perhaps would not have seriously and permanently influenced the life of the Jewish people, had it not been for the awful events of the year A.D. 70. When Jerusalem ceased to exist, and the Temple was finally destroyed, then Christianity emerged from the heart of Judaism, and gathered into its fold many of the Chosen People.
What happened in the year A.D. 70 had a tremendous effect on the life of the Jews,—far more than the ordinary historian usually assigns to it. It has been tersely but truly said that, "unparalleled as were the calamities which attended the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, by far the most terrible of all was the total collapse of Judaism as a Creed, owing to the annihilation of all the divinely instituted means of access to God. The religious pulse of the nation ceased to beat, as it were, with a suddenness most appalling. We hear nothing of the Sadducees in those days, . . . they were swept away like chaff before the tempest never to appear any more; but the Pharisees, to whom the Rabbis and Scribes belonged, remained steadfast, and, collecting the poor remnant of the people around them, determined to infuse new life into them."
Mosaism was irretrievably destroyed in the year of our Lord 70, but the foundations of Rabbinism had, as we have noticed, been laid long before. It was only necessary to consolidate it, to give it shape and form, and to claim for the words of its expounders a yet higher authority than had as yet been conceded even to the written Law (the Torah). And this was done, or more accurately speaking was commenced, in the last twenty or thirty years of the first century (the years immediately following the catastrophe of A.D. 70) by the disciples of Rabban Jochanan ben Zacchai, who were certainly the earliest elaborators of the Mishnah,[1] the first and oldest part of the famous Talmud.
- ↑ What the Mishnah was will be explained below (p. 358), where a general description of the Talmud is given.
