To have an idea of the hatred which the upper classes of Jerusalem felt towards Jesus, priestly hatred, scholastic hatred and commercial hatred, we must remember that the Holy City apparently lived by faith, but in reality on the Faithful. Only in the Jewish metropolis could valid and acceptable offerings be made to the Old God, and therefore every year, especially on great feast days, streams of Israelites poured in there from the Tetrarchates of Palestine and from all the provinces of the Empire. The Temple was not only the one legitimate sanctuary of the Jews, but for those who were attached to it and for all the others who lived at its feet, it was the great nourishing breast which fed the Capital with the products of the victims, the offerings, the tithes and, above all, with the profits accompanying the continual influx of visitors. Josephus says that at Jerusalem on special occasions there were gathered together as many as three million pilgrims. The stationary population depended all the year round on the Temple: business for the animal-sellers, dealers in victuals, money-changers, inn-keepers, and even artisans depended on the fortunes of the Temple. The priestly caste, which without the Levites (and there were a great crowd of them) numbered in Christ’s lifetime twenty thousand descendants of Aaron—got their living from the tithes in kind, from the taxes of the Temple, from the payments for the first-born—even the first-born of men paid five shekels a head!—and got their food from the flesh of the sacrificial animals, of which only the fat was burned. They were the ones who had the pick of herds and crops; even their bread was given them by the people, for the head of every Jewish family was obliged to hand over to the priests the twenty-fourth part of the bread which was baked in his house. Many of them, as we have seen, made money on the raising of the animals which the Faithful were obliged to buy for their offerings; others were associated with money-changers, and it is not impossible that some of them were really bankers, because people readily deposited their savings in the strong-boxes of the Temple. A net-work of self-interest thus bound to the Herodian edifice all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, down to the vendors at fairs and the sandal-makers. The priests lived on the Temple and many of them were merchants and rich men: the rich needed the Temple to increase their profits and keep the common people respectful: the merchants did business with the rich people who had money to spend, with the priests who were their associates and with the pilgrims from every part of the world drawn towards the Temple: the working men and the poor lived from the scraps and leavings which fell from the tables of the rich, the priests, the merchants and the pilgrims.