inguished himself from the apostle Paul. The Pauline letters are at pains to have the new religion encase the old, whether Jewish or Hellenistic: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal 3.28-29). Meanwhile, Kalmin notes that ancient Palestinian and Babylonian (Persian) rabbinic talmuds give an account of Jesus, although they differ because the Babylonian Talmud "depicts Jesus as a rabbi" who defected after a dispute with his mentor, whereas the Palestinian Talmud describes a dispute between the teacher and an unnamed student. Kalmin's reading of these sources emphasizes the conscious distinction that the rabbis made between Judaism and Christianity in a context of religious competition:
[E]arly Palestinian sources discourage contact with minim and Christians by emphasizing the seductive nature of such contact. Later Palestinian and Babylonian sources, on the contrary, do not portray minut and Christianity as attractive. . . . Early rabbis tried to frighten people away by emphasizing the attractive qualities of heretics, underscoring the need for vigilance in avoiding their corrosive influence. Later rabbis tried to show how empty and unappealing these heresies were and how easily their claims could be refuted. . . . The intent of both early and later sources is the same, however, namely, to convince Jews to keep their distance from minim and Christians and thereby to avoid their malevolent influence.
From the apostolic period onward the methods of Jewish exegesis became even more linguistically parsed. Peshat (pashat) refers to what Maori calls the "plain sense of the verse," while derash refers to rabbinical interpretations of the verse, particularly as expressed in the interpretive segments of the midrash. Sarna distinguishes peshat as referring to literal exegesis, and derash as referring to "tropological, moral homilies." <...