toward the year 80, Baptism was in strife with Christianity, especially in Asia Minor.  John the evangelist appears to combat it in an indirect manner.[5] One of the Sibylline[6] poems seems to proceed from this school.  As to the sects of Hemero-baptists, Baptists, and Elchasaites (Sabiens Mogtasila of the Arabian writers[7]), who, in the second century, filled Syria, Palestine and Babylonia, and whose representatives still exist in our days among the Mendaites, called “Christians of St. John;” they have the same origin as the movement of John the Baptist, rather than an authentic descent from John.  The true school of the latter, partly mixed with Christianity, became a small Christian heresy, and died out in obscurity.  John had foreseen distinctly the destiny of the two schools.  If he had yielded to a mean rivalry, he would to-day have been forgotten in the crowd of sectaries of his time.  By his self-abnegation he has attained a glorious and unique position in the religious pantheon of humanity.

[Footnote 1:  Acts xviii. 25, xix. 1-5.  Cf.  Epiph., Adv.  Haer., xxx. 16.]

[Footnote 2:  Vita, 2.]

[Footnote 3:  Would this be the Bounai who is reckoned by the Talmud (Bab., Sanhedrim, 43 a) amongst the disciples of Jesus?]

[Footnote 4:  Hegesippus, in Eusebius, H.E., ii. 23.]

[Footnote 5:  Gospel, i. 26, 33, iv. 2; 1st Epistle, v. 6.  Cf. Acts x. 47.]

[Footnote 6:  Book iv.  See especially v. 157, and following.]

[Footnote 7:  Sabiens is the Aramean equivalent of the word “Baptists.” Mogtasila has the same meaning in Arabic.]

CHAPTER XIII.

FIRST ATTEMPTS ON JERUSALEM.

Jesus, almost every year, went to Jerusalem for the feast of the passover.  The details of these journeys are little known, for the synoptics do not speak of them,[1] and the notes of the fourth Gospel are very confused on this point.[2] It was, it appears, in the year 31, and certainly after the death of John, that the most important of the visits of Jesus to Jerusalem took place.  Many of the disciples followed him.  Although Jesus attached from that time little value to the pilgrimage, he conformed himself to it in order not to wound Jewish opinion, with which he had not yet broken.  These journeys, moreover, were essential to his design; for he felt already that in order to play a leading part, he must go from Galilee, and attack Judaism in its stronghold, which was Jerusalem.

[Footnote 1:  They, however, imply them obscurely (Matt. xxiii. 37; Luke xiii. 34).  They knew as well as John the relation of Jesus with Joseph of Arimathea.  Luke even (x. 38-42) knew the family of Bethany.  Luke (ix. 51-54) has a vague idea of the system of the fourth Gospel respecting the journeys of Jesus.  Many discourses against the Pharisees and the Sadducees, said by the synoptics to have been delivered in Galilee, have scarcely any meaning, except as having been given at Jerusalem.  And again, the lapse of eight days is much too short to explain all that happened between the arrival of Jesus in that city and his death.]