Council of Jamnia

[1][2][3] It has also been hypothesized to be the occasion when the Jewish authorities decided to exclude believers in Jesus as the Messiah from synagogue attendance, as referenced by interpretations of John 9:22 in the New Testament.

[6] The Talmud says that some time before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai relocated to the city of Yavneh, where he received permission from the Romans to found a school of halakha (Jewish religious law).

[7] The Mishnah, compiled at the end of the 2nd century, describes a debate over the status of some books of Ketuvim, and in particular over whether or not they render the hands "impure".

Based on these, and a few similar references, Heinrich Graetz concluded in 1871 that there had been a Council of Jamnia (or Yavne in Hebrew) which had decided the Jewish canon sometime in the late 1st century (c.

...These ongoing debates suggest the paucity of evidence on which the hypothesis of the Council of Jamnia rests and raise the question whether it has not served its usefulness and should be relegated to the limbo of unestablished hypotheses.

It should not be allowed to be considered a consensus established by mere repetition of assertion.The 20th-century evangelical scholar F. F. Bruce thought that it was "probably unwise to talk as if there were a Council or Synod of Jamnia which laid down the limits of the Old Testament canon.