Preface to 16. The View From Prindle's Head
A quote from Francis Legge's Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity from 330 BC to 330 AD. pp.162-163.
From this dream of universal dominion, nothing seemed able to arouse the poorer Jews. In vain did the Sadducees, who comprised those of the nation who had become rich either by trading with the Gentiles or by dependence on the luxurious Jewish Court, try to persuade the people that they had better make the best of the Hellenist cu...lture thrust upon them than try to arrest its progress by fighting against powers that would crush them like glass when once sufficiently provoked. In vain did the Syrian Empire, warned by the mistakes of Antiochus Epiphanes in Hellenizing the Jews against their will, accord them the largest possible religious liberty and even acknowledge their right to self-government in exchange for tribute. When the Romans, whom, according to their own account, they had called in to protect them against their Syrian overlords, destroyed once for all their chance of remaining an independent state, they not only gave the Jews the fullest liberty to practise their own religion, but set over them first a vassal king and then tetrarchs of Semitic blood who might be supposed to moderate the too pronouncedly Western ideas of the Roman governor of Syria. But these concessions were no more effective in inducing the Jews to settle down quietly as the peaceful tributaries of a great empire than had been the severities of Antiochus. They seized every opportunity to revolt, every time with the accompaniment of horrible atrocities committed upon those unfortunate Gentiles who for a moment fell into their power, until, some sixty years after the Destruction of the Temple by Titus, Hadrian had to wage against them the awful war of extermination which extinguished their nationality for ever. At the Fair of the Terebinth, when every able-bodied Jew left alive in Palestine was sold into slavery, the nation must have realized at last the vanity of its dream
A quote from Francis Legge's Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity from 330 BC to 330 AD. pp.162-163.
From this dream of universal dominion, nothing seemed able to arouse the poorer Jews. In vain did the Sadducees, who comprised those of the nation who had become rich either by trading with the Gentiles or by dependence on the luxurious Jewish Court, try to persuade the people that they had better make the best of the Hellenist cu...lture thrust upon them than try to arrest its progress by fighting against powers that would crush them like glass when once sufficiently provoked. In vain did the Syrian Empire, warned by the mistakes of Antiochus Epiphanes in Hellenizing the Jews against their will, accord them the largest possible religious liberty and even acknowledge their right to self-government in exchange for tribute. When the Romans, whom, according to their own account, they had called in to protect them against their Syrian overlords, destroyed once for all their chance of remaining an independent state, they not only gave the Jews the fullest liberty to practise their own religion, but set over them first a vassal king and then tetrarchs of Semitic blood who might be supposed to moderate the too pronouncedly Western ideas of the Roman governor of Syria. But these concessions were no more effective in inducing the Jews to settle down quietly as the peaceful tributaries of a great empire than had been the severities of Antiochus. They seized every opportunity to revolt, every time with the accompaniment of horrible atrocities committed upon those unfortunate Gentiles who for a moment fell into their power, until, some sixty years after the Destruction of the Temple by Titus, Hadrian had to wage against them the awful war of extermination which extinguished their nationality for ever. At the Fair of the Terebinth, when every able-bodied Jew left alive in Palestine was sold into slavery, the nation must have realized at last the vanity of its dream
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