After he adopted a worldview considered heretical by his fellow Tannaim, the rabbis of the Talmud refrained from relating teachings in his name and referred to him as the "Other One" (אחר, Acher).
"[3] Other sayings attributed to Elisha indicate that he stressed mitzvot (commandments) as equal in importance to education: To whom may a man who has good deeds and has studied much Torah be compared?
[7] Wilhelm Bacher, in his analysis of Talmudic legends, wrote that the similes attributed to Elisha (including the ones cited above) show that he was a man of the world, acquainted with wine, horses, and architecture.
"[19]Whereas the Jerusalem Talmud seems to explain what Elisha "saw" as an earthly occurrence: humans suffering in a way that seemed to contradict the idea of reward and punishment.
"[16] Others disagree with Ginzberg, suggesting that he failed to account for the regular travel of sages between Judea and Babylonia to collect and transmit scholarly teachings.
The sources do not necessarily relate the historical facts about the heroes but they do illustrate the cultural concerns that find expression in the stories told about them.
In this context, Elisha the heretic and Eleazar ben Arach represent two extremes in attitudes towards the Torah; actual rabbis and their arguments had to fit somewhere between these two limits.
According to Louis Ginzberg "it is almost impossible to derive from rabbinical sources a clear picture of his personality, and modern historians have differed greatly in their estimate of him.
According to Grätz, he was a Karpotian Gnostic; according to Siegfried, a follower of Philo; according to Dubsch, a Christian; according to Smolenskin and Weiss, a victim of the inquisitor Akiva.
Quite in harmony with this supposition are the other sins laid to his charge; namely, that he rode in an ostentatious manner through the streets of Jerusalem on a Yom Kippur which fell on Shabbat, and that he chose to overstep the techum.
Thereupon, according to a legend, a pillar of smoke arose from it, and Meir, paraphrasing Ruth 3:13, exclaimed, "Rest here in the night; in the dawn of happiness the God of mercy will deliver thee; if not, I will be thy redeemer".
Gordin's Ben Abuyah is clearly a surrogate for Gordin himself, and to some extent for Adler: an unbeliever, but one who thinks of himself, unalterably, as a Jew, and who rejects Christianity even more firmly than Judaism, a man who behaves ethically and who dies haunted by a vision of "terrible Jewish suffering", condemned by the rabbis generally, but lauded as a great Jew by his disciple Rabbi Meir.
[29] Conservative Rabbi Milton Steinberg fictionalized the life of Elisha ben Abuyah in his controversial 1939 novel, As A Driven Leaf.
[30] Steinberg's novel wrestles with the 2nd century Jewish struggle to reconcile Rabbinic Judaism both culturally and philosophically with Greek Hellenistic society.
Although the novel draws on Talmudic tradition to create the framework for Elisha's life, Steinberg himself wrote that his novel "springs from historical data without any effort at rigid conformity or literal confinement to them."
Based on a historical figure, Ahmad (Nissim)[clarification needed] Soussan's work ended up being used as anti-Jewish propaganda during the era of Saddam Hussein.
Commenting on the use of Soussan's writing on Judaism by propagandists, his friend Assad Nissim likens him to Elisha Ben Abuya, or the one they called Aher, the Outcast.
Elisha is revealed to be the main antagonist of the series, a mystic driven mad by the sight of the Outer God Azathoth during his explorations of the seven heavens.
A parallel is also drawn between his occupation of training artificially intelligent software agents and how asking difficult questions lead to Elisha's exile.