How far Essenism reacted on early Jesuism cannot be ascertained. Despite some approximations, such as the veto on oaths and the esteem for celibacy, it is clear that there was no such close resemblance between the movements as has been supposed by the writers who seek to identify them; but they tell of a similar mental climate. The non-mention of Essenism in the gospels is to be explained by the fact that the two systems were not rivals. One was localized, monastic, exclusive; the other peregrine and propagandist: and only in the minds of the ill-informed Roman forgers of the second century could they be supposed to have come into hostile contact. Essenism needed no innovating Messiah; and Jesuism had to go afield for adherents. § 4. Gentile Cults What Christism had to compete with in the Greco-Roman world was not so much the collective principle of polytheism or the public worship of the endowed temples, as the class of semi-private cults to which itself belonged, and the popular worships equally associated with suffering and dying Saviour-Gods. Of these the most prominent were the ancient worships of the Syrian Adonis, the Phrygian Attis, Dionysos, and the Egyptian Osiris, all of which had become partly assimilated in theory, in ritual, and in public observance. But contemporarily with Christianity there began also to spread through the empire the Persian cult of Mithra, which had been first introduced into the Roman army after the Mithridatic wars; and in the end this became the most dangerous rival of the new church. All six cults alike gave prominence to the idea of the God's death and resurrection; and all lived in a common atmosphere of ancient superstition, emotional unrest, craving for communion, anxious concern for the future and for the washing out of guilt by religious rites and penances. And all six deities were nominally "born of a virgin."