When, on the other hand, Dr. Conybeare proceeds to notice the thesis that the ancient Jesuine sacrament would presumably survive as a secret rite, he disposes of the proposition by calling it "a literary trick." That would be a mild term for his express assertion (p. 34) that I have claimed that "the canonical Book of Joshua originally contained" the tradition that Joshua was the son of Miriam--an explicit untruth. My reference to deletions from the book expressly pointed to the theses of Winckler, a scholar whom Dr. Conybeare supposes himself to discredit by expressions of personal contempt. Winckler never put the hypothesis as to Miriam. [203] As to the survival of many private "mysteries" among the Jews, I may refer the reader to the section in Pagan Christs on "Private Jewish Eucharists" (p. 168 sq.), and in particular to the dictum, there cited, of the late Professor Robertson Smith (who has not yet, I believe, incurred Dr. Conybeare's tolerably indiscriminate contempt), that "the causes which produced a resuscitation of obsolete mysteries were at work at the same period [after the Captivity] among all the Northern Semites," and that "they mark the first appearance in Semitic history of the tendency to found religious societies on voluntary association and mystic initiation." To the "first" I cannot subscribe, save on a special construction of "appearance." But Robertson Smith's proposition was founded on the documentary evidence; and when he writes that "the obscure rites described by the prophets have a vastly greater importance than has been commonly recognized," with the addendum that "everywhere the old national Gods had shown themselves powerless to resist the gods of Assyria and Babylon," we are listening to a great Semitic scholar, an anthropologist, and a thinker, not to a "wilful child," as Dr. Conybeare may charitably be described, in words which, after his manner of polemic, he applies to me.] Finally, we have seen that a rite of "Jesus the Son," otherwise known as the "Week of the Son," was actually specified by the Talmudists of the period of the fall of the Temple. Taken with the item of the name Jesus Barabbas, "Jesus the Son of the Father," and the five-days' duration of the ritual of the sacrificed Mock-King, it completes a body of Jewish evidence for the pre-Christian currency of the name Jesus as a cult-name of some kind. It is now possible to see at once the force of the primary thesis of Professor W. B. Smith [204] that the phrase ta peri tou Iêsou, "the things concerning the Jesus," in the Gospels and the Acts, [205] tells of a body of Jesus-lore of some kind prior to the gospel story; and also the significance of the fact that the narrative of the Acts represents the new apostle as finding Jesus-worshippers, albeit in small numbers, wherever he went.