The Judaism of the Apostolic Age in its most characteristic form was thoroughly hostile to Christianity. The Pharisees and the mass of the people with their expectation of a political Messiah, took offence at a Messiah crucified by the Gentiles (1 Cor. i. 13); their national pride was wounded by the granting of equality to Samaritans and heathens, while their legal righteousness and sham piety were exposed and censured by the teachings of Christianity. On the other side, the Sadducees felt no less called upon to fight to the death against Christianity with its doctrine of the resurrection (Acts iv. 2; xxiii. 6). The same hostile feeling generally prevailed among the dispersion. The Jewish community at Berea (Acts xvii. 2) is praised as a pleasing exception to the general rule. Finally, in A.D. 70 destruction fell upon the covenant people and the holy city. The Christian church of Jerusalem, acting upon a warning uttered by the Lord (Matt. xxiv. 16), found a place of refuge in the mountain city of Pella, on the other side of Jordan. But when the Pseudo-Messiah, Bar-Cochba (Son of a Star, Num. xxiv. 17), roused all Palestine against the Roman rule, in A.D. 132, the Palestinian Christians who refused to assist or recognise the false Messiah, had again to endure a bloody persecution. Bar-Cochba was defeated in A.D. 135. Hadrian now commanded that upon pain of death no Jew should enter Ælia Capitolina, the Roman colony founded by him on the ruins of Jerusalem. From that time they were deprived of all power and opportunity for direct persecution of the Christians. All the greater was their pleasure at the persecutions by the heathens and their zeal in urging the pagans to extreme measures. In their seminaries they gave currency to the most horrible lies and calumnies about Christ and the Christians, which also issued thence among the heathens. On the other hand, however, they intensified their own anti-Christian attitude and sought protection against the advancing tide of Christianity by strangling all spiritual movement under a mass of traditional interpretations and judgments of men. The Schools of Tiberias and Babylon were the nurseries of this movement, and the _Talmud_, the first part of which, the _Mishna_, had its origin during this period, marks the completion of this anti-Christian self-petrifaction of Judaism. The disciples of John, too, assumed a hostile attitude toward Christianity, and formed a distinct set under the name of Hemerobaptists. Contemporaneously with the first successes of the Apostolic mission, a current set in among the Samaritans calculated to checkmate Christianity by the setting up of new religions. Dositheus, Simon Magus and Menander here made their appearance with claims to the Messiahship, and were at a later period designated heresiarchs by the church fathers, who believed that in them they found the germs of the Gnostic heresy (§§ 26 ff.).