One Institution or Several, Described by Different Sources

Three separate ancient bodies of evidence describe something called a Sanhedrin, and they do not agree closely enough to be read as straightforward descriptions of one unchanging institution: the Mishnah presents an idealized rabbinic legal body organized around religious law, Josephus's historical narratives in the Antiquities of the Jews describe a council that looks considerably more political, convened at need rather than sitting continuously, and the Gospel accounts of the trial of Jesus describe a body whose composition and procedure again differ from both.

Whether these sources describe one continuously existing institution that changed character over time, two distinct bodies, a religious Sanhedrin and a separate political council, operating in the same period, or an institution whose nature genuinely shifted across the roughly two centuries these sources span, remains an open question among historians of the Second Temple period rather than a settled matter, and no single reconstruction commands full scholarly agreement. The Sanhedrin, in whatever form it actually took, ceased to function with the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and the end of Jewish political autonomy in Jerusalem that followed it. The name was later revived symbolically and without institutional continuity in 1807, when Napoleon convened an assembly of Jewish notables he styled a Grand Sanhedrin to ratify decisions of an earlier assembly on the civil status of French Jews, a modern political exercise rather than a restoration of the ancient court.