Teaching Team

Textual Criticism of an E-mail

By Aaron Eby  | Comments (4) | Posted on February 15, 2008

During my recent visit to the FFOZ offices in Missouri, Toby called me over to take the opportunity to help him with one of his projects. He was writing a piece on the late Rabbi Yitzchak Kaduri, but the only biography written about him so far is in Hebrew. So I helped him translate bits and pieces from that book. Toby's article will appear in issue 100 of messiah magazine.

Rabbi Kaduri, if you recall, reported before his death that he had met the Messiah. A year after his death, his students revealed a note from Rabbi Kaduri that indicated that the Messiah's name was "Yehoshua" -- which is equivalent to "Yeshua." A controversy erupted as to whether or not the person Rabbi Kaduri met was Yeshua of Nazareth. Had Rabbi Kaduri become a believer in our Messiah?

While I was there, Toby also showed me an amazing e-mail he had received about Rabbi Kaduri. It was an English translation of a list of 18 points about the Messiah that allegedly had appeared on Kaduri's own web site in Hebrew. It was translated into English by an Israeli believer, who also commented on a number of the points.

Reading through the list, many of the points were shocking in that they appeared to make it obvious that Rabbi Kaduri was a follower of Yeshua. There were quotes from the Gospels, there was Christian-like terminology (such as "saved"), and there were Scripture references to Isaiah 53. It looked too Messianic to be true, so it made us wonder if this was an accurate translation of the Hebrew original.

So Toby requested and received the original Hebrew text. When we compared the Hebrew with the English, we were amazed to find that it was an expert translation. It was perfectly accurate.

The English text came with a warning that this document was so revealing that it wouldn't be long before it was taken down from Kaduri's web site. So it didn't surprise us that when we entered the Hebrew text into a search engine, we didn't find the document on Kaduri's web site. We only found it posted in the comments on a forum on an Israeli news site that reported on his "revelation."

But it still smelled fishy to us. There were some odd inconsistencies that sparked our sense of textual criticism -- the art/science of determining the original form of a document. For example, even if Rabbi Kaduri had met the true Messiah, would he really have used the term "saved" to describe his experience?

Remember Daniel Lancaster's Gospel of Thomas game? The Gospel of Thomas contains a large amount of clearly Gnostic material, as well as some apparently genuine material. One dead giveaway that a Thomas saying is authentic is if it has a clear meaning from a Hebraic/Rabbinic perspective, but then the text continues to elaborate as if it meant something else, something Gnostic. This indicates the editor did not understand what the saying actually meant. If he had made it up, it wouldn't have had a Hebraic/Rabbinic meaning, only a Gnostic one. Thus, it is likely to have originated in the oral traditions of the early followers or an ancient Gospel manuscript.

We encountered the same thing in this text. Each of the 18 points would begin with a cryptic statement that seemed perfectly plausible in the mouth of a Kabbalist such as Rabbi Kaduri. Next, there would be an elaboration that often seemed to misunderstand the first statement and turn it into something "Christian."

Then the mystery finally became clear to us. The comment in the forum was the original document. The commenter, an Israeli Christian or Messianic whose name was listed as Sarah, had gleaned the 18 points herself from an article found on Kaduri's site. To each of the 18 points she added her own comments and interpretation (in Hebrew) in an effort to argue to other members of the forum that Rabbi Kaduri was a believer in Yeshua. She did not mean to put words in Rabbi Kaduri's mouth; she was just offering her interpretation of what he had said from a Christian/Messianic Israeli perspective.

The confusion came when someone else spotted her comments and thought they were actual quotes from Rabbi Kaduri. The entire post including both quotes from Kaduri's web site and Sarah's comments were treated as if they were a complete article and then translated into English. To each of the points, the translator added an additional layer of commentary in English.

This turned out to be a fun sleuthing exercise and a real life application of textual criticism. It also has served as a stern reminder to track down sources!

About the Author: Aaron Eby writes for messiah magazine and other FFOZ publications. He is also the author of the forthcoming siddur project, as well as the forthcoming Hebrew lesson DVD.

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