he", is worth noting; also Joel,
Blicke in die Religionsgeschichte zu Anfang des 2 Christl. Jahrhunderts,
1880-1883.

Sec. 5. _The Religious Conceptions and the Religious Philosophy of the
Hellenistic Jews, in their significance for the later formulation of the
Gospel_.

1. From the remains of the Jewish Alexandrian literature and the Jewish
Sibylline writings, also from the work of Josephus, and especially from
the great propaganda of Judaism in the Graeco-Roman world, we may gather
that there was a Judaism in the Diaspora, for the consciousness of which
the cultus and ceremonial law were of comparatively subordinate
importance; while the monotheistic worship of God, apart from images,
the doctrines of virtue and belief in a future reward beyond the grave,
stood in the foreground as its really essential marks. Converted
Gentiles were no longer everywhere required to be even circumcised; the
bath of purification was deemed sufficient. The Jewish religion here
appears transformed into a universal human ethic and a monotheistic
cosmology. For that reason, the idea of the Theocracy as well as the
Messianic hopes of the future faded away or were uprooted. The latter,
indeed, did not altogether pass away; but as the oracles of the Prophets
were made use of mainly for the purpose of proving the antiquity and
certainty of monotheistic belief, the thought of the future was
essentially exhausted in the expectation of the dissolution of the Roman
empire, the burning of the world, and the eternal recompense. The
specific Jewish element, however, stood out plainly in the assertion
that the Old Testament, and especially the books of Moses, were the
source of all true knowledge of God, and the sum total of all doctrines
of virtue for the nations, as well as in the connected assertion that
the religious and moral culture of the Greeks was derived from the Old
Testament, as the source from which the Greek Poets and Philosophers had
drawn their inspiration.[108]

These Jews and the Greeks converted by them formed, as it were, a
Judaism of a second order without law, i.e., ceremonial law, and with a
minimum of statutory regulations. This Judaism prepared the soil for the
Christianising of the Greeks, as well as for the genesis of a great
Gentile Church in the empire, free from the law; and this the more that,
as it seems, after the second destruction of Jerusalem, the punctilious
observance of the law[109] was imposed more strictly