Abstract
The Sanhedrin of the late Second Temple period ceased to function in any meaningful institutional sense in the wake of the First Jewish-Roman War. Yet the institution did not disappear from Jewish memory; it was remembered, codified, and reimagined in the foundational documents of rabbinic Judaism, principally the Mishnah and its supplementary tractates compiled under the editorial direction of Judah ha-Nasi around the year 200 A.D. This paper examines how the Sanhedrin was remembered and reimagined in that literature. It focuses on three convergent dynamics: the construction of an idealized Sanhedrin whose detailed procedures bear the marks of rabbinic norms more than of historical reportage; the assertion of legal continuity through the famous chain of transmission in Pirkei Avot, set against the substantial historical discontinuity that the war’s aftermath actually imposed; and the transformation of what had been an institution of seated officeholders into a textual authority structure in which authority is exercised through study, citation, and scholarly recognition rather than through formal council session. The paper closes with reflection on what this kind of institutional memory accomplishes, what it conceals, and how it shapes the reception of the older institution in subsequent generations. Readers approaching the material from a Christian perspective will find that the rabbinic reimagining illuminates by contrast the very different way the New Testament writings remember the same body, and that careful attention to both kinds of memory clarifies the redemptive-historical setting of each.
I. Introduction
Institutions persist in memory long after they cease to function. The memory is rarely identical to the original; it is shaped by the needs, anxieties, and self-understanding of those who do the remembering. A community remembering its own past institutions writes that memory in a way that serves its present identity. This is not, in itself, a failure of integrity. It is the normal work of communal memory. But it does mean that the remembered institution and the historical institution are not the same object, and that careful study must distinguish between them.
The Sanhedrin in rabbinic memory presents a particularly clear case of this distinction. The Mishnah’s Tractate Sanhedrin, together with its companion tractate Makkot and the Tosefta and other related materials, devotes substantial attention to the council’s composition, leadership, jurisdiction, and procedure. The treatment is detailed, internally coherent, and authoritative in tone. It is also, in significant respects, an idealized construction issuing from a community whose actual institutional setting differed sharply from the one being described. The Mishnah was compiled more than a century after the council it describes had ceased to function. It was compiled by men who had never seen the body in operation, on the basis of traditions whose lines of transmission were partly real and partly reconstructed, in a setting (post-Temple, post–Bar Kokhba, under Roman provincial administration) in which the institutional realities of the Second Temple period could no longer be directly verified.
This paper examines what the Mishnaic memory accomplishes. The argument is not that the Mishnah is fabricating or that its accounts have no historical roots; many of its provisions plausibly preserve genuine memory of pre-70 practice, and the rabbinic community had access to oral traditions that the New Testament writings, focused on different concerns, do not record. The argument is rather that the Mishnaic Sanhedrin is a literary and theological construction whose features serve the self-understanding of the rabbinic community even where they preserve historical material, and that reading it as if it were straightforward historical reportage produces predictable distortions.
The paper proceeds in three stages, corresponding to the three dynamics identified above. It first describes the idealized Sanhedrin of rabbinic literature. It then examines the continuity claims and the historical discontinuity they cover. It closes with attention to the transformation of an institution of officeholders into a textual authority structure, and offers theological reflection appropriate to a study undertaken from a Christian perspective.
II. The Idealized Sanhedrin in Rabbinic Literature
A. The Mishnaic Portrait
The Mishnah’s principal treatment of the Sanhedrin appears in Tractate Sanhedrin, which together with Tractate Makkot (originally part of the same tractate) addresses the structure and operation of Jewish courts and the punishments they could impose. The portrait is detailed and orderly. The Great Sanhedrin numbers seventy-one. The lesser courts in cities meeting a population threshold number twenty-three. Courts of three handle ordinary civil disputes. The Great Sanhedrin sits in the Chamber of Hewn Stone within the Temple precincts. It is presided over by a nasi and an av beit din. Its jurisdiction includes specific categories of grave matters: a tribe charged with apostasy, a false prophet, a high priest accused of a capital offense, declarations of war other than defensive, additions to the city of Jerusalem or to the Temple courts.
