The Mishneh Torah ruled without showing its work. Maimonides distilled each law to a single formulation, named no authorities, cited no Talmudic passages and recorded no dissents, and in his introduction he explained why: the chain of argument was a burden the ordinary student could not carry, and the law itself, stated plainly, was what the Torah required a Jew to know. The reaction was immediate and lasting. Rabbi Abraham ben David of Posquieres, the Ravad, wrote glosses of sharp objection that are printed around the code to this day, protesting both individual rulings and the very method, since a law stated without its source could not be checked, weighed or argued with.
Critics feared the code would displace the study of the Talmud itself, a fear Maimonides' own stated ambition did little to calm. The controversy joined the wider Maimonidean disputes of the thirteenth century, which at their worst saw his philosophical writings burned. Yet the code's authority only grew. Later codifiers built upon its structure, the Shulchan Aruch drew on it as one of its three pillars, Yemenite communities accepted it as binding law, and centuries of commentators supplied the sources he omitted, so that the book intended to end discussion became one of the most discussed books in Jewish history.