“I am only suggesting the lack of value in many value judgments, when these emerge from an acquaintance merely with excerpt instead of with the intent, and the nuances, of a literature”

Rabbinists have sometimes assumed that a gospel pericope was lifted bodily from the Gemara. Elsewhere, I have expressed the opinion that rabbinic scholars have assumed that a mastery of the Talmud confers automatic mastery of the gospels.

I would state here that NT scholars devoid of rabbinic learning have been misled by Strack-Billerbeck into arrogating to themselves a competency they do not possess. Strack-Billerbeck confers upon a student untrained and inexperienced in rabbinic literature not competency but confusion. The list of indiscretions by NT scholars in rabbinics, or by rabbinic scholars in NT, would be a long one. I allude here to errors in scholarship and not to pseudo scholarship. By this latter I have in mind the distorted evaluation of rabbinic Judaism as merely dry and arid legalism – it is never dry or arid, but always dry and arid; or a judgment such as Friedlander’s that what is good in the Sermon on the Mount is borrowed from Jewish sources, and what isn’t, isn’t very good. I am not implying that scholars are without the right to make value judgments. I am only suggesting the lack of value in many value judgments, when these emerge from an acquaintance merely with excerpt instead of with the intent, and the nuances, of a literature.

Samuel Sandmel, “Parallelomania”, Journal of Biblical Literature vol 81, No. 1 (March 1962), 9-10.