The Early Christians in Rome

by H. D. M. Spence-Jones

What Rabbinism and its Book, the Talmud, did for the Jewish People

Historical summary of events leading up to the compilation and consolidation of the first part of the Talmud—the Mishnah.

After A.D. 70, when Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed, an extraordinary group of Rabbis or teachers of “the Law” arose—men of rare gifts, far-seeing and possessing unusual powers of communicating their enthusiasm to other men. These teachers recognized the utter hopelessness of any further war with Rome; they abandoned all expectation of seeing the Temple rebuilt; they saw that the future of Israel lay not in any restoration of its nationality as a people—that was now hopeless. But Israel alone among the people of the world possessed a Divine Law, was the inheritor of a glorious promise, a promise which they maintained belonged alone to them; no earthly misfortune could rob the Jew of this: they were the people specially beloved of God, and only by neglecting the observance of the Divine Law could they forfeit the sure and blessed inheritance reserved for them. That same Law must be their sole guide in all the various details of life—in the smallest matters as in the more important. In the rigid keeping of it they would in the end receive their great reward, the reward reserved for them, and for them alone, as the peculiar people of God the Supreme, the Almighty.

For some five centuries, since the days of Ezra and the return of the remnant of the people from the Captivity, “the Mosaic Law,” as contained in the Pentateuch, essentially in the same form as we now have it, had been regarded by the Jew with an almost limitless reverence. The acknowledgment of its awful and binding precepts was the condition without which no one was a member of the Chosen People, or could have a share in the glorious promises reserved for them.

Their teachers insisted that the commands of “the Law” (the Torah) were in their entirety the commands of God. “He who says that Moses wrote even one verse of his own knowledge is a denier and despiser of the Word of God.” The whole Pentateuch thus came to be regarded as dictated by God. Even the last eight verses of Deuteronomy, in which the death of Moses is told, were asserted to have been written by means of a divine revelation. Some of the teachers even went further; they asserted that the complete book of the Law had been handed to Moses by God.[152]

As time went on, the other Books of the “Old Testament”—at first the writings of the older prophets and works on the pre-exilic period of Israel; then the body of the “prophets” and the other Old Testament writings, became also regarded as documents in which the will of God was revealed in a manner absolutely binding.

Round the Law (Torah) had gathered a vast number of explanatory directions, and a certain number of traditional additions known as “Haggadah.” The first of these, the directions or explanations, were known by the term “Halachah.”[153] It had become necessary, seeing that the Law of Moses was accepted as the divine code for the guidance of the Chosen People, to explain and enlarge it further, so as to apply its brief enactments to all the conditions of everyday life. Some few of these Halachah were traditionally derived from Moses himself. Others had probably been composed very early in the schools of the prophets; yet more were the work of the Scribes,[154] a numerous class of teachers which had arisen after the return from exile in the days of Ezra. These Halachah (we use the well-known expression in preference to the more accurate plural form Halachoth; the same course has been followed in that of the expression “Haggadah”) had been largely augmented in the half-century preceding the catastrophe of A.D. 70.

The group of eminent Rabbis who arose after the fall of the City and Temple, and who set themselves the task of reconstituting Israel on a new and purely religious basis, took these Halachah, studied them, meditated on them,—no doubt recast many of them to suit the new position of the people, now that the Temple and its complicated ritual of sacrifice and public prayer had disappeared, and framed them into an elaborate system of regulations, thus pointing out how the Law might be rigidly observed in all the relations of ordinary life.

This great and elaborate work is termed the Mishnah[155]—or “Repetition,”—the term originally derived from the method in which it was elaborated. It was not written down in the first instance, but was repeated again and again by the more famous teachers and heads of schools to their pupils. The term “Mishnah” came in time to signify “the second Law,” but that was not the original meaning; it belonged to a period when the whole instruction was oral.