Barry Holtz is a storyteller, educator, translator, and professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He has also demonstrated his mastery of writing books, at a rate of about one a decade, with previous works that include seminal texts such as Your Word Is Fire (with Arthur Green), Back to the Sources, Finding Our Way, Textual Knowledge, and now his newest book, a “biography” of Rabbi Akiva, which is scholarly, yet eminently approachable. This book will be of great interest not only to Jews, for whom Akiva is the architect of the Jewish enterprise from his time to today, but, as Akiva lived right around the time of Jesus, also for Christians of all stripes who wish to get a better sense of the Jewish world at that time.
The word biography is in quotes above because no personal effects, letters, or legal documents of Akiva’s remain. There are, however, 1,341 mentions of him in the Babylonian Talmud, the primary source for our knowledge of him. So while there is no “proof” that Akiva lived, Holtz believes that he did:
I cannot know whether every story about him and every utterance attributed to him reflects what he did or said, but I do know that editors who established the texts that have come down to us from long ago chose to preserve certain stories and teachings in Akiva’s name and that despite the complexities of transmission, it is possible to discern a portrait of
