: Yes; I should try and note this in the main text of the article! And you are correct - Talmud IS Mishna and gemara, and I hate it when people refer to the entire Talmud as "the gemara" for precisely this reason. But Orthodox Jews do this very often; Conservative Jews tend to do this less often. I guess the ambiguity arose because whenever someone reads the Talmud, 90% of the time it is the gemara portion of it that they are reading, so these terms (unfortunately) became synonomous. But if you want my real beef with Judaism (and I am a religious Jew) just try and get me started on anthropomorphic language. The medieval Jewish scholars like Maimonides and Gersonides were more advanced in many ways than most Jewish laypeople today. Christians don't have the same problem, because for them Jesus really is part of the Trinity, and Jesus was a human, so it isn't blasphemy for them to have anthropomorphic views of God in a literal sense. According to many rabbinic authorities, this view of God is supposed to be strictly forbidden - but in practice, Jews have anthropomorphic views of God almost as much as Christians do. I understand that this is a a natural thing for people to do, and the Bible itself certainly portrays God in such terms, but the glaring difference between later Jewish theological texts and actual beliefs held by laypeople bothers me. Sometimes I think some of my co-religionists are worshipping "God, the friednly heavenly miracle caterer that you can talk to!", while I am philosophically contemplating the groundsource of reality. Then again, they probably think of me as a Deist, and not a Theist! RK
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