MYTH OF THE COUNCIL AT JAMNIA
Following the loss of the Jewish temple and its cultus, Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai requested permission from the Romans to establish a religious academy at Jamnia. … For more than a century, many scholars have taught that the Jews officially closed the third part of their biblical canon at the Council of Jamnia. … It is unlikely, however, that the Jewish religious leaders who gathered together (there was no council as such) at Jamnia around 90 c.e. made a final or binding decision about their biblical canon. … The Jewish religious teachers met at Jamnia after the destruction of Jerusalem to clarify how a religious faith that was once based on a temple and sacrificial cult could survive without these institutions. …
A Jamnia council decision is attractive, since no other prior time can be identified when a significant decision was made about the scope of the Hebrew biblical canon by the rabbinic teachers. No evidence, however, supports any formal action taken at Jamnia, and this view is largely abandoned today. The scope of the Hebrew biblical canon within Judaism was more likely settled in the second century c.e., and possibly even later than that. …
That the so-called Council of Jamnia did not stabilize the canon of the hb/ot is also seen in the widespread debate throughout the rabbinic period (i.e., second to sixth centuries C.E.) whether certain writings "deified the hands," a rabbinic designation for a canonical text.[1]
Neither Josephus nor ancient Christian literature knows anything of a Council of Jamnia or of a closing of the canon of scripture at its sessions.[2]
Books were discussed at Jamnia, but they were also discussed at least once a generation before and several times long after the Jamnia period. [Newman] saw the Jamnia rabbis testing a status quo which had existed beyond memory. "But no text of any specific decision has come down to us (nor, apparently, even to Akiba and his students)." [3]
Frank M. Cross designates the Council of Jamnia "a common and somewhat misleading designation of a particular session of the rabbinic academy (or court) at Yabneh. … Recent sifting of the rabbinic evidence makes clear that in the proceedings at the academy of Yabneh the Rabbis did not fix the canon, but at most discussed marginal books, notably Ecclesiastes (Qohelet) and the Song of Songs. . . . Moreover, it must be insisted that the proceedings at Yabneh were not a 'council,' certainly not in the late ecclesiastical sense.[4]