Capital procedure is described with particular care. Witnesses are warned solemnly before testimony. Examinations probe for inconsistency. Deliberations begin with arguments for acquittal. A bare majority acquits; conviction requires a majority of two. A same-day verdict acquits; conviction must be deferred a day. Capital trials cannot be held on the eve of Sabbath or feast. Voting in capital cases proceeds from junior to senior to insulate younger judges from elder influence. A unanimous capital conviction is, paradoxically, an acquittal. The witnesses themselves carry out the execution in capital cases, in accordance with Deuteronomy 17:7. Each provision has its scriptural anchor or its careful exegetical derivation, and each fits within an internally coherent procedural system.
The portrait presents itself as authoritative description. It does not, in the main, distinguish between provisions that derive from clear scriptural mandate, provisions that derive from inferential exegesis, and provisions that derive from established practice. The mode of presentation is uniform: this is how the Sanhedrin operated. The Mishnaic compilers, working a century and more after the council had ceased to function, set down what their tradition delivered to them, supplemented by the exegetical and casuistic work the schools had developed, and presented the result as the council’s procedure.
B. The Marks of Idealization
Several features of the Mishnaic portrait bear the marks of rabbinic idealization rather than straightforward historical reportage.
First, the proportionality of procedural protections in capital cases is striking. The cumulative effect of the Mishnaic safeguards — the presumption of acquittal, the requirement of agreeing witnesses, the ban on same-day capital verdicts, the prohibition of capital trials on the eve of feasts, the disqualifying force of unanimity — is to make capital conviction enormously difficult. The Mishnah itself, in Makkot 1:10, records the famous statement that a sanhedrin that puts a man to death once in seven years (or, in another opinion, seventy years) is called destructive. Akiva and Tarfon say that if they had been on a sanhedrin no one would ever have been put to death. The procedural architecture, in other words, is calibrated toward the systematic prevention of capital outcomes.
This calibration may reflect actual pre-70 practice. It may also reflect the rabbinic community’s settled discomfort with capital adjudication under post-Temple conditions, where Jewish courts no longer exercised practical capital authority in any case and where the question of how capital cases ought ideally to be conducted had become an exercise in jurisprudential theory. The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. The Mishnaic picture of capital procedure is at once a memory of how the older institution may have operated and a projection of how the rabbinic community believed such proceedings ought to be conducted. Distinguishing the two layers in any particular provision is difficult and often impossible.
Second, the Mishnaic emphasis on the nasi/av beit din leadership structure aligns the council’s leadership with the scholarly authority that the rabbinic community itself claimed. The figures who fill the nasi role in the chain of Pirkei Avot — Hillel, Gamaliel, Simeon ben Gamaliel — are scholarly figures rather than priestly officeholders. The High Priest, who in the New Testament accounts of the council clearly presides over its formal sessions, is largely absent from the Mishnaic account of council leadership. This is not because the Mishnah denies the High Priest’s role; it is because the Mishnah’s account of council authority is structured around the scholarly succession that the rabbinic community traced as its own.
It is possible that there were two parallel bodies in the Second Temple period — a priestly council that handled the matters the New Testament records and a scholarly court that operated alongside it — and that the Mishnah preserves the scholarly tradition while the New Testament preserves the priestly. This view has serious defenders. It is also possible that the Mishnaic account is projecting the structure of the post-70 rabbinic community backward onto a body that, in fact, was led by the High Priest as the New Testament describes. On this second view, the nasi/av beit din structure describes the leadership of the post-70 patriarchate at Yavneh and Usha, and is read backward into pre-70 institutional life as part of the Mishnaic argument for continuity. Both views have textual and historical evidence in their favor; the cautious reader takes the nasi/av beit din tradition seriously without treating it as automatically descriptive of the council that tried Jesus Christ.
Third, the Mishnaic portrait passes over in silence several features that the New Testament narratives prominently record. The body’s accommodation with Rome, its political mediation, its internal Sadducean-Pharisaic factional dynamics, its role in the trial of Jesus Christ and the persecution of the early church — none of these is treated in the Mishnaic discussion of the council’s procedure. The silence is not, in itself, evidence of distortion; the Mishnah is a legal compilation, not a historical narrative, and its omissions can often be explained by genre. But the cumulative effect of the silences is to present the council as an idealized scholarly-judicial body operating under stable conditions of procedural integrity, whereas the historical body operated under intense political pressure and, by the New Testament’s account, departed from procedural integrity at a decisive moment. The idealization is real, even if it is partly a function of the genre.
