What Is the Talmud? Mishnah, Gemara, and the Two Talmuds

The Gospels show the Pharisees holding to a “tradition of the elders” alongside the written Law. Jesus knew it only as spoken teaching, and argued with it. After the Temple fell, that oral tradition was written down, argued over for three more centuries, and became the Talmud. Here is what the Mishnah, the Gemara and the two Talmuds are, and how they relate to Jesus.

The oral tradition behind it

The Pharisees taught that Moses received two things at Sinai: the written Law, and an unwritten body of explanation passed down by word of mouth, teacher to student. The New Testament knows this tradition and names it.

When Rome destroyed the Temple in AD 70, the priesthood and the Sadducees lost their reason to exist. The rabbis, heirs of the Pharisees, carried Judaism forward through study and teaching, and their oral tradition became the material of the Mishnah and the Talmud. One teacher of that line appears in Acts: Gamaliel, the Pharisee who advised the Sanhedrin to leave the apostles alone and under whom Paul studied. The Mishnah quotes him by name.

The Mishnah: the oral law written down

Around AD 200 Rabbi Judah the Prince (Judah ha-Nasi), the head of the Jewish community in Galilee, gathered the rulings of the earlier sages into one book, the Mishnah (“repetition” or “teaching”). It is written in Hebrew and arranged by subject, not by the order of the Bible, in six orders: Seeds (agriculture and blessings), Appointed Times (Sabbath and festivals), Women (marriage and divorce), Damages (civil and criminal law), Holy Things (sacrifices and the Temple) and Purities. The orders are divided into 63 tractates in the usual count, the tractates into chapters, and the chapters into short paragraphs, each of which is also called a mishnah. So “Berakhot 1:1” means tractate Berakhot (Blessings), chapter 1, mishnah 1.

Most of the Mishnah is law (halakhah), often recorded as a debate in which the opinions that lost are kept alongside the one that won. One tractate is different: Avot, the “Sayings of the Fathers,” a collection of maxims that opens by tracing the oral tradition from Moses through the prophets to the sages. Hillel and Shammai, two teachers of Herod's time whose schools argued about nearly everything, are among the voices quoted.

The Gemara: the discussion of the Mishnah

The Mishnah was taught, not just read, and its terse rulings raised questions. For the next three centuries the sages of the academies (the Amoraim, “expounders”) discussed it line by line: where does this ruling come from in scripture, how does it fit with another ruling, what about a case it doesn't mention? The record of those discussions is the Gemara (“completion” or “study”), written mostly in Aramaic. It ranges far beyond law into stories, sayings, biblical interpretation, medicine and folklore, the material called aggadah.

The Mishnah together with its Gemara is a Talmud (“learning”). A Talmud page puts a passage of the Mishnah first, then the Gemara's discussion of it, then the next passage of the Mishnah, and so on through the tractate.

Two Talmuds

Two centres of Jewish learning each produced a Gemara on the same Mishnah, so there are two Talmuds.

The Jerusalem Talmud (the Yerushalmi, also called the Talmud of the Land of Israel) was not written in Jerusalem, where Jews were barred after the second revolt against Rome. It came from the academies of Galilee, chiefly Tiberias, and was finished around AD 400, when Roman pressure on those academies grew. It covers the first four orders (Seeds, Appointed Times, Women, Damages) and part of the tractate on menstrual purity, and it is shorter, terser and less polished, with discussions that sometimes stop short.

The Babylonian Talmud (the Bavli) came from the academies of Sura and Pumbedita in Persian Babylonia, in modern Iraq, home to a large Jewish community since the exile. It was edited over a longer period, to around AD 500 with later touches, and is far larger and more carefully worked. It has Gemara on 37 tractates, mostly in the orders of Appointed Times, Women, Damages and Holy Things, but not on most of Seeds, the agricultural laws that applied only in the Land of Israel. When people say “the Talmud” without qualification, they mean the Bavli, and it became the authoritative one in Jewish law. It is cited by folio and side, from the page layout of the first complete printed edition (Venice, 1520-23): “Berakhot 2a” is the front of the second leaf of tractate Berakhot. Some tractates of the Mishnah, such as Avot, have no Gemara in either Talmud.

Jesus and the tradition of the elders

Put the dates side by side. Jesus taught around AD 27 to 30, while the Temple still stood. The Temple fell in AD 70. The Mishnah was compiled around AD 200, the Jerusalem Talmud finished around AD 400, and the Babylonian Talmud around AD 500 or later. So there was no Talmud in Jesus' day, and no Mishnah either: no written book of the oral law existed at all. The Pharisees held their tradition as spoken teaching, memorised and handed down from teacher to student, and that is how Jesus met it, in the mouths of its teachers. The Gospels call it “the tradition of the elders.”

That spoken tradition is what Jesus argued with. When Pharisees and scribes who had come from Jerusalem asked why his disciples ate without the ritual hand-washing the tradition required, he answered them from Isaiah and called them hypocrites: they had set aside God's commandment to hold on to a human tradition.

He gave an example. Under the tradition a man could declare his goods “Corban,” dedicated to God, and then be held to that vow even when it left his own father and mother without support, against the commandment to honour them. That, Jesus said, made the word of God of no effect.

The same pattern runs through his Sabbath disputes. The Sabbath itself was God's commandment, but the detailed rules about what counted as work on it belonged to the tradition, and Jesus measured those rules by the purpose of the day.

His fiercest words, the woes of Matthew 23 with their refrain “scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!”, aim at the same gap: careful observance of the tradition's details while the heart of the Law went neglected. (What “hypocrite” meant, and why Jesus did not condemn every Pharisee, is explained in the article on the Pharisees, scribes and Levites.)

Yet in the same speech he tells the crowds to do what the scribes and Pharisees teach from “Moses' seat,” and not what they do. His quarrel was not with the Law, which he said he came to fulfil, nor with the devotion of his own people, but with human tradition set above God's commandment, and with religion performed for show. It was an argument inside one family of faith: a Jewish teacher speaking to fellow Jews about how to keep the Torah they shared.

So when the Mishnah and the Talmud, centuries later, set out rulings on hand-washing, vows and the Sabbath, they are writing down and developing the tradition Jesus met as spoken teaching. That makes them a valuable window on the world of the Gospels, read with one caution: what the Mishnah records around AD 200 was not always what was taught around AD 30. Paul, trained as a Pharisee before he followed Jesus, remembered his own zeal for that same unwritten tradition.

What the Talmud is, and is not

In rabbinic Judaism the Talmud is the Oral Torah in written form, and the Babylonian Talmud has been the centre of Jewish study and the foundation of Jewish law ever since. It is not part of the Bible in any tradition: the Hebrew Bible ends with the books of the Tanakh, and the Talmud is commentary on them and on the law drawn from them. It is also later than the New Testament. The Mishnah was compiled a century or more after the Gospels and the Gemaras two to four centuries after that, so it shows how Jewish life and law were remembered and argued, not a record made in Jesus' day. Historians use it with that in mind, as they use Josephus, for the background of the Gospels: Temple rites, Sabbath rules, and the teachers who came just before and after Jesus. A famous example is Hillel's answer to a man who asked to be taught the whole Torah while standing on one foot: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour; that is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary” (Shabbat 31a). It is the same rule Jesus gave in positive form.