ings. And this was all done in the story of Lazarus in such a way that it might surround every grave with illusions for centuries. For who, while tears are falling, will pause to handle the wreaths, and find whether they are genuine? Who, while the service is proceeding, will analyze the details, and ask whether it is possible that the good Jesus could have practiced such deception and assumed such theatrical attitudes?*

The indifference of the fourth Gospel to such moral considerations as those found in the Synoptics is so apostolic that I am inclined to place much of it nearer to the first century than I once supposed. Paul's rage against the "wisdom of this world," and his fulminations against the learned because they are not "called," are fully adopted by the Johannine Christ, who says to the blind man whose eyes he had opened, and who was worshipping him: "For judgment came I into this world, that they that see not may see, and they that see may become blind." And these ideas are represented in a legend related in the book of Acts which is really allegorical, though our translators have manipulated it into serious history.

A persecutor of Christians, on whom the spirit "came mightily," as on King Saul, so that he was a new "Saul among the prophets," sought to convert to his new faith a Roman Proconsul, Sergius Paul. But with this Consul was a learned man of the Jewish Wisdom School, Bar-Jesus Elymas,-i. e., Dr. Anti-Jesus Wise Man. Like Michael and Satan contending for the body

*Renan suggested that Jesus and his friends at Bethany arranged a pretended death and resurrection of Lazarus. This seems inconsistent with the absence of any allusion to it or to Lazarus in the Epistles, and also with the evident relation of the narrative to the parable. It looks more as if the parable of Lazarus and the rich man had been dramatized and the return of Lazarus from "Abraham's bosom" added. At every step in the narrative( John xi.) there is a suggestion of some old "mystery-play" fossilized into prosaic literalism.

of Moses, Prophet Saul and Anti-Jesus Wise Man contended for the Roman Paul's soul. Prophet Saul prevailed by calling Anti-Jesus Wise Man a child of the devil, and striking him blind. Thereupon Consul Paul believed, being "astonished at the teaching of the Lord." Whereupon Prophet Saul triumphantly carries off the Roman's name as a trophy.*

Beginning in this conclusive way, by striking human Wisdom sightless ("that they that see may become. blind," John ix. 39), the Anti-Wisdom propaganda, which began with identifying Wisdom with the serpent in Eden, passed on to inspire the Church Fathers who gloated over the eternal tortures of the poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome. Alas for the philosophers not in their graves, but in their cradles, or in the womb of the future! For torments are nearest "eternal" when they begin at once on earth.

One may readily understand how it was that personal traditions of Jesus and his teachings remained unwritten until his contemporaries were dead (although this may not have been the case with the suppressed "Gospel according to the Hebrews"); the hourly expected return of Christ rendered such memoirs unimportant until it became clear that the expectation was erroneous. The age of John, of whom Jesus was rumoured to have predicted survival till his return

*This is the genuine sense of the story in Acts xiii. There is no evidence in Paul's writings that he ever bore the name of Saul. Bar-Jesus has a double meaning,-"Son of Jesus" and "Obstruction of Jesus." The antithesis may have been suggested by the words of Pilate, in many ancient versions of Matt. xxvii. 16, 17: "Whether of the twain will ye that I release unto you? Jesus Bar Abbas, or Jesus that is called the Christ?" Elymas, commonly used as a proper name, means Wise Man. The word páɣot denotes Wise Men in Matt. ii. 1, where they bring gifts to the infant Christ, but the same word is made by translators to denote a "sorcerer" when the wise man is opposing Paul! Nobody named Sergius Paulus was known before the Consul of AD. 94, who must have been long enough dead for this legend to form before it was written.

(John xxi. 22), was stretched out to a mythical extent; he became an undying sleeper at Ephesus, and finally a pious "Wandering Jew"; but when at length such fables lost their strength, some imaginative impersonator brought forth an apocalyptic bequest of John postponing the second advent a thousand years. The conventicles had thus no resource but to turn into orthodoxy the heresy of Hymenous and Alexander, for which Paul delivered them over to Satan, that the resurrection occurs at death; to collect the traditional sayings of Jesus; and to adapt these to the new situation. A thousand years later, when the expected catastrophe did not occur, the substantial churches and cathedrals were built, as the Gospels had been built after the firstcentury disappointment.

These Gospels contain things from which some of the real teachings of the wise man of Nazareth may be fairly conjectured. That the synoptical records are palimpsests, though denied by the prudent, is a truth felt by the unsophisticated who, in their use of such words as "Christian" and "a Christian spirit," quite ignore the fearful anathemas and damnatory language ascribed to Jesus.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE LAST SOLOMON.

Every race has a pride in its great men which ultimately prevails over any pious taboo imposed on them in life or by tradition. Some years ago it was announced that a German scholar was about to publish proofs that Jesus was not of the Hebrew race, and while Christendom showed little concern, all Israel sat upon that German almost furiously. It is an old story. Banished Buddha becomes an avatar of Vishnu, and his image now appears in India beside Jagenath. For the heresiarch must be adapted before adoption. So Solomon returns as a preacher of orthodox Jahvism, in the "Wisdom of Solomon," but so rigid had been the taboo in his case that the writer did not venture to insert the name of so famous a liberal and secularist.

That was about the first year of our era. But presently we hear about the "Son of David." Was that because of David himself? Interest in David had so receded that in the "Wisdom of Solomon" the resuscitated Wise Man barely alludes (once) to his "father's seat." Was it because of any popular interest in the legendary throne or house of David? That old "covenant" is not alluded to by the resuscitated monarch, and in the apostolic writings nothing is said about it. In the Gospels the title "Son of David" is generally connected with certain alleged miracles of Jesus, which recalled legends of Solomon, and it is only in the ac

count of the entry into Jerusalem that it carries any connotation of royalty corresponding to the genealogies afterwards elaborated. Unless these narratives are accepted as historical they must be regarded as phenomena, and, taken in connection with what may be reasonably regarded as genuine teachings of Jesus, the phenomena point to a probability that he had reawakened interest in the Wise Man's teachings, and that this interest, by a compromise with Jahvist prejudices, coined the expression "Son of David" as an alias of Solomon.

However this may be, it appears certain that there was in the teachings of Jesus some substantial recovery of the ancient and unconverted Solomon, the proverbial philosopher, the man of the world. How much Jesus may have said to revive interest in Solomon, and how many of his secular utterances have been hidden in the grave of his humanity, can only be conjectured; but there are two direct sayings concerning Solomon ascribed to him which may be regarded as the only unreserved tributes to the Wise Man that had ever been uttered since his idealization in Chronicles. And our own Protestant Jahvism has tried so hard to manipulate these tributes into partial disparagements that we may easily imagine early Christian Jahvism destroying similar testimonies altogether.

A. S. V. Luke xi. 31: “The Queen of the South shall rise up in judgment with the men of this generation and condemn them: for she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold a greater than Solomon is here."

True rendering: "The Queen of the South shall stand in the judgment with the men of this [Abra