ness during the reign of Domitian. A coin of Nerva, inscribed on the reverse FISCI JUDAICI CALUMNIA SUBLATA, while it commemorates its abolition, confesses its abuse.* But the discontent of the Jewish people was too deeply seated to be removed by a slight act of grace. They watched the opportunity of the forces of the Empire being engaged in a Parthian war, A.D. 115, to rise in insurrection, and put their enemies to death wherever they could. These insulated movements had probably no definite object beyond revenge upon a hostile population; but the rebellion in Palestine, which began in A.D. 131, aimed at the recovery of Jerusalem and the re-establishment of Jewish independence. Such was the determination with which the Jews fought under the leadership of Barcocheb,† that it required the best troops and ablest generals of Hadrian to put down the insurrection after a severe struggle of two years. Here, again, the Jewish coinage comes in to illustrate the Jewish history. Mr. Madden's work contains representations of numerous coins, with archaic Hebrew characters and symbols, bearing the name of Simon, struck over those of Roman emperors subsequent to the time of Vespasian-Titus, Domitian and Trajan, but so imperfectly struck that the original legend can still be traced. Whether the leader's true name was Simon, or Barcocheb assumed it as an encouragement to his followers, which is not improbable; or whether he used the stamp of Simon Bargiora, preserved since the first revolt, there can be no doubt that these coins belong to the second. We give an example of one of them.

The obverse exhibits the name of Simon; the reverse, imperfectly struck, Lacher[uth] Ierusalem, The deliverance

The Calumnia here acknowledged answers to the ovкopavría (false accusation) which Zaccheus (Luke xix. 8) confesses, we presume, as practised by his subordinates.

+ "Son of a Star," an allusion to Numbers xxiv. 17, "There shall come a star out of Jacob."

of Jerusalem-while round the margin may be distinctly read TITVS CAESAR VESP. What a stern joy, what a luxury of revenge must Barcocheb's have been, when he placed the stamp of Jewish independence on the head of Titus-of Titus, who had destroyed the Holy City and razed the Temple to its foundations, had slaughtered its unresisting inhabitants or condemned them to the slow death of the mines, and carried the sacred vessels of the Temple in triumph to the Capitol! The success of Barcocheb was shortlived; the second revolt ended, like the first, in a bloody catastrophe, and, instead of Jerusalem being delivered, a Roman colony, bearing the name Elia Capitolina, commemorated the victory of Hadrian and the triumph of Paganism.

The present age is distinguished by the sympathy which it feels for nations struggling to recover their independence, and we are disposed to claim a share in it for the Jews. They were certainly a "down-trodden nationality," and their national feeling was stronger than ordinary, because their religion was an element of strong repulsion between them and their polytheistic neighbours. It was increased by the obligation of simultaneous resort to the national sanctuary, by laws making them in every respect a peculiar people, by traditions of wonderful deliverances wrought for them in past ages, by prophecies of future glory and prosperity, surpassing all that their history recorded. The sympathy which is so freely accorded to Greeks, Poles or Italians, is denied to the Jews, partly because they are supposed to have committed a crime without a parallel-not a homicide, but a deicide-partly because their national depravity was also without a parallel. With regard to the first, the legal maxim may fairly be urged, that before sentence is passed and punishment is inflicted, the corpus delicti, the fact that the crime has been committed, must first be proved, and that here the proof fails. The general depravity of the nation in our Lord's time and during the first rebellion has been assumed on grounds none of which are satisfactory. The testimony of Josephus is alleged to prove that the whole nation was utterly corrupt; but he is by no means a veracious historian, and he had special reasons for depreciating those whose cause he had deserted. The crimes committed in the course of the struggle were of an atrocious kind, but it is

most unjust to impute to a whole nation the deeds done or instigated by the bold bad men whom revolutions or insurrections raise to power. The worst epidemics leave the great majority of a people in sound health. Could "salvation have been of the Jews," could they have been the means of the moral regeneration of mankind, if in their average moral quality they had not been far superior to the heathen? The gospel narrative brings prominently before us the least estimable part of our Lord's contemporariesthe self-righteous Pharisee, the sceptical Sadducee, the Herodian, a political religionist, the fickle populace of Jerusalem, a priest and a Levite without human sympathies. And these represent to us the Jewish people. But we doubt not that there were among them many a true Israelite, like Nathaniel-many a household like that of Lazarus and his sisters. A new light has lately broken upon us, from our increased knowledge of the Jewish traditional literature. When we find how closely the morality taught in their schools approached to that of the New Testament, we are obliged to confess, that in our zeal to exalt the Gospel we have done injustice to the teachers of the Law.

