co-existent with God Himself. The Holy Spirit was either God, or the influence of God, but not a personality distinguishable from Him. Metatron comes the nearest to the conception of a second God; but, whatever the later Cabbalists may have made of Metatron, the Pharisees of the Talmud expressly rejected the notion that he was a second God. It is told (b. Ḥag. 15ª) that the famous Elisha b. Abujah, the nearest approach to a Jewish heretic, went up into Heaven (Paradise), and there saw "Metatron, to whom was given power to sit and write down the merits of Israel." (Elisha) said: "It is taught that on high there is no sitting, no strife, no parting, and no joining. Can there be, Heaven forbid, two powers? (_i.e._ two Gods). They brought out Metatron, and gave him sixty lashes of fire." The commentator on this passage explains that Metatron was treated in that manner in order to show that he was not superior to the other angels in kind, and that he was subservient to God, not on any sort of equality with Him. Metatron, as I have elsewhere maintained,[19] is the Rabbinical reply to the Gnostic and Christian doctrines which seemed to threaten the divine Unity. It was perhaps with reference to Christian doctrine that the Rabbis laid stress on the belief that God has no Son. Commenting on Exod. xx. 2: "R. Abahu said: 'A parable of a king of flesh and blood; he reigns and has a father or a brother. The Holy One, blessed be He, saith, "I am not so"; (but) (Isa. xliv. 6) "I am the first," I have no father; "and I am the last," I have no son; "and beside me there is no God," I have no brother'" (Shem. R. 51^b). Abahu lived in the third century of our era; and most of the Haggadic expositions of the unity of God, on the lines indicated, are later than the New Testament period. But, as they were only developed in opposition to Christian teaching, it is not likely that in the time of Jesus or the Apostles the Pharisees were divided or uncertain upon a point which had scarcely as yet been challenged. Jesus himself never challenged it, so far as the Synoptic Gospels are evidence; and, upon a belief so fundamental in Pharisaic Judaism, it is not to be supposed that he was more consistent than the Pharisees themselves. The challenge came not from Jesus but from Paul, even though Paul may not have intended, or been conscious of, any infraction of the unity of God in his teaching about Christ. The Pharisees took the alarm from him; and, in opposition to his Christology, and the later Johannine doctrine, taught with especial emphasis the undivided sole supremacy of God. And they had no more difficulty than Jesus had in believing that the one God was both sovereign Lord and heavenly Father, as in fact they called Him. [19] See my _Christianity in Talmud and Midrash_, pp. 286-8.