An important scholarly debate about the emergence of the rabbinic movement in Roman Palestine concerns when and how the rabbis came to have authority over the general Jewish populace. Composed around 200 CE, the Mishnah (a written collection of Jewish oral law) offers the earliest evidence of rabbinic activity. Regulating everything from prayer to holy day practices to agricultural laws and property disputes, the Mishnah appears to assume a Jewish populace that accepts the rabbis’ authority to regulate their lives. A traditionalist scholarly narrative takes the evidence of the Mishnah at face value and asserts that the rabbis emerge in […]
