e Hebrew or Chaldaean, and later Cabalists frequently put down Joshua
or Jesus in the place of Metathron.

Those who believe that Acher's dualism of the Deity was the Persian
_Ormuzd_ and _Ahriman_, hence a good and an evil principle, and that
Metathron never was an evil demon, are as decidedly mistaken as those
who believe that Paul had more than one God. Paul's Son of God and
Acher's Metathron are the same central figure before the throne of God,
and the two authors are identical.

In that world of secret thoughts Paul discovered the harmonization of
discordant speculations and the remedy for all existing evils. "The
world must be regenerated by a new religion," was his great ideal. The
ancient religions and the philosophies have produced the corruption
which rages universally. They must be swept away. Society must be
reconstructed on a new basis, and this basis is in the theology and
ethics of Israel, separated and liberated from their climatical and
national limitations, their peculiar Jewish garb. There was no hope
left of saving the Jewish nationality and political organization from
the hands of omnipotent Rome, which swallowed and neutralized kingdoms
and nations with wonderful ease; nor was there any particular necessity
for it if society at large was reconstructed on the new basis. The
object of Jesus was to reconstruct the kingdom of heaven _in Israel_,
and he was crucified. All Israel had the same object in view, and stood
at the brink of dissolution. If the basis and principles of the kingdom
of heaven became the postulate of society at large, Jesus is resurrected
in the world, and Israel is saved, was Paul's main idea.

The Pharisean rabbis hoped that this would come to pass at some future
day, when, they maintained, all sacrifices and all laws would be
abolished, and all the nations of the earth would be one family, with
one God and one moral law. Paul seized upon the idea, and added to it
the simple dogma of Peter, "The Messiah has come." That hoped-for future
is now. God's promise to Abraham, "And there shall be blessed by thee,
and by thy seed, all the families of the earth," is to be fulfilled at
once. So he came forth from his mystical paradise an apostle of Jesus
and a new redeemer of Israel. He argued exactly as the Pharisean doctors
did who maintained that the Messiah would come when all mankind should
be guilty or all righteous. In the estimation of Paul, at that
particular time all mankind was