Fourth, the Mishnaic provision that capital trials not be held on the eve of Sabbath or a feast (Sanhedrin 4:1) is particularly striking against the New Testament’s account of the trial of Jesus Christ. Whether the Mishnaic provision was already established by the early first century or whether it represents a later codification is debated. If it was established, the trial proceeded in violation of council norms; if it was not yet established, the Mishnaic norm may itself be in part a response to the kind of expedited proceeding the trial of Jesus Christ exemplified, formulated by a community that had absorbed Christian critique through several generations of Jewish-Christian disputation. Either reading is significant. The Mishnaic procedural ideal, by its own account, would not have permitted the trial the Gospels record. Whether this ideal already constrained pre-70 practice is, in some particulars, beyond what we can presently determine.
C. The Function of Idealization
The idealized Mishnaic portrait performs several functions for the rabbinic community. It establishes a model of authoritative judicial practice against which contemporary rabbinic adjudication can be measured. It encodes a theological vision of justice rendered slowly, mercifully, and with maximum protection of the accused — a vision the rabbinic community sought to sustain in its own much more limited adjudicative life. It claims, by the very detail of its account, an inheritance from the older institution that legitimizes the rabbinic community’s present authority. And it offers, to readers of subsequent generations, a stable image of what a properly functioning Jewish court is supposed to look like.
These functions are not invalid. The construction of an idealized memory is, as observed at the outset, the normal work of communal self-understanding. But the idealization should not be read as straightforward historical reportage. The Mishnaic Sanhedrin is, at significant points, the council the rabbinic tradition wished the older council to have been, projected into a literary form whose details cannot all be verified against independent evidence.
III. Legal Continuity Claims Versus Historical Discontinuity
A. The Chain of Pirkei Avot
The most explicit assertion of continuity between the older institution and the rabbinic community appears in the opening chapter of Pirkei Avot, the tractate of Sayings of the Fathers preserved within the Mishnah. The chain runs as follows in summary: Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua; Joshua to the elders; the elders to the prophets; the prophets to the men of the Great Assembly. From the men of the Great Assembly, the chain passes through Simeon the Just, Antigonus of Sokho, and a series of paired sages identified as the zugot — Yose ben Yoezer and Yose ben Yohanan, Joshua ben Perahyah and Nittai of Arbel, Judah ben Tabbai and Simeon ben Shetah, Shemaiah and Avtalion, Hillel and Shammai. From Hillel the chain proceeds through his son Simeon, his grandson Gamaliel, and into the patriarchal line that culminates with the editor of the Mishnah, Judah ha-Nasi.
The chain is doing significant work. It places the rabbinic teachers in unbroken transmission from Moses, identifies them as the legitimate inheritors of the prophetic tradition, and grounds their authority in the same revelation that authorized the older institution. Each link in the chain personally received and personally transmitted what each prior link had received. Authority flows down the chain by direct teacher-to-disciple transmission, and the Mishnaic compilers themselves stand at the chain’s end as faithful bearers of what was given at Sinai.
The chain also makes two specific institutional claims. It identifies the Great Assembly (an institution mentioned in Nehemiah 8 and elaborated in later tradition) as a specific link between the prophets and the zugot, providing a bridge across the centuries between the close of the prophetic period and the rise of the schools. It identifies the zugot as the leadership of the Sanhedrin in the period before Hillel, asserting that the council was led by paired scholarly figures throughout the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods.
B. The Historical Difficulties
The continuity claim is theologically powerful and rhetorically effective. It is also subject to substantial historical difficulties.
First, the period from the close of the prophetic books (approximately the fifth century B.C.) through the rise of the zugot in the second century B.C. is sparsely documented. The Great Assembly is mentioned briefly in Nehemiah 8 as the gathering of leaders who supported Ezra’s reading of the Law, but its later identification as a continuing institution that handed authority forward over centuries is a development of the rabbinic tradition that goes substantially beyond the biblical text. Whether anything like a continuous institutional Great Assembly existed across the centuries the chain assigns to it is, at best, uncertain.
Second, the zugot tradition presents the named pairs as the leaders of the Sanhedrin in successive generations. The historical evidence for each pair’s actual relationship to the council’s leadership in their generation is uneven. Some pairs are well-attested as significant teachers; others are little more than names in the tradition. The cleanness of the zugot succession — five pairs, each succeeding the previous, each occupying the nasi/av beit din leadership — has the look of a retrospective construction. Real history rarely arranges itself in such tidy patterns.
