The Essenes appear in Jerusalem as a monastic order like the Neopythagoreans. They possessed secret texts.[349] In the broad sense they are representative of the Pseudomorphosis, and in consequence they disappear from Jewry completely after A.D. 70, while precisely in this period Christian literature was becoming purely Greek--not in the least of the causes of this being that the Hellenized Western Jews left Judaism to retreat into its East, and gradually adopted Christianity. But also Apocalyptic, which is an expression-form of townless and town-fearing mankind, soon came to an end within the Synagogue, after a last wonderful reaction to the stimulus of the great catastrophe.[350] When it had become evident that the teaching of Jesus would lead not to a reform of Judaism, but to a new religion, and when, about A.D. 100, the daily imprecation-formula against the Jew-Christians was introduced, Apocalyptic for the short remainder of its existence resided in the young Church. VI The incomparable thing which lifted the infant Christianity out above all religions of this rich Springtime is the figure of Jesus. In all the great creations of those years there is nothing which can be set beside it. Tame and empty all the legends and holy adventures of Mithras, Attis, and Osiris must have seemed to any man reading or listening to the still recent story of Jesus’s sufferings--the last journey to Jerusalem, the last anxious supper, the hours of despair in Gethsemane, and the death on the cross. Here was no matter of philosophy. Jesus’s utterances, which stayed in the memory of many of the devoted, even in old age, are those of a child in the midst of an alien, aged, and sick world. They are not sociological observations, problems, debatings. Like a quiet island of bliss was the life of these fishermen and craftsmen by the Lake of Gennesareth in the midst of the age of the great Tiberius, far from all world-history and innocent of all the doings of actuality, while round them glittered the Hellenistic towns with their theatres and temples, their refined Western society, their noisy mob-diversions, their Roman cohorts, their Greek philosophy. When the friends and disciples of the sufferer had grown grey and his brother was president of their group in Jerusalem, they put together, from the sayings and narratives generally current in their small communities, a biography so arresting in its inward appeal that it evolved a presentation-form of its own, of which neither the Classical nor the Arabian Culture has any example--the Gospel. Christianity is the one religion in the history of the world in which the fate of a man of the immediate present has become the emblem and the central point of the whole creation.