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Council of Jamnia

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The so-called[1] Council of Jamnia would have been during the time of consolidation for the remaining Jewish communities in Israel following the Destruction of Jerusalem and Herod's Temple in A.D. 70, that lasted until about A.D. 90 and from which Rabbinic Judaism emerged. According to tradition, it owed much to the spiritual leadership of Yohanan ben Zakkai.

Heinrich Graetz introduced the notion in 1871; based on Mishnaic and Talmudic sources, he concluded that there had been a Council of Jamnia which had decided Jewish canon sometime in the late 1st century. This became the prevailing scholarly consensus for much of the 20th century. However, from the 1960s onwards, based on the work of J.P. Lewis, S.Z. Leiman, and others, this view came increasingly into question. In particular, later scholars noted that none of the sources actually mentioned books that had been withdrawn from a canon, and questioned the whole premise that the discussions were about canonicity at all, asserting that they were actually dealing with other concerns entirely.

As regards the pertinence of the term Council of Jamnia Jack P. Lewis writes in The Anchor Bible Dictionary Vol. III, pp. 634-7 (New York 1992):

The concept of the Council of Jamnia is an hypothesis to explain the canonization of the Writings (the third division of the Hebrew Bible) resulting in the closing of the Hebrew canon. ... These ongoing debates suggest the paucity of evidence on which the hypothesis of the Council of Jamnia rests and raise the question whether it has not served its usefulness and should be relegated to the limbo of unestablished hypotheses. It should not be allowed to be considered a consensus established by mere repetition of assertion.

The Jewish Encyclopedia article on ACADEMIES IN PALESTINE states:

The destruction of Jerusalem put as abrupt an end to the disputes of the schools as it did to the contests between political parties [ Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, Zealots ]. It was then that a disciple of Hillel, the venerable Johanan ben Zakkai, founded a new home for Jewish Law in Jabneh (Jamnia), and thus evoked a new intellectual life from the ruins of a fallen political existence. The college at Jabneh, which at once constituted itself the successor of the Great Sanhedrin of Jerusalem by putting into practise the ordinances of that body as far as was necessary and practicable, attracted all those who had escaped the national catastrophe and who had become prominent by their character and their learning. Moreover, it reared a new generation of similarly gifted men, whose task it became to overcome the evil results of still another dire catastrophe — the unfortunate Bar Kokba war with its melancholy ending. During the interval between these two disasters (56-117), or, more accurately, until the War of Quietus under Trajan, the school at Jabneh was the recognized tribunal that gathered the traditions of the past and confirmed them; that ruled and regulated existing conditions; and that sowed the seeds for future development. Next to its founder, it owed its splendor and its undisputed supremacy especially to the energetic Gamaliel, a great-grandson of Hillel, called Gamaliel II., or Gamaliel of Jabneh, in order to distinguish him from his grandfather, Gamaliel I. To him flocked the pupils of Johanan ben Zakkai and other masters and students of the Law and of Biblical interpretation. Though some of them taught and labored in other places — Eliezer ben Hyrcanus in Lydda; Joshua ben Hananiah in Beḳiin; Ishmael ben Elisha in Kefar Aziz, Akiba in Bene Beraḳ; Hananiah (Ḥanina) ben Teradyon in Siknin — Jabneh remained the center; and in "the vineyard" of Jabneh, as they called their place of meeting, they used to assemble for joint action.
In the fertile ground of the Jabneh Academy the roots of the literature of tradition — Midrash and Mishnah, Talmud and Aggadah — were nourished and strengthened. There, too, the way was paved for a systematic treatment of Halakah and exegesis. In Jabneh were held the decisive debates upon the canonicity of certain Biblical books; there the prayer-liturgy received its permanent form; and there, probably, was edited the Targum on the Pentateuch, which became the foundation for the later Targum called after Onkelos. It was Jabneh that inspired and sanctioned the new Greek version of the Bible — that of Akylas (Aquila). The events that preceded and followed the great civil revolution under Bar Kokba (from the year 117 to about 140) resulted in the decay and death of the school at Jabneh. According to tradition (R. H. 31b), the Sanhedrin was removed from Jabneh to Usha, from Usha back to Jabneh, and a second time from Jabneh to Usha. This final settlement in Usha indicates the ultimate spiritual supremacy of Galilee over Judea, the latter having become depopulated by the war of Hadrian. Usha remained for a long time the seat of the academy; its importance being due to the pupils of Akiba, one of whom, Judah ben Ilai, had his home in Usha. Here was undertaken the great work of the restoration of Palestinian Judaism after its disintegration under Hadrian. The study of the Law flourished anew; and Simon, a son of Gamaliel, was invested with the rank that had been his father's in Jabneh. With him the rank of patriarch became hereditary in the house of Hillel, and the seat of the academy was made identical with that of the patriarch.

Late first century developments attributed to "Jamnia"

Today, there is no scholarly consensus as to when the Jewish canon was set. Nevertheless, the outcomes attributed to the "Council of Jamnia" did occur whether gradually or in a definitive, authoritative council. Several concerns of the remaining Jewish communities in Israel would have been the loss of the national language, the growing problem of conversions to Christianity, based in part on Christian promises of life after death. What emerged from this era was two fold: 1.A rejection of the Septuagint or Greek Testament widely then in use among the Hellenized diaspora along with its additional books not then found in Hebrew, and 2. The inclusion of a curse on the Minim which probably included Jewish Christians (Birkat ha-Minim). According to the Jewish Encyclopedia article on Min: "On the invitation of Gamaliel II., Samuel ha-Ḳaṭan composed a prayer against the minim which was inserted in the "Eighteen Benedictions"; it is called "Birkat ha-Minim" and forms the twelfth benediction; but instead of the original "Noẓerim" (= "Nazarenes"; see Krauss in "J. Q. R." v. 55; comp. Bloch, "Die Institutionen des Judenthums," i. 193) the present text has "wela-malshinim" (="and to the informers"). The cause of this change in the text was, probably, the accusation brought by the Church Fathers against the Jews of cursing all the Christians under the name of the Nazarenes."

Sociologically, these developments achieved two important ends, namely, the preservation of the Hebrew language at least for religious use even among the diaspora and the final separation and distinction between the Jewish and Christian communities. (Through nearly the end of the first century, Christians of Jewish decent continued to pray in synagogues.) Note: Some of the books excluded from the Hebrew canon in this era, such as Wisdom and 2 Maccabees, gave the only textual support for the common first century Jewish belief in the after-life. The martyrs' prayers for the dead and the living praying and offering sacrifices for the dead motivated Martin Luther to reject these books as apocryphal because they supported Catholic doctrine and practice.

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