The rule of the Romans, like that of the Seleucidæ before them, made the Jews fall back upon their Messianic dreams. In these the Bible played the leading part. The prophets of old had merely been religious and popular tribunes; nevertheless, by the aid of fanciful interpretation they succeeded in making them soothsayers. They were made to predict the supremacy of the Jewish nation over all others; by taking some sentences of their writings apart from the context the people discovered allusions to their future deliverer, their Messiah. Like all mythological types, this ideal figure of the Messiah grew more and more clearly defined. But at the same time it assumed a loftier significance, it became purely moral in character. In face of the vastness of the Roman power, a warrior king like David would not have been enough; what was needed was rather a revealer, like Moses, to set up the kingdom of God upon earth. The Messiah, in this supernatural rôle, was bound to exercise a far greater effect upon the people; but any kind of revolution, whether violent or mystical, must always inspire the ruling classes with equal abhorrence. The Jewish priesthood implored the aid of the secular arm against Jesus of Nazareth, as it had done against Judas Maccabæus. Pilate being loth to put an innocent man to death in order to gratify priestly spite, they gave him to understand that his own position would be compromised by indulgence, and he yielded for fear of losing his office. Moreover, it is likely that the death sentence caused him no great remorse; no doubt he said to himself that it was the price of maintaining order, and that in dealing with an enemy to society there was no constraining need to be just. This event, which divides the history of the world in two, passed unmarked by the generation that witnessed it. The five or six lines which we find in Josephus appear to be an interpolation. If Josephus had believed, as the passage states, that Jesus was the Messiah and that he was more than man, it is obvious that, instead of remaining a Jew, he would have become a Christian.[b] The excerpt from Josephus is as follows: “Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works--a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was (the) Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.”