In chapter 11 we recognised how important an element the Jewish colonists were in the cities which the

Seleucid kings founded or re -founded as strongholds of their power, and as centres of the Graeco-Asiatic

civilisation amid the dreary ocean of Oriental monotony; and we also saw what were the reasons which

made them trusty supporters of the Seleucid regime and specially useful to counterbalance the Greek

element in those cities, all the more trusty and useful because they were unpopular, and even hated by their

Considering how important a part the Jewish Christians must have played in the Asian Churches (Acts

18:20, 19:1-8, 20:21), it is necessary to examine their position in the cities more closely. The point of view

taken in the Apocalypse is that the Christians were the true Jews (just as they constitute the real element in

the city where they dwell), and the national Jews who clung to the old Hebrew ideas were not the true Jews

but merely the synagogue of Satan. The Palestinian Jew who could express such a view had travelled far

along the Pauline path of development.

The Jews were too clever for their fellow-townsmen. They regarded with supreme contempt the gross

obscene ritual and the vulgar superstitions of their neighbours; but many of them were ready to turn those

superstitions to their own profit; and a species of magic and soothsaying, a sort of syncretism of Hebrew

and pagan religious ideas, afforded a popular and lucrative occupation to the sons of Sceva in Ephesus and

to many another Jew throughout the Asiatic Greek cities. It was p robably an art of this kind that was

practised in the Chaldean's holy precinct at Thyatira, which is mentioned in an inscription of the Roman

period (see chapter 23).

There were among those Jews, of course, persons of every moral class, from the destined prophet, Saul of

Tarsus, whose eyes were fixed on the spiritual future of his people, down to the lowest Jew who traded on

the superstitions and vices of those pagan dogs whom he despised and abhorred, while he ministered to the

excesses from which in his own person he held aloof. But among them all there was, in contrast to the pagan

population around them, a certain unity of feeling and aspiration bred in them by their religion, their holy

books, the Sabbath meetings and the weekly lessons and exhortations, the home training and the annual

family meal of the Passover. These made an environment which exercised a strong influence even on the

most unworthy.

Of their numbers we can form no estimate, but they were very great. In preparing for the final struggle in

western Asia Minor about 210 BC, Antiochus III moved 2,000 Jewish families from Babylonia into Lydia and

Phrygia, and that was a single act of one king, whose predecessors and successors carried out the same

policy on a similar scale. The statistics which Cicero gives, when he describes how a Roman Governor in 66

BC arrested the half-shekel tribute which the Jews sent to Jerusalem, show a very large Jewish population in

Phrygia and a large Jewish population in Lydia.

Except in a few such references history is silent about that great Jewish population of Asia Minor. But

inscriptions are now slowly revealing, by here a trace and there a trace, that nobles and officers under the

Roman Empire who have all the outward appearance of ordinary Roman provincial citizens were really part of

the Phrygian Jewish population. The original Jews of Asia Minor seem to have perished entirely, for the

Turkish Jews of the present day are Spanish-speaking Jews, whose ancestors were expelled from Spain by

the most famous of Spanish sovereigns and sheltered in Turkey by Mohammedan Sultans. In the dearth of

evidence one can only speculate as to their fate. Reasons have elsewhere been stated showing that a

considerable part of that original Jewish population adopted Christianity, and thus lost their isolation and

cohesion, and became merged in the Christian Empire of the fourth and following centuries after Christ.