used to. These differences of form are the signs and producers of major differences in cultural meaning as well. The first is that the texts are openly intertextual (dialogical) in their structure, perhaps more so than any others in literary history. As opposed to literary systems that imply or construct authors for texts, all of the texts of the rabbinic period are authorless (see Fraade 1991, 17). They present themselves as anthologies of quotations and discussions,
as if
we had access to the actual raw material of rabbinic oral interactions. The second formal feature (closely related to the first) is that the texts are primarily structured as dialectic, even as arguments between rabbis, and that most often and typically the dialectic is open-ended. The text does not finally resolve the issue in one direction or the other.
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While other literary cultures obviously register dissent and controversy as well, the social semiotics of controversy are different when dissent appears between single-authored tracts or as dialectic within the same text. Let us compare the situation of early Christian textuality. There is, of course, not the slightest doubt that the earliest church was full of sharp dissent on almost every issue, from Christology to the Commandments of the Torah and circumcision to the status of marriage. But the different options were not incorporated into books in which they are set into dialectical relations with each other, with the different ideologues on equal footing in terms of authority. They are rather presented to us in a series of tracts, some of which are Pauline and others of which are anti-Pauline, and ultimately it was the Pauline version that won, and the others disappeared.
36
This is not the case for the talmudic culture. All of the opinions are of the same literary origin. Formally, they have the same authority. They come from the same source. There is no possibility whatsoever of rejecting or definitively accepting one. In practice, of course, later decisions were made as to halakha in order to prevent chaos, but at the same time the epistemological privilege of the established view was generally denied. It would simply be incoherent for Jews to declare themselves
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 | | 36. For Christianity, this should be qualified in one important way. There is a sense in which the deutero-Pauline letters provide precisely the heterogeneity that talmudic dialectic provides, although not, I think, to the same degree. Since these letters are often highly revisionistic with respect to Paul's doctrines, they provided the developing Pauline church with various cultural options. I am thinking, for example, of the way that the
Haustfafeln
of the later letters revise the doctrine of marriage presented in Corinthians.
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