ABSTRACT
For the thinkers of the Mishnah, historical patterning emerges as today scientific knowledge does, through classification, the classification of the unique and individual, the organization of change and movement within unchanging categories. Rabbinic Judaism reached its full statement in the first six centuries of the Common Era, an age in which the people, Israel, confronted enormous historical crises. Disorderly historical events entered the system of the Mishnah and found their place within the larger framework of the Mishnah's orderly world. The heavy weight of prophecy, apocalyptic, and biblical historiography, with their emphasis upon history as the indicator of Israel's salvation, stood against the Mishnah's quite separate thesis of what truly mattered. The crisis confronted Israel in the fourth century, when Christianity, reading the same Scriptures and speaking in many of the same categories, became the official religion of the Roman Empire and claimed that its political triumph validated its reading of Scripture and invalidated that of Judaism.