*

The outward position of the Jew among us has greatly improved. He is no longer subject to the brutal outrages and exactions of former times; Christians no longer spit upon his gaberdine. The Legislature, as usual in religious matters, "slowly wise and meanly just," has allowed him to steal into the House of Commons. His evil days are past; but his liability to evil tongues continues, if not in his own person, in that of his ancestors. We take no account of missionary sermons or speeches on missionary platforms, but we regret to read such a sentence as the following, in a work of so high a character as the Rev. C. Merivale's History of the Romans under the Empire:† "There is another point of view which the heathen philosopher" (Tacitus) "could not seize, from which the Christian must regard the position of the Jews. Whether we consider their sin to have lain in their carnal interpretation of prophecy, or in

* See the remarkable article in the Quarterly Review for October last, p. 437. In reference to a late sermon of the Archbishop of York at Whitehall, it may be remarked, that there is no reason to doubt that the precepts of the Rabbi Hillel, for example, really preceded the preaching of Christ.

+ VI. 567.

their rejection of truth and godliness in the person of Jesus Christ, they were judicially abandoned to their own passions and the punishment which naturally awaited them." We protest against either of these suppositions as constituting the Christian point of view. The notion that judicial blindness, involving a psychological miracle, has been inflicted on a people as the means of their destruction, is Jewish, or indeed heathen (Quos Jupiter vult perdere, &c.), rather than Christian. Such phrases are obsolete in philosophical history. By the carnal interpretation of prophecy, we suppose Mr. Merivale means the literal. But was it a sin on the part of the Jews, meriting extermination, to have been ignorant of the devices of "double senses," "types and antitypes," "adumbrations," "immediate and remote references," &c., to which Christian interpreters of prophecy have been driven, in order to justify what Mr. Merivale would call its spiritual, as opposed to its carnal, interpretation? He himself admits "that as apostles of national liberty the Zealots were contending for a noble principle." They contended also for what they believed to be the only true religion; and when we consider the intense power of these two principles, acting in unison, we need not seek in judicial blindness for the cause of the desperate energy with which they fought against the Romans. Their loss of independence was the gain of humanity, but we are not therefore justified in imputing to them a wilful resistance to the designs of Providence, which are not revealed beforehand.

K.

VL-THE EPISTLE OF JUDE AND THE PROPHECY AND ASSUMPTION OF MOSES.

Novum Testamentum extra Canonem receptum. Edidit A. Hilgenfeld. Leipzig. 1866.

Mosis Prophetia et Assumtio. Eine Quelle für das Neue Testament, zum ersten Male Deutsch herausgegeben, von Dr. Gustav Volkmar. Leipzig. 1867.

Now that questions relating to the authorship and constitution of the books of the New Testament are being every day

more earnestly discussed, the discovery of any new materials for their solution cannot but be welcomed with interest. Unhappily, such materials are very hard to find, though it is true that some of the great Continental libraries occasionally yield to indefatigable and painstaking research results of some importance. Such has already been the gratifying reward of the labours of M. A. M. Čeriani, the accomplished Curator of the Ambrosian Library at Milan, who has not long since commenced to restore and bring to light the literary treasures so carefully concealed by the Hapsburg-Jesuits.

Among the most interesting fruits of his investigation may be counted the recovery of a valuable fragment of the Itala version of the Gospel of Luke; but, still more, that of a portion of a MS. of the sixth century, which appears to have been brought from the monastery of Bobbio, near Pavia, founded by Columban in 613 A.D. It is, unfortunately, imperfect; but it contained originally a complete collection of the apocryphal books, under Old Testament names, in a Latin translation. The contents of the MS., however, seem not to have suited the ideas of the later priests; they were obsolete, if not dangerous; and accordingly the parchment leaves, which alone remained of value, were used to write sermons and litanies upon. The ancient characters, however, were not so completely erased but that they could be discerned by a practised eye; and Ceriani, after almost incredible labour, has succeeded in bringing to light the underlying writing.

The leaves preserved in Milan contain the fragments only of two apocryphal books. The largest part belongs to the so-called Lepto-Genesis, a rabbinical version of the first book of Moses. But to this there were attached eight leaves, with two columns on a page, of a Latin MS., in which Ceriani discovered the beginning of the "Assumtio Mosis." From the second to the eleventh century this was a highlyesteemed devotional book in the ancient church; only a few fragments of it, however, have been preserved to us in quotations by the Fathers,-together with the information that in its scope it bore a general resemblance to the Apocalypse of John. From the treasures of Columban's monastery, however, a considerable part of the book has come to light; fortunately it is the first and most important part,