ted in deducing righteousness from a punctilious observance of
numerous particular commandments, because in so doing they became
self-satisfied, that is, irreligious, and because in belonging to
Abraham they thought they had a claim of right on God). For all that, so
far as a historical understanding of the activity of Jesus is at all
possible, it is to be obtained from the soil of Pharisaism, as the
Pharisees were those who cherished and developed the Messianic
expectations, and because, along with their care for the Thora, they
sought also to preserve, in their own way, the prophetic inheritance. If
everything does not deceive us, there were already contained in the
Pharisaic theology of the age, speculations which were fitted to modify
considerably the narrow view of history, and to prepare for
universalism. The very men who tithed mint, anise and cummin, who kept
their cups and dishes outwardly clean, who, hedging round the Thora,
attempted to hedge round the people, spoke also of the sum total of the
law. They made room in their theology for new ideas which are partly to
be described as advances, and on the other hand, they have already
pondered the question even in relation to the law, whether submission to
its main contents was not sufficient for being numbered among the people
of the covenant (see Renan: _Paul_). In particular the whole sacrificial
system, which Jesus also essentially ignored, was therewith thrust into
the background. Baldensperger (Selbstbewusstsein Jesu. p. 46) justly
says. "There lie before us definite marks that the certainty of the
nearness of God in the Temple (from the time of the Maccabees) begins to
waver, and the efficacy of the temple institutions to be called in
question. Its recent desecration by the Romans, appears to the author of
the Psalms of Solomon (II. 2) as a kind of Divine requital for the sons
of Israel, themselves having been guilty of so grossly profaning the
sacrificial gifts. Enoch calls the shewbread of the second Temple
polluted and unclean. There had crept in among the pious a feeling of
the insufficiency of their worship, and from this side the Essenic
schism will certainly represent only the open outbreak of a disease
which had already begun to gnaw secretly at the religious life of the
nation": see here the excellent explanations of the origin of Essenism
in Lucius (Essenism 75 ff. 109 ff.) The spread of Judaism in the world,
the secularization and apostacy of the