dicted Saviour was to work, in proof of his Divine authority; executing his office at the precise time prefixed near five hundred years before by the prophet Daniel; and repeatedly receiving in the sight and hearing of the people special tokens, in attestation of his Messiahship, from God his Father; He was ignominiously rejected by the Jewish nation. One general cause of offence was his appearance in that humble station, which the prophet Isaiah had expressly* foretold: while the ambitious and prejudiced minds of the Jews were blindly attached to the idea of a temporal Messiah, who should expel every foreign enemy from the land of Canaan, and reign in triumph on the throne of Jerusalem. Among the higher classes, the principal enemies of Christ were the Scribes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Herodians. The Scribes, a proud and corrupt set of men, were the established teachers and expounders of the Mosaic law. The Pharisees were a religious sect, who distorted that law from its genuine import by the traditional interpretations and accessions with which they loaded it; and under the mask of much outward and ceremonial sanctity disguised the utmost depravity of heart and conduct. The Sadducees held as their distinguishing tenet, that there was to be no future existence; and were, as might be expected, practically regardless of virtue in this life. The Herodians were, as their name intimates, persons devoted to the interests of Herod; and formed a political faction rather than a religious party. These jarring sects, enraged at the boldness and severity with which Christ reproved their sins, and dreading from his influence the ruin of their power, co-operated for his destruction.

* Isaiah, liii.

The common people at first received him with joy: but afterwards, according to the usual instability of popular favour, they listened to the calumnious arti fices of his persecutors, and at length aided with vehement and clamorous importunity the demand of their superiors for his crucifixion. With this demand Pilate, the Roman governor, though avowing his conviction of the perfect innocence of Christ, and vainly attempting by washing his hands in the presence of the multitude to transfer the whole guilt of that innocent blood from himself to them; while they blasphemously cried out, "His blood be on us and on our children;" flagitiously complied. Christ was nailed to the cross; and, while the earth quaked, and the heavens were darkened, and the beholders stood aghast with astonishment and terror, yielded up his life as the great atoning sacrifice for the sins of the human

race.

The measure of Jewish guilt was now full; and the vengeance of Heaven, of which that infatuated people had been mercifully forewarned by the prophets and by Christ himself, was poured out upon them; and poured out by the hands of that very nation, whom they had instigated to cut off the Messiah. Inflamed by the oppression of the Roman governors, they broke out into open rebellion against Florus, in the reign of Nero. Cestius, and afterwards Vespasian, took many cities, and slaughtered immense. multitudes of the Jews. At length, at the time of the passover, in the seventy-first year of the Christian era, when the principal part of the nation, assembled from many different countries for the purpose of celebrating that solemity, were cooped up, as victims prepared for slaughter, within the walls of Jerusalem, Titus encamped his army before that devoted city.

F

Unconscious that he was exactly fulfilling the predictions of Christ *, he surrounded the whole city with an uninterrupted bulwark, nearly five miles in circuit. The miseries which the Jews then sustained from famine, from pestilence, from the assaults of the Romans, and from the implacable fury of contending in horror every parties among themselves, far surpass account of any siege in the records of the world.† The city was taken, burned to the ground, and razed from its foundations. Eleven hundred thousand Jews perished during the siege. Of ninety-seven thousand captives, some were reserved to grace the triumphal return of Titus to Rome; and the rest were dispersed as slaves or as criminals throughout the empire. A subsequent revolt, in the reign of Adrian, A. D. 134, carried on with the most furious outrages by the Jews, great numbers of whom had again collected in their native land, was followed by the destruction of their leader Barchocheba, who averred himself to be the Messiah, by the slaughter of more than five hundred thousand of his adherents, by the sale of additional multitudes, and by the entire expulsion of the whole nation from Judæa. From that day to the present, during a period of nearly seventeen centuries, they have had no national existence. They have continued, according to the unfailing truth of prophecy, "scattered among all people from one end of the earth unto the other; an astonishment, a proverb, and a by-word among all nations."+

*Luke, xix. 43.

+ See a very striking summary of the events of these “days of vengeance," and of the completion of every particular in the prophecies of Christ respecting the destruction of Jerusalem, in Arch"Observations on our Lord's Conduct. bishop Newcome's

2d edit. 8vo. pp. 203-276.

Deut. xxviii. 37. 64.

To give a detailed narrative of their situation, so far as it has been ascertained, in the principal countries in which they have sojourned during their dispersion, would extend this part of the present work to a disproportionate size. Yet a summary account of their history throughout that period may be acceptable, and perhaps useful, to the reader. In collecting it I shall notice those events only which are in themselves important, and are also recorded by sufficient authority. The Jewish writers of later times, in their zeal to magnify the credit of their own nation, abound in such exaggerated and fabulous recitals, such extravagant violations of historical and chronological truth, that on their unsupported testimony little reliance is to be placed.

During the continuance of the Roman empire in the West, the Jews experienced from different emperors varying degrees of oppression or forbearance: and at some times indulged their rooted inveteracy against the Christians in tumultuous and sanguinary outrages; at others, endured many grievous cruelties from the spirit of bigotry and retaliation. In the reign of Constantine, they essentially contributed to the bloody persecution in Persia, which almost overwhelmed the faith of Christ in that country. In the reign of his son Constans, the Jews in Palestine, the region whither in the face of penal laws they were continually crowding, broke forth at Diocæsarea into a violent insurrection; which terminated in the destruction of that city by the Romans, and in the revival and augmentation of severe laws against the Jews. From Julian, who equalled them in enmity

For full information consult Basnage's Histoire des Juifs; and the Modern Universal History, 8vo. vol. 13th.

towards the Christians, they received many marks of favour. His abortive endeavours to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem will be noticed hereafter. The treatment which they experienced in Italy under the dominion of the Ostrogoths, and of the Lombards, was not materially different from that to which they had been accustomed, while Rome had not yet bowed to a foreign yoke.

During the course of these events, the Jews appear to have been confirmed by the destruction of their national polity, and other causes, in their attachment to the oral traditions and unauthorized decisions of their Rabbies; which in the days of our Saviour possessed a decided ascendancy over the written law, and since the dispersion had been studied with encreasing ardour in the Jewish academies established partly in Palestine, partly in the territories of the Persian monarch. Towards the conclusion of the second century, and probably about A. D. 180, these traditions and decisions were collected, systematically arranged, and published, by Rabbi Judah, who presided upwards of forty years with uncontrouled authority, and with the title of Patriarch, over the great academy at Tiberias. His work, entitled the Mishna, soon acquired and still retains universal celebrity among the Jews. About fifty years afterwards, as some writers affirm, though in the opinion of others not until a much later period, Rabbi Jochanan, who also presided at Tiberias, wrote a Commentary on the Mishna, denominated the Jerusalem Talmud. The conciseness and obscurity of this Commentary gave occasion to another, composed by some Rabbies of the academy of Sora near Babylon, and entitled the Babylonish Talmud, or Gemara. Its date is variously placed: and by some