although as we have seen, notions of calendar‘orthodoxy’and‘heresy’are not
explicitly articulated in the context of these sources.
Perhaps more pronounced, though in very different ways and still rather
implicitly, is the notion of calendar orthodoxy in rabbinic literature, of which
the earliest books (including the Mishnah) date from the early third century
CE. There, for thefirst time, wefind the assumption that all Jews must follow
the same lunar calendar and observe the festivals on the same date, and that
this calendar must be controlled and determined by a single, designated
rabbinic court (see Chapter 6 n. 134)—which implies that any other calendar
is invalid. It is this assumption that explains why, according to the Mishnah,
the rabbinic court’s calendar decisions had to be disseminated to the Diaspora
through a chain of beacons, or failing that, by sending out special envoys. This
also explains the observance of two consecutive festival days in parts of
the Diaspora which the envoys could not reach (e.g. in Babylonia), to prevent
the unintended desecration of the correct date observed in Palestine—a
practice that has survived until today, but that was unique, in Antiquity, to
rabbinic Judaism (Stern 2001: 242–7). The assumption that only one calendar
is legitimate underlies also the remarkable rabbinic tradition that God and his
angelic court do not sit in judgement on the New Year until the rabbinic court
has sanctified the month and declared that day the New Year (Chapter 6
n. 156).^52
In most of these sources, however, the emphasis is less on calendar ortho-
doxy (or on correctness of the calendar) than on rabbinic authority. Thus
when Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabban Gamaliel disagreed about whether the new
moon had been sighted, and consequently, about the date of the Day of
Atonement, it is on the strength of the authority of R. Gamaliel’s court, not
on the inherent merits of his calendrical opinion, that his opponent was forced
to submit to his authority and to desecrate in public what he himself consid-
ered to be the true date. As the Mishnah explicitly says, whether the date was
right or wrong, the court’s decision had to be obeyed; the issue was not the
orthodoxy of the calendar, but only the authority of R. Gamaliel.^53 Most
importantly, although the Mishnah implies that in calendar matters it was
particularly important to obey the rabbinic court, there is no suggestion that
R. Yehoshua’s dates were intrinsically wrong, or that, had he persisted and
observed his own dates, he would have been guilty of sectarianism or heresy.^54
(^52) See more generally Stern (2001) 232–75.
(^53) mRH2: 9. See further above, n. 35. The story is cast in the early 2nd c.CE.
(^54) Note also that practices attributed in early rabbinic literature to theminim—a term usually
referring to a type of Jews and translated, a little unsatisfactorily, as‘heretics’(but by no means
necessarily Christian)—never relate to how the calendar is reckoned: see e.g.mBerakhot9: 5,
mMegillah4: 8.
378 Calendars in Antiquity