In the prologue to his Studying Classical Judaism, Jacob Neusner identifies what he sees as the most significant recent theoretical development in the study of the emergence of Judaism (and Christianity) during roughly the first six centuries AD. Dealing with the spread of such study from the seminary to the secular university, and with the involvement in it there of believing Jews and Christians of different sorts, he selects as most important a rejection of the simple ‘debunking’ which he thinks was characteristic of the early modern study of religion. ‘What scholars [in the second half of the twentieth century] have wanted to discover is not what lies the sources tell but what truth they convey – and what kind of truth’ (J. Neusner, Studying Classical Judaism. A Primer, Louisville, Ky. 1991, esp. 20–1).

It is clear that Neusner has in mind a diminution of the importance of questions such as ‘what really happened?’ and ‘do we believe what the sources tell us happened?’, questions which he describes as ‘centred upon issues of historical fact’. In their place he finds a growing interest in questions about the world-view that the religious texts and other sources convey: ‘how these documents bear meaning for those for whom they were written – and for those who now revere them’. Part of this process is a realisation that ‘scriptures are not true or false, our interpretations are what are true or false’.

The contrast Neusner sets up cannot be an absolute one.