The Talmud: What It Is
and What it Knows about Jesus and his Followers. By Rev. Bernhard Pick, Ph.D. Ideal Edition, Small Pica type, cloth, 60c.;
One of the most interesting and valuable of recent contributions to religious literature. It answers the great popular curiosity as to what the Talmud is, and gives to clergymen and theological students information of transcendant value, not heretofore accessible to many.
“That wonderful monument of human industry, human wisdom, and human folly.”—Dean Milman.
“In the history of the origin of Christianity, the Talmud has hitherto been far too much neglected.”—Ernest Renan.
“The Talmud may compete with the Constitutions of Loyola for the right to be considered the most irresistible organ ever forged for the subjugation of the human will.”—Edinburgh Review.
“The Talmud is the slow growth of several centuries. It is a chaos of Jewish learning, wisdom and folly, a continent of rubbish with hidden pearls of true maxims and poetic fables.”—Philip Schaff.
“But glimpses of profound metaphysics, stray parables of real beauty, and occasional sentiments of true spiritual breadth and elevation, are only the rare grains of wheat in mountains of chaff.”—Dr. Geikie.
“Anything more utterly unhistorical than the Talmud cannot be conceived. It is probable that no human writings ever confounded names, dates, and facts with more absolute indifference. Some excellent maxims may be quoted from the Talmud where they lie imbedded like pearls in a sea of obscurity and mud.”—Canon Farrar.
“A most curious monument, raised with astonishing labor, yet made up of puerilities. An immense heap of rubbish, at the bottom of which a few bright pearls of Eastern wisdom are to be found. The book composed by Israel without their God, in the time of their dispersion, their misery, and their degeneracy.”—Dr. Isaac Da Costa.
“Here, then, we find a prodigious mass of contradictory opinions, an infinite number of casuistical cases, a logic of scholastic theology, some recondite wisdom, and much rambling dotage; many puerile tales and oriental fancies; ethics and sophisms, reasonings and unreasonings, subtle solutions, and maxims and riddles.”—Benjamin Disraeli.
“It is a vast debating club in which there hum confusedly the myriad voices of at least five centuries. In its way, a unique code of laws, in comparison with which, in point of comprehensiveness, the law books of all other nations are but Lilliputian, and, when compared with the hum of its kaleidoscopic Babel, they resemble, indeed, calm and studious retreat.”—Prof. Delitzsch.
“It has proved a grateful task to wander through the mazes of the Talmud and cull flowers yet sparkling with the very dew of Eden. Figures in shining garments haunt its recesses. Prayers of deep devotion, sublime confidence and noble benediction, echo in its ancient tongue. Sentiments of lofty courage, of high resolve, of infantile tenderness, of far-seeing prudence, fall from the lips of venerable sages. No less practicable would it be to stray with an opposite intention, and to extract venom, instead of honey, from the flowers that seem to spring up in self-sown profusion. Fierce, intolerant, vindictive hatred for mankind; idle subtlety; pride and self conceit amounting to insanity; indelicacy pushed to a grossness that renders what it calls virtue more hateful than the vice of more modest people; all these strung together would give no more just an idea of the Talmud than would the chaplets of its lovelier flowers.”—Edinburgh Review.