ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Jewish “holy man” in late antiquity in light of both contextual historical work that locates such a figure within the larger shifting landscape of Greek, Roman, and Christian religious entrepreneurs and theoretical understandings of the “holy”. The chapter distinguishes between the actual presence of such figures in antiquity and their representation, primarily in rabbinic texts. Depictions of wonder-working rabbis are to be distinguished from the (very few) rabbinic depictions of “holy men” and from Christian holy men. Miracle workers were portrayed as having supernatural powers but not as channeling the holy.
