For Vespasian’s War, directed against Judea, was a liberation of Jewry. In the first place, it ended both the claim of the people of this petty district to be the genuine nation, and the pretensions of their bald spirituality to equivalence with the soul-life of the whole. The research, the scholasticism, and the mysticism of the Oriental academies entered into possession of their rights; so, for instance, the judge Karna--the contemporary, more or less, of Ulpian and Papinian--formulated at the academy of Nehardea the first code of civil law.[345] In the second place, it rescued this religion from the dangers of that pseudomorphosis to which Christianity in that same period was succumbing. Since 200 B.C. there had existed a half-Hellenistic Jewish literature. The “Preacher” (Ecclesiastes, Koheleth) contains Pyrrhonic ideas.[346] The Wisdom of Solomon, 2 Maccabees, Theodotion, the Aristeas Letter, etc., follow; there are things like the Menander collection of Maxims, as to which it is impossible to say whether they ought to be regarded as Jewish or as Greek. There were, about 160, high priests who were so Hellenistic in spirit that they combated the Jewish religion, and later there were rulers like Hyrcanus and Herod who did the same by political methods. This danger came to an end instantly and for good in A.D. 70. In the time of Jesus there were in Jerusalem three tendencies which can be described as generally Aramæan, represented respectively by the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. Although the connotations of these names varied, and although both in Christian and in Jewish research most diverse views are held about them, it may at any rate be said that the first of these tendencies is found in greatest purity in Judaism, the second in Chaldeanism, the third in Hellenism.[347] Essene is the rise of the cult (almost the Order) of Mithras in the east of Asia Minor. The Sadducees, although in Jerusalem they appear as a small and distinguished group--Josephus compares them with the Epicureans--are thoroughly Aramæan in their apocalyptic and eschatological views, in virtue of a certain element which makes them, so to say, the Dostoyevskis of this Early period. They stand to the Pharisees in the relation of mysticism to scholasticism, of John to Paul, of Bundahish to Vendidad[348] in the Persian world. The Apocalyptic is popular, and many of its traits are spiritually common property throughout the Aramæan world; the Talmudic and Avestan Pharisaism is exclusive and tries to rule out every other religion with uncompromising rigour.