Rabbis as Jurists: On the Representation of Past and Present Legal Institutions in the Mishnah
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In light of the growing consensus that the rabbis of Late Antiquity were not a powerful and dominant group with roots in the time of the Temple, this article reexamines the portrayal of the rabbinic present and the rabbinic past in the Mishnah. The Mishnah, I propose, pictures the rabbis acting as jurists—modelled on Roman jurists—who issue opinions primarily on matters of Jewish ritual law. This claim for a legal-judicial role for the rabbis in post-destruction Jewish society, furthermore, shapes the rabbinic memory of the past in which the Court of Temple times is the predecessor to the rabbis and in which this Court has ultimate authority over Temple ritual. In their construction of both the present and the past, the rabbis make a powerful claim for authority over ritual law and ritual practice, an authority which it seems they did not yet have.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it