A persecutor of Christians, on whom the spirit "came mightily," as on King Saul, so that he was a new "Saul among the prophets," sought to convert to his new faith a Roman Proconsul, Sergius Paul. But with this Consul was a learned man of the Jewish Wisdom School, Bar-Jesus Elymas,--i. e., Dr. Anti-Jesus Wise Man. Like Michael and Satan contending for the body of Moses, Prophet Saul and Anti-Jesus Wise Man contended for the Roman Paul's soul. Prophet Saul prevailed by calling Anti-Jesus Wise Man a child of the devil, and striking him blind. Thereupon Consul Paul believed, being "astonished at the teaching of the Lord." Whereupon Prophet Saul triumphantly carries off the Roman's name as a trophy. [50] Beginning in this conclusive way, by striking human Wisdom sightless ("that they that see may become blind," John ix. 39), the Anti-Wisdom propaganda, which began with identifying Wisdom with the serpent in Eden, passed on to inspire the Church Fathers who gloated over the eternal tortures of the poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome. Alas for the philosophers not in their graves, but in their cradles, or in the womb of the future! For torments are nearest "eternal" when they begin at once on earth. One may readily understand how it was that personal traditions of Jesus and his teachings remained unwritten until his contemporaries were dead (although this may not have been the case with the suppressed "Gospel according to the Hebrews"); the hourly expected return of Christ rendered such memoirs unimportant until it became clear that the expectation was erroneous. The age of John, of whom Jesus was rumoured to have predicted survival till his return (John xxi. 22), was stretched out to a mythical extent; he became an undying sleeper at Ephesus, and finally a pious "Wandering Jew"; but when at length such fables lost their strength, some imaginative impersonator brought forth an apocalyptic bequest of John postponing the second advent a thousand years. The conventicles had thus no resource but to turn into orthodoxy the heresy of Hymenoeus and Alexander, for which Paul delivered them over to Satan, that the resurrection occurs at death; to collect the traditional sayings of Jesus; and to adapt these to the new situation. A thousand years later, when the expected catastrophe did not occur, the substantial churches and cathedrals were built, as the Gospels had been built after the first-century disappointment. These Gospels contain things from which some of the real teachings of the wise man of Nazareth may be fairly conjectured. That the synoptical records are palimpsests, though denied by the prudent, is a truth felt by the unsophisticated who, in their use of such words as "Christian" and "a Christian spirit," quite ignore the fearful anathemas and damnatory language ascribed to Jesus. CHAPTER XVIII. THE LAST SOLOMON.