That there was a Jewish sect of "Nazaræans" before the Christian era, Professor Smith has clearly shown, may be taken as put beyond doubt by the testimony of Epiphanius, which he exhaustively analyzes. [254] Primitively orthodox, like the Samaritans, and recognizing ostensibly no Bible personages later than Joshua, they appear to have merged in some way with the "Christians," who adopted their name, perhaps turning "Nazaræan" into "Nazorean." My original theory was that the "Nazaræans" were just the "Nazarites" of the Old Testament--men "separated" and "under a vow"; [255] and that the two movements somehow coalesced, the place-name "Nazareth" being finally adopted to conceal the facts. But Professor Smith is convinced, from the evidence of Epiphanius, that between "Nazarites" and "Nazaræans" there was no connection; [256] and for this there is the strong support of the fact that the Jews cursed the Jesuist "Nazoræans" while apparently continuing to recognize the Nazirs or Nazarites. That Professor Smith's derivation of the name may be the correct one, I am well prepared to believe. But it is difficult to connect such a derivation of an important section of the early Jesuist movement with the thesis that Jesuism at its historic outset was essentially a monotheistic crusade. On this side we seem to face an old sect for whom, as for the adherents of the early sacrament, Jesus was a secondary or subordinate divine personage. Standing at an early Hebraic standpoint, the Nazaræans would have no part in the monotheistic universalism of the later prophets. The early Hebrews had believed in a Hebrew God, recognizing that other peoples also had theirs. How or when had the Nazaræans transcended that standpoint? In the absence of any elucidation, the very ably argued thesis of Professor Smith as to the name "Nazaræan" seems broadly out of keeping with the thesis that a monotheistic fervour was a main and primary element in the development of the Christian cult; and that Jesus was conceived by his Jewish devotees in general as "the One God." This would have meant the simple dethroning of Yahweh, a kind of procedure seen only in such myths as that of Zeus and Saturn, where one racial cult superseded another. But the main form of Christianity was always Yahwistic, even when Paul in the Acts is made to proclaim to the Athenians an "unknown God"--an idea really derived from Athens. Only for a few, and these non-Jews, can "the Jesus" originally have been the One God; unless in so far as the use of the name "the Lord" may for some unlettered Jews have identified Jesus with Yahweh, who was so styled. The Ebionites denied his divinity all along. The later Nazareans were Messianists who did not any more than the Jews seem to conceive that the Messiah was Yahweh.