es.(1397) Jesus
took up this message when John was imprisoned and finally killed by Herod
Antipas on account of his preachment against him.(1398) The life of Jesus
is wrapt in legends which may be reduced to the following historical
elements:(1399) The young Nazarene was of an altogether different
temperament from that of John the Baptist, the stern, Elijah-like preacher
in the wilderness;(1400) he manifested as preacher and as a healer of the
sick a profound love for, and tender sympathy with suffering humanity, a
trait especially fostered among the Essenes. This drew him toward that
class of people who were shunned as unclean by the uncompromising leaders
of the Pharisees, and also by the rigid brotherhoods of the Essenes, whose
chief object was to attain the highest degree of holiness by a life of
asceticism. His simple countrymen, the fishers and shepherds of Galilee,
on hearing his wise and humane teachings and seeing his miraculous cures,
considered him a prophet and a conqueror of the hosts of demons, the
workers of disease. In contrast to the learned Pharisees, he felt it to be
his calling to bring the good tidings of salvation to the poor and
outcast, to "seek the lost sheep of the house of Israel" and win them for
God. He soon found himself surrounded by a multitude of followers, who, on
a Passover pilgrimage to Jerusalem, induced him to announce himself as the
expected Messiah. He attracted the people in Jerusalem by his vehement
attacks upon the Sadducean hierarchy, which he threatened with the wrath
of heaven for its abuses, and also by his denunciations of the
self-sufficient Pharisean doctors of the law. Soon the crisis came when he
openly declared war against the avarice of the priests, who owned the
markets where the sacrificial fowl for the Temple were sold, overthrowing
the tables of the money-changers, and declaring the Temple to have become
"a den of robbers."(1401) The hierarchical council delivered him to
Pontius Pilatus, the Roman prefect, as an aspirant to the royal title of
Messiah, which in the eyes of the Romans meant a revolutionary leader. The
Roman soldiers crucified him and mocked him, calling him, "Jesus, the king
of the Jews."(1402)

The fate of crucifixion, however, did not end the career of Jesus, as it
had that of many other claimants to the Messiahship in those turbulent
times. His personality had impressed itself so deeply upon his followers
that they could not admit that he had gon