Q&A: Why in the Mishnah each position is represented by one tanna by name
Why in the Mishnah each position is represented by one tanna by name
Question
Why are disputes in the Mishnah almost always between two tannaim, or between “the Sages” and Rabbi So-and-so (and sometimes the Talmud identifies “who are the Sages? Rabbi So-and-so”), rather than, say, Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Meir, and Rabbi Yosei against Rabbi Tarfon, Rabbi Shimon, and Rabbi Yehuda?
I recently learned Mishnah tractate Bekhorot, and that’s where I especially noticed this. In the first chapters there are: a dispute between the first tanna and Rabbi Elazar; a three-way dispute between the first tanna, Rabbi Eliezer, and the Sages; a dispute between Rabbi Eliezer and the Sages; a dispute between the first tanna and Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel; a four-way dispute among Rabbi Yosei HaGelili, the Sages, Rabbi Tarfon, and Rabbi Akiva; a dispute between Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva; and so on.
For example, in a dispute between Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva, what did the other tannaim hold? What did Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, or Rabbi Yehoshua, or the student Rabbi Shimon hold? Is it possible they weren’t asked what their opinion was, or that they had no practical halakhic opinion on the matter? And if so, why wasn’t their view also recorded? It doesn’t seem likely that on every issue one person stood against everyone else. After all, in the same generation there were quite a number of tannaim of roughly equal standing. And the students too, seemingly, should have expressed an opinion. So why don’t we find disputes of Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Akiva against the Sages?
Sometimes you do find in the Talmud that a certain tanna and another one said the same thing and share one view. But it seems that phenomena like that are not recorded in the Mishnah, or are hardly recorded there.
One could say that since the minority opinion has already been taught, one representative is enough to carry the banner of that view (“Why are the words of the individual mentioned among the many for no practical purpose? So that if a person says: this is the tradition I received, they can say to him: you heard it as the view of that particular individual”). But from the standpoint of clarifying Torah teachings, it would seemingly certainly help us to know what every tanna held in every single dispute, and there would surely be great benefit in that for understanding each one’s approach.
Answer
The Talmud is a record of give-and-take that took place in the study hall. Presumably, in such a study hall there were usually a few important rabbis present and many students. There would be one or two heads of the academy. So the discussion is attributed to the heads of the academy who were present in the discussion. Sometimes another sage came there, or one of the students had the status of an amora, and then he too is treated as a stated opinion.
Sometimes the editor of the passage inserts into it the views of other sages who were not present in the discussion. That is an editorial act that intervenes in the protocol-like description of the give-and-take.