that the question “what is the Bavli?” is itself rarely, if ever, asked.

Although religious history has traditionally concerned itself with the transcendent dimension in human life, and social history with the mundane, the latter approach can also be used to illuminate the ways in which religion works itself out on the social plane. In fact, it might be argued that inquiries of this sort should occupy a prominent place on the agenda of any social and religious history of the Jews. Among historians of the Annales school, for whom the study of material life was long considered the backbone of historical inquiry, there has been a discernible move in recent years toward the study of religious life, especially in its popular forms. Whereas, for example, previous volumes in the valuable Johns Hopkins series of “Selections from the Annales” were devoted to such topics as food and drink in history, the one published in 1982 was entitled, significantly, Ritual, Religion and the Sacred.

They just don't fit very neatly; they never did. Ever since it became clear that the law-free mission to the gentiles would create a church and not a synagogue, Jewish-Christianity has been an uncomfortable reality with which to deal. The “Synagogue” didn't like it. The “Church Catholic” didn't like it. And modern scholarship, far less ready to accept the vagaries of a religion that resembles but cannot be made to fit known varieties of religion, seems to like it even less. Jewish-Christians seemed to want to hang on to an anachronism, a mission that should have failed already in Paul's lifetime.