Third, the chain’s continuation beyond Hillel into the patriarchal line proceeds through Hillel’s descendants in a way that ties scholarly authority to a particular family lineage. The patriarchate that emerged at Yavneh after 70 A.D. and consolidated under the descendants of Gamaliel was a genuine post-war institution, and its leaders did, by the end of the second century, claim Davidic descent through Hillel. Whether the leadership of the pre-70 council actually passed through this same lineage in the manner the chain implies is, again, more contested than the chain’s confident presentation would suggest. The chain’s projection of the patriarchal lineage backward into pre-70 council leadership performs the legitimation function the post-war community needed; whether it accurately describes the council’s actual leadership across the relevant centuries is a separate question.
Fourth, the most fundamental difficulty: the chain assumes a continuous institutional life across a moment — the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. — that, on any sober assessment, was a profound discontinuity. The body that met in the Chamber of Hewn Stone and the body that gathered around Yohanan ben Zakkai at Yavneh were not, in any straightforward sense, the same institution. The first sat in the Temple precincts under priestly leadership and exercised supervisory authority over a tiered judicial system; the second met in a coastal town under Roman tolerance and operated as a scholarly center in the absence of centralized indigenous authority. Calling both “Sanhedrin” preserves a name; it does not preserve an institution. The continuity claim covers what was, in actual institutional terms, a substantial reconstitution.
C. The Function of the Continuity Claim
The continuity claim, like the Mishnaic procedural idealization, performs important functions for the post-war rabbinic community. It establishes the community’s authority as continuous with revelation rather than as a post-catastrophe innovation. It provides a stable framework within which post-70 rabbinic decisions can be received as expressions of the same authority that produced the Mosaic Law itself. It links the rabbinic teachers to the older institutional patrimony and gives subsequent generations a coherent account of how authority has been preserved across centuries of change.
These functions are, again, not invalid. Communities do in fact preserve teaching across institutional changes; teachers do in fact transmit what they have received. The chain is not pure invention. But it is a consolidated, idealized memory that smooths over real discontinuities and presents as continuous what was, in significant respects, a creative reconstitution. The historical reader accepts what the chain plausibly preserves of actual transmission while recognizing that the chain is, in significant measure, a theological-institutional construction rather than a chronicle.
IV. Transformation Into Textual Authority Structures
The third and perhaps most consequential dynamic is the transformation of what had been an institution of seated officeholders into a textual authority structure. This transformation is implicit in the Mishnah’s very form, and its consequences shape the entire subsequent history of the tradition.
A. From Council to Codex
The Sanhedrin of the late Second Temple period was an institution in the strictest sense: a body of named officeholders meeting in a particular chamber, deliberating under a particular procedure, issuing rulings under specific authorizations. Its authority operated through assembly, deliberation, and decision. To know what the council had ruled, one consulted the council; to bring a matter before it, one came to its chamber; to obtain its judgment, one stood before its members and waited for their voice.
The rabbinic system that succeeded it operated differently. Its authority operated through study and citation. To know what the tradition required, one studied the texts in which the tradition’s accumulated rulings were preserved. To bring a matter forward, one consulted a scholar trained in those texts and capable of applying them. To obtain judgment, one received the scholar’s reasoned application of textual precedent to the case at hand. The institution had become, in effect, the text and the community of those qualified to interpret it.
The Mishnah is the foundational document of this transformation. It compiles and organizes the accumulated rulings of the Pharisaic-rabbinic tradition into a structured corpus that can be studied, memorized, and applied. Its tractates cover the full range of Jewish legal life: agriculture, festivals, marriage and divorce, civil and criminal law, sacrificial procedure (preserved as study-material even though the Temple was destroyed), and ritual purity. The corpus is extensive but finite; it can be mastered by a sufficiently dedicated student, and once mastered it provides a framework within which subsequent questions can be addressed.
The Talmuds — the Jerusalem Talmud, completed perhaps in the fifth century, and the Babylonian Talmud, completed in the sixth or seventh century — extend this textual authority structure. They preserve discussions, debates, and refinements of the Mishnaic material across generations of scholarly engagement. The Talmudic page is itself a textual representation of an authority structure: the Mishnaic ruling at the center, the gemara’s discussion arrayed around it, later commentaries surrounding the gemara, and the cross-references that tie any one passage to others throughout the corpus. The page is the institution made visible.
B. The Logic of the Transformation
The transformation of council into text has its own institutional logic, much of which has been touched on in earlier papers in this series. A textual authority structure does not require a particular geographic center; the texts can be studied wherever scholars gather. It does not require political recognition by an external power; the texts retain their authority regardless of state sanction. It does not require buildings, treasuries, or priestly genealogies; it requires only teachers, students, and the texts they share. Each of these features turned a vulnerability of the older centralized council into a strength of the textual successor.
