Do you remember how throughout Jesus’ ministry He constantly criticized the Jewish leaders of His day for focusing on small, unimportant traditions?
As a reminder, this is a quote from Jesus in Matthew 15:3
3 Jesus replied, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?
Well, even after His death and resurrection, the Jews who refused to recognize Him as the Messiah continued to argue over little, unimportant traditions.
They argued about how far you could walk on a Sabbath Day. They argued about handwashing. They argued about the ritual cleanliness of the stems of fruit. They argued about everything.
Now, since Judaism spans all of human history, historians have broken up the different time periods of Judaism by different names to describe the main scholars of the time. One such time period stretches from about 10 AD to about 220 AD. This is the period of the Tannaim.
The word Tannaim is Aramaic for “the repeaters” or “the teachers” because these were the scholars who repeated all of the “Oral Law” that was passed down to them. What’s the “Oral Law”? It’s basically all of those Jewish traditions that Jesus had criticized the Jews for following so legalistically.
So, as the Tannaim continued to argue about Jewish traditions, the three Jewish Revolts broke out, and the Romans destroyed much of Judea. Since the Romans killed so many of these “repeaters” of the Oral Law, the remaining Tannaim began to fear that their traditions would be forgotten.
To solve this issue, around 200 AD, the last of the Tannaim wrote down all the traditions that they had memorized. This is what we call the Mishnah. This forms the basis for the Jewish Talmuds that are so important to modern Jews. Also, the word Mishnah is Hebrew for “the repetition”. And that makes perfect sense because it was written down by “the repeaters”.
That was a lot of information, but in summary, the word Tannaim means “repeaters” and describes the Jewish scholars from around 10-220 AD who focused heavily on Jewish traditions and who wrote down the Mishnah.