=5. Birth of Christianity.=――Christianity, as a new religion in opposition to Judaism, was founded by Paul of Tarsus, who proclaimed the abolition of the Mosaic code of laws. Paul had not known Jesus. He had been at first an opponent of his doctrines, but he was converted about the year 37, and soon went much further than his master. What Jesus preached was scarcely a religion, and Christianity is something perhaps a little different even from the so-called religion of Christ which Paul formulated. Paul became the apostle to the Gentiles, who, in a sense, were ready for him. The cultivated heathens were wanting, by this time, a more spiritual religion than their own, and they were used to worshipping so many gods, that to require belief only in three was a great simplifying of their faith. To strict Jews the Trinity would have been unthinkable. What Paul taught was in effect a new faith――new in dogma, and new, to some extent, in doctrine. Jesus had distinctly said ‘not one jot nor one tittle of the Law should pass away.’ Paul disregarded this, and definitely and deliberately cast aside the obligations of ‘the Law.’ Strict Mosaic observance was a burden which the pagan would not have taken upon him, and was one from which the lax Jew was glad to be relieved. Antioch and Alexandria were the cradles of the new faith, and, stripped of its Jewish swaddling clothes, the infant Christianity was soon strong enough to run alone, and pagan images, like Dagon, fell before it. =6. Reign of Herod Agrippa.=――In the year 36 the procurator Pontius Pilate was recalled to Rome, and in the person of a grandson of Herod’s there came about a restoration of the Herodian dynasty, which lasted for seven years. When, some five-and-forty years before, Mariamne’s sons had been put to death by order of their half-mad father, there had been a mother and a tiny baby left desolate by the execution. The wife of the murdered Aristobulus had fled with her little orphan boy to Rome, and the Emperor Tiberius’s sister-in-law, who was also a widow, had formed a strong friendship for the poor Jewish lady. The Emperor had a young son called Drusus, of about the same age as Herod Agrippa, and the two boys were constantly together at court. When Drusus died the Emperor found it at first too painful to see Herod Agrippa, as it reminded him so much of the loss of his son; and later on, when an intimacy sprang up between the pleasant young Jewish prince and Caligula, the Emperor’s grand-nephew and probable heir, Tiberius seemed to find this new affection as trying to his feelings as the memory of the old. Perhaps he was jealous of his heir, and grudged him his friends. At any rate, Herod Agrippa, who had been a court favourite, became a court prisoner, and iron chains took the place of golden ones. In the year 37 Caligula became Emperor, and one of his first acts was to take his friend Agrippa out of prison and to find a throne for him.