3 over 10

In addition
to the fact that,
as I have mentioned,
both of these Palestinian sources,
the stories of Rabbi Eli'ezer's arrest and of Ben Dama's near fall into heretical behaviour,
appear as doublets, the formal similarity between the two death stories in the Babylonian Talmud -
the use of the phrase [attested in only one other place] "his soul left him in purity" -
also suggests that the two were once a pair in an earlier corpus,
apparently a variation of the two forms in which the stories
appear together in the early Palestinian texts.
In any case, the formal echoes suggest
that it is legitimate
to read them
together.

What do we learn from reading these stories together?

Ben Dama
was genuinely tempted
to engage in some kind of medical sorcery
offered by a disciple of Jesus in order to be cured from his snake bite,
just as Rabbi Eli'ezer had been genuinely tempted to enjoy and render definitive the Torah
that he heard in the name
of Jesus.

However,
I have already pointed to a telling inconsistency in the story as it is recounted.
The implication is that Ben Dama was saved from heresy entirely through his timely death.
However, there is more than an implication in the cited verse that the cause of death, the very snake bite
that brought him low, was itself a punishment
for his priori] engagement
with Christianity.

The death
by snake bite is precipitated,
according to the story's interpretation of the verse,
by the very same breaking down of fences from which he ostensibly was saved by that death.
His death in purity was therefore a kind of atonement or reparation for his earlier sin, a recuperation,
and the idea of death as atonement for one's own sins is a familiar rabbinic concept.
Since the death was by snake bite, we have prima facie evidence that the narrative implicates Ben Dama in antecedent involvement
with the Jesus sect.

Similarly, then,
we can understand the death of Rabbi Eli'ezer
and the lengthy and total isolation and ex-communication into which he had been placed.
Rabbi Eli'ezer was also suspected by his fellows of untoward closeness to the Christians,
and if my argument above about his refusal to curse Jesus is cogent, it is not entirely surprising
that he was so suspected.

He was, indeed,
an adjunct, or perhaps a fellow traveler of Jesus, the narrative seems to suggest,
and his death "in purity" represents the same kind of recuperation or salvation from heresy that Ben Dama's does. The text thus records both the intimacy of the Rabbis with Christianity
and the explicit cultural work of separation that was being undertaken.
As we proceed through these texts being read in this essay,
we will understand more and more, I hope, precisely
why such exertion
was necessary.

As we [might] move
in some future [coming mydi-] chapters into the fourth century,
we will see more and more that the story of the so-called parting of the ways
is a much more ambiguous and complicated narrative than is usually imagined!
Jews and Christians, however much they tried to convince themselves and others differently,
travelled indeed along similar paths
for a long, long time ~~~
if not always?!

Indeed,
paradoxically,
with respect to certain discourses and practices,
far from a "parting of the ways," we will observe a startling convergence of roads taken.
It is therefore not accidental at all that this story of Rabbi Eli'ezer with which our investigation begins
involves an arrest and near martyrdom for Christianity, nor that it forms the first episode
in the longest cycle of talmudic
martyr stories.

The Talmud
thus brings together
the questions of Jewish-Christian definition and martyrology.
Martyrdom and the conversation around it ate thus provided by the Talmud itself
as a pertinent case study for examining the question
of Judeo-Christian
origins.