Students of the Babylonian Talmud are aware that many of the statements attributed in the work to various teachers are not necessarily authentic. We are not here concerned with the question of the reliability of the transmission as much as with the phenomenon that some of the statements, at least, were never intended to be understood as the actual remarks of the teachers to whom they are attributed. In other words, some of them are pseudepigraphic. Pseudepigraphic Rabbinic statements are not limited, of course, to the Babylonian Talmud, but it will be argued that in this work the pseudepigraphic element is prevalent to a remarkable degree.

In the case of an acknowledged pseudepigraphic work like the Zohar, the problem can be seen clearly. No one nowadays would dream of quoting the numerous Zoharic statements put into the mouth of R. Simeon b. Yohai, R. Eleazar, R. Hamnuna Sava and the other heroes of the Zohar as those actually uttered by the second-to fourth-century teachers themselves. It is generally recognised that these sayings were never intended to be accurate reportage, and that while they tell us a great deal about late thirteenth-century Spanish Jewish thought, they tell us nothing at all about Jewish thought in the second- to fourth-century Palestine. R. Simeon b. Yohai in the Zohar serves in exactly the same role as Bunyan's Pilgrim in Pilgrim's Progress.

Now it would be the height of absurdity to see the whole of the Babylonian Talmud as pseudepigraphic in this sense.