In this talk I would like to offer a fresh take on the famous chain of transmission in Avot 1-2. I will argue, contrary to most previous scholarship that this text does not have any polemical agenda against another group. Furthermore, to the extent to which this text grants authority to any of the individuals mentioned in the list, this is entirely secondary. Rather, the primary purpose of this text is to reassure members, or potential members of the Rabbinic community regarding doubts about the integrity of the received tradition in light of the fact that there is no record or communal memory of the existence of a rabbinic community of scholars prior to the late Second Temple period. Unlike the succession lists in classical and early Christian sources, the list of individuals and pairs in Avot, represent the exception rather than the norm. The norm was a community of scholars a such that of the tannaim and those imagined to have existed in the Biblical period. This has very significant implications for the overall ideology of the text. In order to develop this argument, I will reexamine the terms זקנים and אנשי כנסת הגדולה that appear in the first Mishnah of the tractate.
