But to whom? Even in the first days the question arose which decided the whole Destiny of the new revelation. Jesus and his friends were Jews by birth, but they did not belong to the land of Judea. Here in Jerusalem men looked for the Messiah of their old sacred books, a Messiah who was to appear for the “Jewish people,” in the old tribal sense, and only for them. But all the rest of the Aramæan world waited upon the Saviour of the _world_, the Redeemer and Son of Man, the figure of all apocalyptic literature, whether written out in Jewish, Persian, Chaldean, or Mandæan terms.[364] In the one view the death and resurrection of Jesus were merely local events; in the other they betokened a world-change. For, while everywhere else the Jews were a Magian nation without home or unity of birth, Jerusalem held firmly to the tribal idea. The conflict was not one between “preaching to the Jews” and “preaching to the Gentiles”--it went far deeper. The word “mission” had essentially here a twofold meaning. In the Judaic view there was essentially no need for recruiting--quite the reverse, as it was a contradiction to the Messiah-idea. The words “tribe” and “mission” are reciprocally exclusive. The members of the Chosen People, and in particular the priesthood, had merely to convince _themselves_ that their longing was now fulfilled. But to the Magian nation, based on _consensus_ or community of feeling, what the Resurrection conveyed was a full and definitive truth, and consensus in the matter of this truth gave the _principle of the true nation_, which must necessarily expand till it had taken in all older and conceptually incomplete principles. “A Shepherd and his sheep” was the formula of the new world-nation. The nation of the Redeemer was identical with mankind. When, therefore, we survey the early history of this Culture, we see that the controversy in the Apostles’ Council[365] had been already decided, five hundred years before, by facts. Post-exilic Jewry (with the sole exception of self-contained Judea) had, like the Persians, Chaldeans, and others, recruited widely amongst the heathen, from Turkestan to inner Africa, regardless of home and origin. As to this there is now no controversy. It never at any time entered the heads of this community to be anything but what it really was. It was itself already the result of _a national existence in dispersion_. In utter contrast to the old-Jewish texts--which were a carefully preserved treasure, and of which the right interpretation, the Halakha, was reserved by the Rabbis to themselves--the apocalyptic literature was written so that it could reach all the souls to be wakened, and interpreted so that it might strike home in everyone.