History is writing the verdict

History has left open the question of whether the rabbinic takeover of the Jewish people in the aftermath of the Temple's destruction was an act of patriotism or an act of hooliganism. Was Reb Yehuda haNassi's becoming, under Rome's authority and consent, the Jewish people's political as well as spiritual leader an act of self-sacrifice or an act of self-service? 

How the rabbinate relates to the reinstatement of political autonomy in the Messianic era will be key to how history will answer that question. If the rabbinate yields to the political superiority of the Jewish people's secular rulers, then Reb Yehuda haNassi will be seen as a savior of the Jewish state; if the rabbinate opposes the political superiority of the Jewish people's secular rulers and insists on their own political priority as, say, an expression of Daat Torah, then history will deem Reb Yehuda haNassi as a usurper of the Jewish state, and the halakhic system he erected will go down as a great failure of the Jewish people, from whose clutches the Jewish people will have been fortunate ultimately to have escaped albeit at the cost of the murder of one third of their number. 

The only function of a renewed Sanhedrin should be to dismantle halakha in favor of something like mishpat haTorah, and then to disband.