Rabbinize

This issue is far from simple, given the later rabbinic tendency to 'rabbinize' earlier Jewish history, and particularly Jewish heroes from as far back as biblical times.

Joseph and Daniel would have figured largely as authorities, in the way in which they figure in later Christian oneirocritica. Instead the Rabbis take over the standard oneirocritica of their own day and rabbinize it .

The later Babylonian version of this story, therefore, credits Jesus with the ability to derive law via scriptural interpretation, and is therefore consonant with a Babylonian Talmudic tendency to rabbinize wonder-workers, healers, and rain-makers, holy men on the periphery or outside the rabbinic movement.

However, the rabbis attempted to rabbinize it by making it an incentive for obedience to the Torah: the Messiah would come, if all Israel would keep the Torah.

Taking their cue from Vermes , a whole school of New Testament scholars have taken up the notion of 'rabbinization' , and have sought to recover the Chasidim as highly idiosyncratic individuals who had little or nothing in common with the Pharisee movement, despite later attempts to 'rabbinize' them .