He was known for being healthy and beautiful, and reportedly lived more than one hundred years. The Talmud relates of him: "He that wishes to see the beauty of Rabbi Johanan, let him bring a silver chalice when it comes out of the silversmith's refinery, and let him fill it with the red kernels of a pomegranate, and then let him adorn the chalice around its brim with red roses, and then place it between the sunlight and the shade. The emanating radiance would be somewhat similar to the beauty of Rabbi Johanan." He was accustomed to sit outside the mikveh in the evening, saying: "Let the daughters of Israel look at me when they come up from the mikveh and their children will be as handsome as I am and they will learn Torah like I do." He then said a special verse so no jealousy or haughtiness would result from this. Death On his death-bed he ordered that he should be dressed neither in white nor in black, but in scarlet, so that on awaking after death he would not feel out of place in the company either of the pious or of the wicked. Eleazar ben Pedat succeeded Yohanan as head of the Tiberias school. Teaching He thoroughly analyzed the Mishnah, discovering many contradictory decisions in it. These he sought to reconcile; but as that could not always be done, he perforce rejected many laws adopted in the Mishnah, preferring the authority of baraitas taught by his former masters Hiyya and Hoshaiah. He established broad rules that apply in many cases; for example, he held that the halakha always follows a s'tam mishnah (an undisputed anonymous mishnah), and he had rules for which tanna ("Mishnah teacher") to follow in cases of dispute. Some such rules had been formulated by others, but had proved insufficient. Johanan therefore elaborated and supplemented them, and most of his rules are to this day considered authoritative. All of them were collected in the geonic period in the "Order of the Tannaim and Amoraim" (סדר תנאים ואמוראים; abridged, סתו"א), which is ascribed to Naashon b. Zadok of the ninth century. Later Talmudists, seeing that Johanan's name appears more frequently in the Gemara than anyone else's, ascribed to him the compilation of the Jerusalem Talmud. Modern scholars believe that he began the compilation, which, however, was not completed until over a century after him.