Sanhedrin

The Mishnah's tractate Sanhedrin describes a great court of seventy one members sitting in Jerusalem with authority over the most serious matters, capital cases and questions too significant for lesser courts, alongside a network of lesser Sanhedrins of twenty three members seated in individual towns to handle more routine judicial business. The great Sanhedrin is described as meeting in the Chamber of Hewn Stone on the Temple Mount and, distinctively, as sitting in a semicircle rather than in a row facing a single presiding figure, a seating arrangement the Mishnah explains as allowing every member to see every other member during deliberation, which mattered because votes and arguments were conducted collectively rather than delegated to a single judge.

The body was headed by a Nasi, a president or patriarch, with a deputy known as the Av Beit Din, and its procedures for examining witnesses in capital cases, described at length in the same tractate, are notably weighted toward caution, requiring extensive cross examination and treating an execution carried out even once in seventy years as evidence of an unacceptably harsh court. Much of what is known about the Sanhedrin's internal procedure comes from this rabbinic legal literature, composed after the Temple's destruction and describing an institution its authors could no longer observe directly.

Three separate ancient bodies of evidence describe something called a Sanhedrin, and they do not agree closely enough to be read as straightforward descriptions of one unchanging institution: the Mishnah presents an idealized rabbinic legal body organized around religious law, Josephus's historical narratives in the Antiquities of the Jews describe a council that looks considerably more political, convened at need rather than sitting continuously, and the Gospel accounts of the trial of Jesus describe a body whose composition and procedure again differ from both.

Whether these sources describe one continuously existing institution that changed character over time, two distinct bodies, a religious Sanhedrin and a separate political council, operating in the same period, or an institution whose nature genuinely shifted across the roughly two centuries these sources span, remains an open question among historians of the Second Temple period rather than a settled matter, and no single reconstruction commands full scholarly agreement. The Sanhedrin, in whatever form it actually took, ceased to function with the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and the end of Jewish political autonomy in Jerusalem that followed it. The name was later revived symbolically and without institutional continuity in 1807, when Napoleon convened an assembly of Jewish notables he styled a Grand Sanhedrin to ratify decisions of an earlier assembly on the civil status of French Jews, a modern political exercise rather than a restoration of the ancient court.