The Church Fathers · c. 500; edited into the following centuries
The Babylonian Talmud
Talmud Bavli
The academies of Sura and Pumbedita
What it is
The Mishnah with centuries of Babylonian debate wrapped around it, digressing without warning from a rule about a lost ox into medicine, dream interpretation, biography, or a story about God losing an argument to a majority of rabbis.
Why it lasted
The central text of Judaism from this point on, and the one Christians spent the Middle Ages condemning, censoring, and publicly burning without generally having read. Its handful of passages about Jesus were the pretext for the Paris trial of 1240.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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