Over at The Immanent Frame, Lena Salaymeh (who has organized an AJS session that I’ll be participating in) posted about orality, religion, and secularism by way of the Talmud and law-school forms.
This may be old news for some, but I just saw Steven Notley and Ze’ev Safrai’s new collection of rabbinic parables reviewed at Biblioblog Library.
The Talmud Blog 
Just took a look at the review. The notion that the parables (or anything else) contained in any of the extant rabbinic sources can serve as background to or contextualization (strictly speaking) for the teachings of Jesus is not, to me, an immediately obvious proposition. I hope Safrai has laid the methodological groundwork for this approach (assuming review characterized it accurately) in this book. I very much look forward to reading it!
(I refer to the problems involved in the relative chronology, by the way. From an early Judaism/early Judaisms/multiform Judaism/sectarianism perspective, I’m quite thrilled (again, assuming the review has characterized its approach accurately)).