Jacob Neusner

Rabbinic Narrative: a Documentary Perspective - Volume One: Forms, Types and Distribution of Narratives in the Mishnah, Tractate Abot, and the Tosefta (The Brill Reference Library of Judaism, 14) Jacob Neusner

This detailed, systematic classification of Rabbinic narrative supplies these facts concerning the classification of narratives and their regularities: [1] what are the types and forms of narrative in a given document? [2] how are these distinctive types and forms of narrative distributed across the canonical documents of the formative age, the first six centuries C. E.? The answers for the documentary preferences are in Volumes One through Three, for the Mishnah-Tosefta, the Tannaite Midrash-compilations, and Rabbah-Midrash-compilations, respectively. Volume Four then takes up the types of Rabbinic narratives and shows the documentary history of each of them, including the authentic narrative, the maxaseh and the mashal.