Yet, both honored their disagreements by requiring that students memorize and teach the alternative views as well as those opinions of their teachers. Eventually the disagreements became so profound, especially with the death of thousands of students at the hands of the Romans, that Rabbi Judah the Prince (Yehuda HaNasi, aka "Rebbe") collected all of the oral law into a survey of the laws known as the Mishna. Where opinions were in dispute, Rebbe quoted all views, usually by the name of the teacher known for the lesson. But Rebbe excluded some teachings and these were preserved into collections known as B'raisot, which continued to be memorized and passed down. Scholars then would study Rebbe's Mishna but compare those teachings with those of similar B'raisot in order to determine the law and to resolve disputes. Eventually, these studies and debates among the post-Mishnaic era rabbis were recorded in a form known as Gemara. So, using the Mishnas of Rebbe for structure and organization, the Mishna and Gemaras were combined into volumes of books known today as the Talmud. There is a Jerusalem Talmud that contains the teachings of the teachers in Israel, and a Babylonian Talmud, that was completed nearly 200 years later in the 6th century CE, containing (mostly) the debates of the rabbis of Babylonia. This latter version is the one most-often cited because of its breadth of analysis.

The Talmud also includes various other theological discussions among the rabbis including speculation about the Messianic Era, reward and punishment, and more, as well as Midrash -- stories that fill in the gaps of Biblical stories, often to teach lessons, rather than solely for their own truth -- and ancient explanations of resolutions to apparent conflicts in the books of the Bible. Because these teachers were closer in time to the events of the Bible and because they represented an unbroken chain of teaching, we consider their undisputed teachings to be authoritative.

Of course, this was not the end of the Oral law. Later scholars wrote commentaries or attempted codifications of the law. In addition, bodies of case law exist, called Responsa literature, in which we see how later rabbis applied the teachings of the Torah, written and oral, to cases that could not have anticipated by the scholars of the Gemara and Mishna eras.