Giday, I'm Gary Stevens.

And welcome to the third season of the History in the Bible podcast.

In this final season, I explore how the Jews and the Christians constructed new religions when they were sent

spinning into the void after the destruction of the temple. All of the history, about all of the

books beyond the Bible.

Episode 3.17. Quest for the rabbis part two, the Mishnah.

In the last episode, I began a tentative exploration of the origin of the rabbis.

Let's take a closer look at their first great product,

the Mishnah. Until the mid-19th century, all the ancient Jewish traditions in the Mishna and its expansive commentaries, the Talmuddinian, were taken as, forgive me, gospel.

If a Talmud said that Rabbi X had said so and so, why of course he did.

At that point, the brilliant German rabbi Zecharias Frankel launched the modern critical

study of the Talmuddin

a few years before Julius Velhousen did the same for the Old Testament or Tanakh.

To hear more about Velhausen's seminal work,

hearken way back to my episode 1.7, writing the Pentateuch.

Frankl's project only gained momentum a century later.

Today, literary and form criticism of the Mishner is a booming discipline.

To take just one illustration, consider the contention between the early rabbinic houses of

Shammai, or Sharmai, I've heard both pronunciations, and Hillel, around the turn of the

Euras, during the time of Herod the Great and his successes.

Ah, you really should catch up with Herod's homicidal shenanigans.

I have them covered in episode 2.15,

...