While Judæa was still trembling in fear of some new act of violence on the part of the governor, Pontius Pilate, which would again afflict the country with disturbances and troubles, a strange event occurred. At first but little heeded, it soon acquired, through the singularity of its origin and many favorable attendant circumstances, a considerable degree of notoriety. So great were the strides this movement rapidly made to influence and power, that radical changes were produced by it and new paths opened in the history of the world. The time had come when the fundamental truths of Judaism, till then thoroughly known and rightly appreciated only by profound thinkers, were to burst their shackles and go freely forth among all the people of the earth. Sublime and lofty views of God and of holy living for the individual as well as for the state, which form the kernel of Judaism, were now to be disseminated among other nations and to bring them a rich and beneficent harvest. Israel was now to commence in earnest his sacred mission; he was to become the teacher of nations. The ancient teaching about God and religious morality was to be introduced by him unto a godless and immoral world. Judaism, however, could gain admission into the hearts of the heathens only by taking another name and assuming new forms, for with its old designation and distinctive features it was not generally popular. It was due to the strange movement which arose under the governorship of Pilate that the teachings of Judaism won the sympathy of the heathen world. But this new form of Judaism, altered by foreign elements, became estranged from and placed itself in harsh antagonism to the parent source. Judaism, which had given birth to this new manifestation, could take no pleasure in her offspring, which soon turned coldly from her and struck out into strange, divergent paths. This new power, this old doctrine in a new garb, or rather this Essenism intermingled with foreign elements, is Christianity, whose advent and earliest course belong to the Judæan history of this epoch.