may have been a third dark and evil
influence at work to undermine the Christians, for about this very time
the unscrupulous Pharisee Flavius Josephus had availed himself of the
intrigues of the palace to secure the liberation of some Jewish priests.
If, as seems certain, the Jews had it in their power during the reign of
Nero more or less to shape the whisper of the throne, does not
historical induction drive us to conclude with some confidence that the
suggestion of the Christians as scapegoats and victims came from them?
St. Clement says in his Epistle that the Christians suffered _through
jealousy_. _Whose_ jealousy? Who can tell what dark secrets lie veiled
under that suggestive word? Was Acte a Christian, and was Poppaea jealous
of her? That suggestion seems at once inadequate and improbable,
especially as Acte was not hurt. But there _was_ a deadly jealousy at
work against the new religion.

To the pagans, Christianity was but a religious
extravagance--contemptible, indeed, but otherwise insignificant. To the
Jews, on the other hand, it was an object of hatred, which never stopped
short of bloodshed when it possessed or could usurp the power, and
which, though long suppressed by circumstances, displayed itself in all
the intensity of its virulence during the brief spasm of the
dictatorship of Barcochebas. Christianity was hateful to the Jews on
_every_ ground. It nullified their law. It liberated all Gentiles from
the heavy yoke of that law, without thereby putting them on a lower
level. It even tended to render those who were born Jews indifferent to
the institutions of Mosaism. It was, as it were, a fatal revolt and
schism from within, more dangerous than any assault from without. And,
worse than all, it was by the Gentiles confounded with the Judaism which
was its bitterest antagonist. While it sheltered its existence under the
mantle of Judaism, as a _religio licita_, it drew down upon the religion
from whose bosom it sprang all the scorn and hatred which were attached
by the world to its own special tenets, for however much the Greeks and
Romans despised the Jews, they despised still more the belief that the
Lord and Saviour of the world was a crucified malefactor who had risen
from the dead.

I see in the proselytism of Poppaea, guided by Jewish malice, the only
adequate explanation of the first Christian persecution. Hers was the
jealousy which had goaded Nero to matricide; hers not improbably was the
i