It is admitted on all hands that, in the practical form of Prayers for the Dead, the general doctrine of a Middle State can be traced back, in Judaism, up to the important passage in the Second Book of Maccabees, c. ii, vv. 43-45, where Judas Maccabaeus sends about two thousand drachms of silver to Jerusalem, in order that a Sin-Offering may be offered up for the Jews fallen in battle against Gorgias, upon whose bodies heathen amulets had been found. “He did excellently in this … it is a holy and devout thought. Hence he instituted the Sin-Offering for the dead, that they might be loosed from their sins.” That battle occurred in B.C. 166, and this book appears to have been written in B.C. 124, in Egypt, by a Jew of the school of the Pharisees. Now it is difficult not to recognize, in the doctrinal comment upon the facts here given, rather as yet the opinions of a Judaeo-Alexandrian circle, which was small even at the time of the composition of the comment, than the general opinion of Judaism at the date of Judas’s act. For if this act had been prompted by a clear and generally accepted conviction as to the resurrection, and the efficacy of prayers for the dead, the writer would have had no occasion or inclination to make an induction of his own as to the meaning and worth of that act; and we should find some indications of such a doctrine and practice in the voluminous works of Philo and Josephus, some century and a half later on. But all such indications are wanting in these writers. And in the New Testament there is, with regard to helping the dead, only that curious passage: “If the dead do not arise, what shall they do who are baptized for the dead?”[253] where St. Paul refers, without either acceptance or blame, to a contemporary custom among Christian Proselytes from Paganism, who offered up that bath of initiation for the benefit of the souls of deceased relatives who had died without any such purification. Perhaps not till Rabbi Akiba’s time, about 130 A.D., had prayers for the dead become part of the regular Synagogue ritual. By 200 A.D. Tertullian speaks of the practice as of an established usage among the Christian communities: “we make oblations for the Dead, on their anniversary, every year”; although “if you ask where is the law concerning this custom in Scripture, you cannot read of any such there. Tradition will appear before you as its initiator, custom as its confirmer, and faith as its observer.”[254]