Now it is deserving of remark, that many of the Rabbis whose sayings are recorded in the Mischna lived in the time of our Lord, or shortly after, and yet that not the smallest reference is made to the teaching of Jesus, nor even any allusion to him personally. Although the Mischna was drawn up beside the Sea of Galilee, at Tiberias, near where Jesus lived and wrought miracles and taught, neither he nor his followers are mentioned once throughout the Mischna. There must be a reason why the Mischna, as well as Josephus and Justus of Tiberias, is silent respecting Jesus of Nazareth. The reason I have already given. The followers of Jesus were regarded as belonging to the sect of the Essenes. Our Lord’s teaching made no great impression on the Jews of his time. It was so radically unlike the pedantry and puerilities of their Rabbis, that they did not acknowledge him as a teacher of the Law. He had preached Essene disengagement from the world, conquest of passion. Only when Essene enthusiasm was thought to threaten the powerful families which held possession of and abused the pontifical office, had the high‐priest and his party taken alarm, and obtained the condemnation and death of Jesus. Their alarm died away, the political situation altered, the new Essenianism ceased to be suspected, and Nazarene Christianity took its place among the parties of Judaism, attracting little notice and exciting no active hostility. The Mischna was drawn up at the beginning of the third century, when Christianity was spreading rapidly through the Roman empire, and had excited the Roman emperors to fierce persecution of those who professed it. Yet Jehuda the Holy says not a word about Christ or Christianity. He and those whose sayings he quotes had no suspicion that this religion, which was gaining ground every day among the Gentiles, had sprung from the teaching of a Jew. Christianity ruffled not the surface of Jewdom. The harmless Nazarenes were few, and were as strict observers of the Law as the straitest Pharisees. And if Christianity was thus a matter of indifference to the Jews, no wonder that every recollection of Jesus of Nazareth, every tradition of his birth, his teaching, his death, had died away, so that, even at the close of the second century, Origen could charge his Jew opponent with knowing nothing of Jesus save what he had learned from the Gospels. The Mischna became in turn the subject of commentary and interpretation by the Rabbis. The explanations of famous Rabbis, who taught on the Mischna, were collected, and called Gemara (the Complement), because with it the collection of rabbinical expositions of the Law was completed. There are two editions of the Gemara, one made in Palestine and called the Jerusalem Gemara, the other made at Babylon.