The transformation also altered the character of authority itself. In the older council, authority was exercised by a relatively small group of identifiable officeholders, and its decisions were binding by virtue of the office, the procedure, and the formal action of the body. In the textual structure, authority is exercised by a much wider community of trained interpreters, and its decisions are binding by virtue of their faithfulness to the textual tradition and their reception by the broader scholarly community. The transition is from a hierarchical structure to a network structure, from formal office to scholarly recognition, from session to citation.
The transition has costs as well as benefits. A network structure can be more resilient than a hierarchy, but it can also be more diffuse; matters that a hierarchy can settle by formal action a network can leave unresolved through indefinite extension of debate. A textual authority structure can preserve diversity of opinion in a way a council cannot, but the preservation of multiple opinions can also generate uncertainty about which opinion is currently authoritative. The Talmudic literature’s characteristic preservation of minority opinions alongside majority rulings reflects this institutional logic; the cost is a permanent low-grade ambiguity about exactly what the tradition requires in a given case.
C. The Rabbinic Self-Understanding
The transformation was not, of course, presented within the tradition as a transformation. It was presented as the same institution operating through different means under altered conditions. The rabbinic teachers who developed the textual system understood themselves as direct successors to the council of the Second Temple period, exercising the same authority that the council had exercised, drawing on the same revelation that had authorized the council, transmitting the same teaching that the council had preserved. The Mishnaic chain in Pirkei Avot is the institutional self-understanding made explicit: there has been one Torah, one tradition, one teaching, transmitted across the generations through the institutional forms appropriate to each period.
This self-understanding is theologically significant and historically partial. It is theologically significant because it grounds rabbinic authority in something larger than the particular post-war reorganization that produced the Mishnah; it locates that authority within a larger account of how the LORD’s instruction has been preserved among His people. It is historically partial because it understates the degree of innovation involved in the textual transformation. The rabbinic teachers were not simply continuing what the older council had done; they were developing a new institutional form that could carry the tradition’s content under conditions the older form could not have survived. The continuity is real at the level of content; the discontinuity is real at the level of institutional form. The Mishnaic memory presents the continuity and elides the discontinuity, in the manner of communal self-understanding everywhere.
V. Theological Reflection From a Christian Perspective
A study of the Sanhedrin’s afterlife in rabbinic memory cannot, from a Christian perspective, end without theological reflection on what is at stake in that memory. Three observations are warranted.
First, the rabbinic reimagining of the Sanhedrin clarifies, by contrast, the very different way the New Testament writings remember the same body. The Gospels and Acts portray the council in narrative rather than codifying its procedures; they show its operations through specific encounters rather than through systematic legal description; they pass theological judgment on its conduct in the trial of Jesus Christ rather than presenting it within an idealized procedural frame. The two memories are working at different things. The rabbinic memory is constructing an institutional self-understanding for a community that traces its lineage through that institution; the New Testament memory is bearing witness to a redemptive-historical event in which that institution played a specific and consequential role. Each kind of memory has its proper integrity; neither can be reduced to the other.
The Christian reader, attending to both, gains something neither alone could provide. The rabbinic memory illuminates the institutional and procedural texture of the council in a way the Gospels, focused elsewhere, do not. The New Testament memory illuminates the council’s actual decisive moment in a way the Mishnah, focused on idealized procedure, does not. Reading them together, with appropriate critical care for the distinct purposes each is serving, produces a fuller picture of the historical reality than either alone can produce.
Second, the rabbinic continuity claim and the New Testament’s redemptive-historical claim concerning the Lord Jesus Christ stand in genuine theological tension. The chain of Pirkei Avot asserts that authority over the Mosaic Law and its application has been continuously transmitted from Sinai through the elders, the prophets, the men of the Great Assembly, the zugot, and the rabbinic teachers, with the rabbinic community standing at the chain’s living end. The New Testament asserts that the Law was always pointing forward to its fulfillment in the Lord Jesus Christ, that the prophets bore witness to Him, that He is the Prophet greater than Moses to whom the Law itself directed obedience (Acts 3:22, citing Deuteronomy 18:15), and that authority over the household of faith has been entrusted to His apostles and, through them, to the church He has established.
