God Himself announced that Rabbi Joshua was right.

Thus there was neither complete fluidity of doctrine nor complete rigidity
of conduct. There was freedom of conduct within the law, and there was
law within freedom of doctrine.

But Dr. Emil Hirsch puts the case fairly when he says: 'In the
same sense as Christianity or Islam, Judaism cannot be credited with
Articles of Faith. Many attempts have indeed been made at systematising
and reducing to a fixed phraseology and sequence the contents of the
Jewish religion. But these have always lacked the one essential element:
authoritative sanction on the part of a supreme ecclesiastical body'
(_Jewish Encyclopedia_, ii. 148).

Since the epoch of the Great Sanhedrin, there has been no central
authority recognised throughout Jewry. The Jewish organisation has long
been congregational. Since the fourth century there has been no body
with any jurisdiction over the mass of Jews. At that date the Calendar
was fixed by astronomical calculations. The Patriarch, in Babylon,
thereby voluntarily abandoned the hold he had previously had over the
scattered Jews, for it was no longer the fiat of the Patriarch that
settled the dates of the Festivals. While there was something like a
central authority, the Canon of Scripture had been fixed by Synods, but
there is no record of any attempt to promulgate articles of faith. During
the revolt against Hadrian an Assembly of Rabbis was held at Lydda. It was
then decided that a Jew must yield his life rather than accept safety from
the Roman power, if such conformity involved one of the three offences:
idolatry, murder, and unchastity (including, incest and adultery). But
while this decision throws a favourable light on the Rabbinic theory of
life, it can in no sense be called a fixation of a creed. There were