Now, these are adequate though not numerous documentary grounds for the doctrine, on Jewish principles of interpretation. Jewish, indeed, the Messianic idea is not in origin: it is Perso-Babylonian; [140] and the idea of a suffering or re-arising Messiah may well have come in from that side. But equally that may have found some Jewish acceptance. We can see very well that in Daniel "the Anointed One"--that is, "the Messiah" and "the Christ"--refers to the Maccabean hero; but that as well as the other passages, on Jewish principles, could apply to the Messiah of any period; and the Septuagint reading of Psalm xxii, 16: "They pierced my hands and my feet," was a specification of crucifixion. It is not impossible that that reading was the result of the actual crucifixion of Cyrus, who had been specified as a "Christ" in Isaiah. We have nothing to do here with rational interpretation: the whole conception of prophecy is irrational; but the construing of old texts as prophecies was a Jewish specialty. When then a theistic rationalist of the last generation wrote of the gospel Jesus:-- His being a carpenter, occupying the field of barbaric Galilee, and suffering death as a culprit, are not features which the constructor of an imaginary tale would go out of his way to introduce wherewith to associate his hero, and therefore, probably, we have here real facts presented to us, [141] he was far astray. Anything might be predicated of a Jewish Messiah. Not only had the Messianic Cyrus been crucified: the anointed and triumphant Judas Maccabæus, under whose auspices the Messianic belief had revived in Israel in the second century B.C., had finally fallen in battle; and his brother Simon, who was actually regarded as the Messiah, was murdered by his son-in-law. [142]