That there were such scattered and floating oracles, indeed, we are not critically entitled to deny. The Judæo-Greek world was indeed familiar with oracles of "the Lord." The Gospel Jesus is made to predict that there would come after him many saying "I am Christ"; and while the traditionalist must accept this as true prediction, the historian must pronounce that various "Christs" or quasi-Christs did come. We have some of their names and their brief secular history. [109] Each of these men would be "the Lord" for his followers; and some of them, surely, propounded some teaching. The Gospel ethic of reciprocity, we know, was put in a saner form by Hillel; did he get it from the Jesuists? Christian scholars do not claim as much. [110] There is no Messianic item in the Gospels, apart from the lore of the sacrament, which may not have been in the legend of any "Christ." As it happens, the best authenticated saying of "the Lord" is one which no Christian now accepts--the fantastic millenarian prediction given by Papias, who had it from "the elders who saw John, the disciple of the Lord," and textually quoted by Irenæus, who is practically corroborated by Eusebius. The latter, it is true, pronounces Papias very limited in his comprehension; [111] but has not the same thing been said many times of the disciples by believers in the gospel Jesus? The logion preserved from Papias, we know, is in the Apocalypse of Baruch, which imitated the Book of Enoch, both of which are full of oracles of "the Lord." But this only proves that oracles passing current in other quarters and of another source could pass current with devout Jesuists as oracles of Jesus. The Apocalypse of Baruch is pronounced by Canon Charles, who has so ably edited that and other remains of Jewish literature of the same age, a "beautiful" book, "almost the last noble utterance of Judaism before it plunged in the dark and oppressive years that followed the destruction of Jerusalem"; a book written when "breathing thought and burning word had still their home in Palestine, and the hand of the Jewish artist was still master of its ancient cunning." [112] It was admittedly long more widely current in Christian than in Jewish circles, and fell into discredit only when it was felt to contain "an implicit polemic against Christianity." It is to its early Christian vogue that we owe its preservation in a Syriac translation made from the Greek: "of the Hebrew original every line has perished, save a few still surviving in rabbinic writings." Who can say how many other such Jewish books may not have furnished items for the compilers of the Gospels? The Sermon on the Mount we know is a Judaic compilation; and the "Slavonic Enoch" contains sets of beatitudes closely analogous to those of the Sermon. To the traditionalist these things are matters of profound perplexity; for the rational critic they are evidences for the naturalist conception of the rise of Christianity. CHAPTER XIII