Humanism and the Mishnah

Abstract

In 1541 Paulus Fagius published an edition of Pirkei Avot. It was part of a larger project to make the writings of the rabbis more accessible to Christians. The edition began as a teaching aid. Fagius also hoped to see the young write Hebrew fluently. The rabbinical sayings in Pirkei Avot, he pointed out, could play the same role as pointed quotations from the ancients in a Latin letter or oration. Fagius also praised the moral and religious content of many of the sayings he explicated, since the sayings in Avot came from early rabbis, near in time to Jesus. Fagius held that the views of these Jewish authorities often resembled those of the first Christians. This school edition thus formed a modest part of the sixteenth-century project to show that Christianity really had begun, not only in the Jewish world, but as a Jewish sect.