It is further to be remarked that Late Judaism was no longer in his time so open to external influences that any and every kind of religious conception which was floating about anywhere in the Orient could necessarily impose itself on Paul’s mind through this medium. The period of assimilation was, speaking generally, at an end. The new material had been—before Paul’s day—worked up along with the old into a set of Apocalyptic conceptions, [pg 177] which, in spite of the elbow-room which the heterogeneous ideas necessarily claimed for themselves, did form a system, and appeared from without as relatively complete and self-sufficing. The Oriental material has been poured into Jewish moulds and received a Jewish impress. A still further point is that any one whose thought moves in the Apocalyptic system created by the books of Daniel and Enoch is not so much exposed to, as withdrawn from, the action of free Oriental influence. He is already saturated with those elements in regard to receptivity which the Jewish mind possesses and the tendency to assimilation, and possesses it not as something foreign to himself but as Jewish. Apocalyptic tends to produce in him immunisation as against further syncretistic infection. This assertion is susceptible of historical proof. Late Judaism stands, even before the beginning of our era, apart from the Oriental religious movements. And it continues unaffected by them. Not one of its representatives was concerned in the syncretistic movement. Philo seeks to rationalise Judaism by the aid of Platonico-Stoic philosophy, but he gives no place to the religious and cultural ideas by which he was surrounded in Egypt. It is as though they had no existence for him. To apply the comparative method to Paul would, therefore, generally speaking, mean nothing more or less than to explain him on the basis of Late Judaism. Those who give due weight to the eschatological character of his doctrine and to the problems and ideas which connect it with works like the Apocalypse of Ezra are the true exponents of “Comparative Religion,” even though they may make no claim to this title. Any one who goes beyond this and tries to bring Paul into direct connexion with the Orient as such commits himself to the perilous path of scientific adventure. Considerations of that kind were not taken into account by Wrede and his followers. But even if they had become conscious of the difficulties in the way of the application of the method to Paul, they could not have acted otherwise. [pg 178] In spite of all theoretical warnings this path had to be followed.