More and more new communities and groups gathered, believing themselves to have found either a better understanding of the traditional religion, or the true religion itself. In this time of amazing, ever-increasing tension, and in the very years around Jesus’s birth-year, there arose, besides endless communities and sects, another redemption-religion, the Mandæan, as to which we know nothing of founder or origins. In spite of its hatred of the Judaism of Jerusalem and its definite preference for the Persian idea of redemption, the Mandæan religion seems to have stood very close to the popular beliefs of Syrian Jewry. One after another, pieces of its wonderful documents are becoming available, and they consistently show us a “Him,” a Son of Man, a Redeemer who is sent down into the depths, who himself must be redeemed and is the goal of man’s expectations. In the Book of John, the Father high upraised in the House of Fulfilment, bathed in light, says to his only begotten Son: “My Son, be to me an ambassador; go into the world of darkness, where no ray of light is.” And the Son calls up to him: “Father, in what have I sinned that thou hast sent me into the darkness?” And finally: “Without sin did I ascend and there was no sin and defect in me.”[354] All the characters of the great prophetic religions and of the whole store of profound glimpses and visions later collected into apocalypses are seen here as foundations. Of Classical thought and feeling not a breath reached this Magian underworld. No doubt the beginnings of the new religion are lost irrevocably. But _one_ historical figure of Mandæanism stands forth with startling distinctness, as tragic in his purpose and his downfall as Jesus himself--John the Baptist.[355] He, almost emancipated from Judaism, and filled with as mighty a hatred of the Jerusalem spirit as that of primitive Russia for Petersburg, preached the end of the world and the coming of the Barnasha, the Son of Man, _who is no longer the longed-for national Messiah of the Jews_, but the bringer of the world-conflagration.[356] To him came Jesus and was his disciple.[357] He was thirty years old when the awakening came over him. Thenceforth the apocalyptic, and in particular the Mandæan, thought-world filled his whole being. The other world of historical actuality lying round him was to him as something sham, alien, void of significance. That “He” would now come and make an end of this unreal reality was his magnificent certainty, and like his master John, he stepped forth as its herald. Even now we can see, in the oldest Gospels that were embodied into the New Testament, gleams of this period in which he was, in his consciousness, nothing but a prophet.[358]