I have been obliged at some length to show that the early Christian Church in Palestine bore so close a resemblance to the Essene sect, that to the ordinary superficial observer it was indistinguishable from it. And also, that so broad was the schism separating the Nazarene Church consisting of Hebrews, from the Pauline Church consisting of Gentiles that no external observer who had not examined the doctrines of these communities would suppose them to be two forms of the same faith, two religions sprung from the same loins. Their connection was as imperceptible to a Jew, as would be that between Roman Catholicism and Wesleyanism to‐day. Both Nazarene and Jew worshipped in the same temple, observed the same holy days, practised the same rites, shrank with loathing from the same food, and mingled their anathemas against the same apostate, Paul, who had cast aside at once the law in which he had been brought up, and the Hebrew name by which he had been known. The silence of Josephus and Justus under these circumstances is explicable. They have described Essenism; that description covers Nazarenism as it appeared to the vulgar eye. If they have omitted to speak of Jesus and his death, it is because both wrote at the time when Nazarene and Pharisee were most closely united in sympathy, sorrow and regret for the past. It was not a time to rip up old wounds, and Justus and Josephus were both Pharisees. That neither should speak of Pauline Christianity is also not remarkable. It was a Gentile religion, believed in only by Greeks and Romans; it had no open _observable_ connection with Judaism. It was to them but another of those many religions which rose as mushrooms, to fade away again on the soil of the Roman world, with which the Jewish historians had little interest and no concern. If this explanation which I have offered is unsatisfactory, I know not whither to look for another which can throw light to the strange silence of Philo, Josephus and Justus. It is thrown in the teeth of Christians, that history, apart from the Gospels, knows nothing of Christ; that the silence of contemporary, and all but contemporary, Jewish chroniclers, invalidates the testimony of the inspired records. The reasons which I have given seem to me to explain this silence plausibly, and to show that it arose, not from ignorance of the acts of Christ and the existence of the Church, but from a deliberate purpose. III. The Jew Of Celsus. Celsus was one of the four first controversial opponents of Christianity. His book has been lost, with the exception of such portions as have been preserved by Origen.