priestly caste, the desecration
of the Temple, the building of the Temple at Leontopolis, the perception
brought about by the spiritualising of religion in the empire of
Alexander the Great, that no blood of beast can be a means of
reconciling God--all these circumstances must have been absolutely
dangerous and fatal, both to the local centralisation of worship, and to
the statutory sacrificial system. The proclamation of Jesus (and of
Stephen) as to the overthrow of the Temple, is therefore no absolutely
new thing, nor is the fact that Judaism fell back upon the law and the
Messianic hope, a mere result of the destruction of the Temple. This
change was rather prepared by the inner development. Whatever point in
the preaching of Jesus we may fix on, we shall find, that--apart from
the writings of the Prophets and the Psalms, which originated in the
Greek Maccabean periods--parallels can be found only in Pharisaism, but
at the same time that the sharpest contrasts must issue from it.
Talmudic Judaism is not in every respect the genuine continuance of
Pharisaic Judaism, but a product of the decay which attests that the
rejection of Jesus by the spiritual leaders of the people had deprived
the nation, and even the Virtuosi of Religion of their best part (see
for this the expositions of Kuenen "Judaismus und Christenthum", in his
(Hibbert) lectures on national religions and world religions). The ever
recurring attempts to deduce the origin of Christianity from Hellenism,
or even from the Roman Greek culture, are there also rightly, briefly
and tersely rejected. Also the hypotheses, which either entirely
eliminate the person of Jesus or make him an Essene, or subordinate him
to the person of Paul, may be regarded as definitively settled. Those
who think they can ascertain the origin of Christian religion from the
origin of Christian Theology will, indeed, always think of Hellenism:
Paul will eclipse the person of Jesus with those who believe that a
religion for the world must be born with a universalistic doctrine.
Finally, Essenism will continue in authority with those who see in the
position of indifference which Jesus took to the Temple worship, the
main thing, and who, besides, create for themselves an "Essenism of
their own finding." Hellenism, and also Essenism, can of course indicate
to the historian some of the conditions by which the appearance of Jesus
was prepared and rendered possible; but they explain only the
po