deal of pains to show that the question thus raised is of no importance in relation to the main issue.[108] If Gadara was, as I maintain it was, a city of the Decapolis, Hellenistic in constitution and containing a predominantly Gentile population, my case is superabundantly fortified.  On the other hand, if the hypothesis that Gadara was under Jewish government, which Mr. Gladstone seems sometimes to defend and sometimes to give up, were accepted, my case would be nowise weakened.  At any rate, Gadara was not included within the jurisdiction of the tetrach of Galilee; if it had been, the Galileans who crossed over the lake to Gadara had no official status; and they had no more civil right to punish law-breakers than any other strangers.

In my turn, however, I may remark that there is a “point” which appears to have escaped Mr. Gladstone’s notice.  And that is somewhat unfortunate, because his whole argument turns upon it.  Mr. Gladstone assumes, as a matter of course, that pig-keeping was an offence against the “Law of Moses”; and, therefore, that Jews who kept pigs were as much liable to legal pains and penalties as Englishmen who smuggle brandy ("Impregnable Rock,” p. 274).

There can be no doubt that, according to the Law, as it is defined in the Pentateuch, the pig was an “unclean” animal, and that pork was a forbidden article of diet.  Moreover, since pigs are hardly likely to be kept for the mere love of those unsavoury animals, pig-owning, or swine-herding, must have been, and evidently was, regarded as a suspicious and degrading occupation by strict Jews, in the first century A.D.  But I should like to know on what provision of the Mosaic Law, as it is laid down in the Pentateuch, Mr. Gladstone bases the assumption, which is essential to his case, that the possession of pigs and the calling of a swineherd were actually illegal.  The inquiry was put to me the other day; and, as I could not answer it, I turned up the article “Schwein” in Riehm’s standard “Handwoerterbuch,” for help out of my difficulty; but unfortunately without success.  After speaking of the martyrdom which the Jews, under Antiochus Epiphanes, preferred to eating pork, the writer proceeds:—­

It may be, nevertheless, that the practice of keeping pigs may have found its way into Palestine in the Graeco-Roman time, in consequence of the great increase of the non-Jewish population; yet there is no evidence of it in the New Testament; the great herd of swine, 2,000 in number, mentioned in the narrative of the possessed, was feeding in the territory of Gadara, which belonged to the Decapolis; and the prodigal son became a swineherd with the native of a far country into which he had wandered; in neither of these cases is there reason for thinking that the possessors of these herds were Jews.[109]

Having failed in my search, so far, I took up the next book of reference at hand, Kitto’s “Cyclopaedia” (vol. iii. 1876).  There, under “Swine,”