Who wrote the Zohar, and when?

2 positions · no single answer

Position A · held by The Castilian kabbalists and most of the Jewish world afterward

Ancient tradition of Simeon bar Yohai

The text would preserve second-century teachings, which gave it authority comparable to the Mishnah and the Talmud.

Rests on: p. 205

Reads the same page as : the same source, different readings.

Where the debate comes up

Statements tied to the debate

The Zohar ('Book of Splendor'), Jewish mysticism's most influential single work, emerged around 1290 from this circle of Castilian kabbalists. Moses de León played the leading part in writing and circulating it, a mystical homily on the Pentateuch written in archaic Aramaic.
The Castilian kabbalists claimed that the text kept a tradition reaching to the second-century circle of Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai and his students. Although certain critical spirits doubted the work's ancient pedigree, it won broad acceptance across the Jewish world as a source of divinely inspired truth, as authoritative as the Mishnah or the Talmud.