That Galilean or other Jews or semi-Jews, always in a partly hostile relation to priests, scribes, and Pharisees, should in an age of chronic war, disaster and revolution, maintain an old private sacrament, with a subordinate worship of a Hero-God Jesus whose body and blood had once literally and now symbolically brought salvation, is not an unlikely but a likely hypothesis. The gospels themselves indicate an attitude of demotic hostility alike to the king, the priests, the scribes, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees. It is not pretended that before and apart from Jesus there was no such hostility, and that he generated it by his teaching. In a united community such hostility could not be so generated. It was there to start with. If then cults of Dionysos and Attis and Adonis, the annually dying and suffering demigods, could openly subsist in the Hellenistic world alongside of the State cults of Zeus and the other chief Gods, a secret cult of a Hero-God Jesus could subsist in some part of Jewry, with its survivals of rural paganism and its many contacts and mixtures with Samaritan schism and Hellenistic culture. Yet further, if the popular needs of the Hellenistic world could elicit and maintain a multitude of private religious associations, each with its own sacramental meal, [187] the same needs could elicit and maintain them elsewhere. To this thesis it is objected that we have no mention of the existence of a Jesus cult of any kind in the Hebrew books. But that is a necessity of the case. The Sacred Books would naturally exclude all mention of a cult which in effect meant the continued deification of Joshua, [188] who had long been reduced to the status of a mere hero in the history. That Joshua is a non-historical personage has long been established by modern criticism. [189] That he did not do what he is said in the Book of Joshua to have done is agreed by all the "higher" critics. Who or what then was Joshua? He is in many respects the myth-duplicate of Moses, whose work he repeats, passing the Jordan as did Moses the Red Sea, appointing his twelve, "renewing" the rite of circumcision, and writing the law upon stones. But he notably excels Moses in that he causes the sun and moon to stand still by his word; [190] and as this is cited from "Jasher," he is possibly the older figure of the two. And for the Jews he retained a special status. In his Book he is made (with a "thus saith the Lord") to give a list of the conquests effected by him against "the Amorite, and the Perizzite, and the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Girgashite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite." In Exodus xx, this very list of conquests, barring "the Girgashite," is promised, with this prelude:-- Behold, I [Yahweh] send an angel before thee, to keep thee by the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. Take ye heed of him, and hearken unto his voice: provoke him not, for he will not pardon your transgression; for my name is in him.