These two accounts cannot both be true in their fullness. They name different sources of continuing authority over the people of God, different criteria of legitimate teaching, and different terminal points toward which the older institutions of Israel were pointing. The Christian reader, while honoring the rabbinic tradition’s seriousness and its real preservation of much that is valuable from the older period, cannot accept its continuity claim as the framing account of how the LORD’s purpose has actually moved through history. The New Testament’s account is, for the believer, the determinative one. The Lord Jesus Christ is the one to whom the Scriptures bore witness from the beginning; the church He established is the community in whom the Spirit’s work continues; the apostolic writings are the authoritative record of what He has done and what His people are to believe and to obey. These are not concessions to confessional preference; they are the church’s settled convictions, grounded in the Scriptures the church receives.
Third, the rabbinic transformation of council into text offers, even from a Christian perspective, a useful study in how communal authority can adapt to catastrophic conditions. The Christian church faced its own analogous transitions in the early centuries: from the apostolic generation to the post-apostolic generation, from oral tradition to a recognized canon of New Testament Scripture, from charismatic itinerant authority to settled episcopal and conciliar structures, from a persecuted minority to a recognized community within the empire. These transitions were not without their own losses, their own contested moments, and their own retrospective idealizations. The rabbinic case illuminates, by analogy, the pressures any tradition faces when conditions change beyond what its older institutional forms can handle, and the kinds of memory work such transitions characteristically produce.
The Christian church’s transitions, however, were carried by a different center of gravity than the rabbinic community’s were. The center of the Christian community is not a textual tradition transmitted through scholarly succession but a person — the Lord Jesus Christ, crucified, risen, and reigning — to whom the apostolic writings bear witness and in whom the community is gathered by the Spirit. The Scriptures are received as the authoritative testimony to that person, and the community’s continuity is not finally a matter of institutional transmission, however valuable institutional continuity may be, but of the abiding presence of the One whom the Scriptures proclaim. The rabbinic system constructs continuity through the chain of teachers; the Christian church confesses continuity through the abiding lordship of Jesus Christ. The two are different in kind, not merely in detail.
VI. Conclusion
The Sanhedrin did not survive the destruction of the Temple as an operative institution, but it survived in rabbinic memory as the construct of an idealized council whose procedures, leadership, and continuity were preserved and reimagined in the Mishnah and the literature that built on it. Three dynamics shape that memory: the construction of an idealized procedural picture in which the council’s work is presented under conditions of careful legal integrity; the assertion of legal continuity through the chain of Pirkei Avot, which smooths over substantial historical discontinuity at the moment of the war and the post-war reconstitution; and the transformation of an institution of seated officeholders into a textual authority structure in which authority operates through study, citation, and scholarly recognition rather than through formal council session.
Each dynamic performs identifiable functions for the post-war rabbinic community. Each preserves real material from the older period while shaping that material to serve the present community’s self-understanding. Each, accordingly, must be read with the kind of critical care appropriate to communal memory of any sort: respectful of what the memory plausibly preserves, alert to what it shapes or omits, and attentive to the institutional and theological work the memory is performing for those who do the remembering.
The Christian reader, attending to this memory alongside the New Testament’s quite different memory of the same body, gains a fuller picture of the historical institution than either source alone could provide. The Christian reader also recognizes that the two memories are framed by competing accounts of where the LORD’s redemptive purpose was, in fact, going, and that these accounts cannot finally be reconciled at the level of framing. The Mishnaic chain runs through the rabbinic community to the present scholarly tradition. The New Testament’s chain runs through the prophets and the Law to the Lord Jesus Christ and through Him to His apostles and His church. The Christian confession is that the second framing is the true one, and that the first, however much of value it preserves, is finally a memory that has not recognized the One to whom the institution it remembers was always pointing. This recognition is offered not in a spirit of contempt for the rabbinic tradition but in the conviction that all history, including the history of memory, finds its center and its meaning in Him whom that tradition’s own Scriptures foretold.
Selected Sources for Further Study
- Mishnah, Tractate Sanhedrin and Tractate Makkot; Mishnah, Tractate Avot, especially chapter 1.
- Tosefta, Tractate Sanhedrin.
- Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin.
- Acts 3:22–26; Acts 7 (Stephen’s recital of the chain of Israel’s history); Hebrews 1:1–4; Hebrews 7–10.
- Deuteronomy 17:8–13; 18:15–22.
- Emil Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, revised English edition, vol. II, on the institutions of post-war Judaism.
