If, now, we attempt to examine what these competitors were, we find at the outset that a good number of those which we once thought formidable may be eliminated from the list. Judaism, for instance, although the matrix in which Christianity was formed, was never at any time in effective rivalry with it. The words of the Gospel as to the Pharisees compassing sea and land to make one proselyte have misled the unwary into supposing that the number of Jewish proselytes was at one time or another large[10]; but it must be remembered that it was the Sadducees and not the Pharisees who were the dominant party in the Jewish State, and that these last formed but a very small part of the total population of Judaea[11]. The Sadducees from their Hellenizing tendencies were much more likely to go over to the faith of the Gentiles than to make any great effort for their conversion, and both they and the Essenes, who formed in Josephus’ day the third party among the Jews, were too much set on procuring, by different means, the temporal supremacy of Israel, to care much about admitting any proselyte to share in it[12]. Although a few undistinguished persons of Gentile blood may have become converts to Judaism between the birth of Christ and the fall of the Temple, their number can never have been at any time important; and after 69 A.D., the furious hostility that arose between Jew and Gentile made any further conversions to the Jewish faith practically impossible. Never, so far as we know, did Judaism aim at becoming, and certainly never had the slightest chance of appearing as, a world-religion.