A few weeks ago in California New Testament scholars held a meeting which, in my view, represents either the greatest scholarly hoax since the Piltdown Man or the utter bankruptcy of New Testament studies — I hope the former. [Time Magazine Jan 10, 1994 p. 39]
Smith marked himself a charlatan and a fraud, and his discovery (the Letter to Theodore) a hoax [the Price of Excellence 1995 p. 78]
I have said this time and time again. There is an interesting pattern where Neusner slides from the break with Morton Smith into an allegiance with Republican operatives. Neusner by nature cannot be considered a 'Jewish conservative' given that he thinks the rabbinic literature, the very foundation of modern Judaism, is ahistorical. It would be like having a conservative evangelical who claimed that we can't date the information associated with Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter and the rest of the authors of the New Testament. In other words, that the information didn't come from the apostolic period but could have come from any time thereafter. This can't be described as a 'conservative' religious position. Nevertheless Neusner ended up in the arms of conservatives because - quite frankly - he began to hate 'liberal elites' from the time his teacher Morton Smith began to criticize his scholarship in the late seventies.
Neusner is very much the 'spiritual grandfather' of the various conservatives who reject the Letter to Theodore. However his motives appear very different than theirs.
