Hadrian’s rescripts seem to have dealt on several occasions with this law. His obvious intention to extend the statute may have caused him to use terms of general effect. Perhaps an isolated case of the practice of circumcision among people outside of those to whom it was an ancient custom may have been followed by indictment and punishment. If Hadrian really had attempted to carry out this prohibition generally, he would have provoked a rebellion in Egypt as well as in Judea, since in Egypt the priests practised it likewise.[378] The rescript of Antoninus, a few years later, which expressly exempted Jews from the broad condemnation of the practice, simply restated established law.[379] Indeed it may well be that the occasion of Pius’ rescript was rather one that restricted the Jews than one that enlarged their privileges. Even in the case of the severest form of mutilation, it is forbidden if it is done _promercii aut libidinis causa_. A similar insistence on criminal intent must have been present in the case of the lesser mutilation involved in the Jewish rite. There could of course never have been any question that circumcision was not performed _promercii aut libidinis causa_, and therefore there seems to be little reason for the rescript of Pius, unless we assume it to have been a direct attempt to check the spread of Judaism by making the performance of the rite in the case of non-Jews criminal _per se_, without proof of wrongful intent. Paul, writing about seventy-five years later, states the limitation on the performance of the rite even more broadly, by including within it slaves of non-Jewish origin.[380] In all circumstances there does not seem to have been any real effort to enforce it. The Jewish propaganda went on in spite of it, not surreptitiously, as in the case of the still-proscribed Christians, but quite frankly. The statement of Paul is the stranger because of the open favor shown by Paul’s master, the Syrian Severus Alexander, toward all foreign cults, including that of the Jews. The Sentences of Paul may have been written before the decree of the emperor which his biographer mentions, by which, he says, Severus strengthened the privileged position of the Jews, _Iudaeis privilegia reservavit_.[381] When one contrasts this with the immediately following statement, _Christianos esse passus est_, “He allowed the Christians to profess their faith,” it is plain that in the case of the Jews there is no question of mere toleration, but of the recognition of an established position, and that is not quite in accord with the statement in Paul’s Sentences, according to which the spread of Judaism was rigorously checked, even to the extent of modifying one of the fundamental concepts of the law—the unlimited character of the master’s dominion over his slaves.