and Second Maccabees did.

But, as Professor E. Schurer and others have rightly observed, there is not the slightest reason to think that

the Jews of Asia Minor ceased to be true to their religion and their nation in their own way: they really

commanded a wider outlook over the world and a more sane and balanced judgment on truth and right than

their brethren in Palestine. They looked to Jerusalem as their centre and the home of their religion. They

contributed to maintain the Temple with unfailing regularity. They went on pilgrimage in great numbers, and

the pilgrim ships sailed regularly every spring from the Aegean harbours for Caesaria. They were in

patriotism as truly Jews as the straitest Pharisee in Jerusalem. Doubtless Paul was far from being the only

Jew of Asia Minor who could boast that he was "a Pharisee sprung from Pharisees." Yet they were looked at

with disfavour by their more strait-laced Palestinian brethren, and regarded as little better than backsliders

and Sadducees. They had often, we may be sure, to assert their true Pharisaism and spirituality, like Paul, in

answer to the reproach of being mere Sadducees with their Greek speech and Greek ways.

In truth, there was great danger lest they should forget the essence of their Hebrew faith. Many of them

undoubtedly did so, though they still remained Jews in name and profession, and in contempt for the

Gentiles, even while they learn ed from them and cheated them and made money by pandering to their

superstitions. Many such Jews were, in very truth, only "a Synagogue of Satan" (as at Smyrna and

Philadelphia), but still they continued to be "a Synagogue." The national feeling was sound, though the

religious feeling was blunted and degraded.

In such surroundings was Saul of Tarsus brought up, a member of a family which moved both in the narrow

and exclusive circle of rich Tarsian citizenship and in the still more proud and aristocratic circle of Roman

citizenship. In his writings we see how familiar he was with the Graeco-Asiatic city life, and how readily

illustrations from Greek games and Roman soldiers and triumphs suggest themselves to him. In him are

brought to a focus all the experiences of the Jews of Asia Minor. He saw clearly from childhood that the

Maccabean reaction had not saved Palestine, that the Pharisaic policy of excluding Gentile civilisation and

manners had failed, and that the only possible salvation for his nation was to include the Gentiles by raising

them to the Jewish level in morality and religion. Judaism, he saw, must either lose its vigour amid the

sunshine of prosperity in Asia Minor, and gradually die, or it must conquer the Gentiles by assimilating

them. The issue was, however, certain. The promise of God had been given and could not fail. This new

prophet saw that the time of the Messiah and His conquest of the Gentiles had come.

And amid such surroundings the Jew that wrote the Apocalypse had lived for years . He had come much in

contact both with the Hellenist Jews of the Diaspora and with the Christianised pagans in the Asian cities.

He had been all the more influenced by those surroundings, because his whole outlook on the world had

long ago been modified by the ardent spirit of St. Paul. He was still bound to Jewish models and literary

forms in composing the Apocalypse; but sometimes the spirit and the thought which he expresses in those

forms are essentially non-Judaic though their wider character is concealed from most of the commentators

under the outward show of Judaism. His growing mind was on the point of bursting the last Jewish fetters

that still contained it, the reverence for traditional Jewish literary forms; it had not yet done so, but in the

composition of this book it was working towards full freedom.