ABSTRACT
ABOUT the time of Jesus the priestly authority expressed itself through the Great Council, or Sanhedrin, which sat in Jerusalem. 1 We have little knowledge concerning its origin and development, its method of election, or even its functions. The Rabbis of the Talmud liked to stress its great antiquity; their story was that it had grown out of the council of the seventy elders of Israel whom Jahweh had commanded Moses to assemble in the “tent of meeting” (Num. xi. 16). They imagined for this assembly an unbroken continuity from that distant date to Talmudic times. In this they were completely mistaken, for there is no connexion between the possibly fictitious Sanhedrin of Numbers and that of the Gospels, nor between the latter and the “Sanhedrin” known to the redactors of the Talmud, which was a kind of learned Academy with certain judicial powers, and existed from the time of the Great Rebellion until the tenth century or later.
