[120] Compare Brückner, _Die Entstehung der paulinischen Christologie_, 1903, p. 237. But how did the death of Jesus ever come to be interpreted by Paul as a vicarious death of the Messiah? The natural answer would be that it was because of something that Jesus had said or because of an impression derived from His character. That answer is excluded by Wrede's hypothesis. How then did Paul come to regard the death of Jesus as a vicarious death of the Messiah? It could only have been because Paul already had a doctrine of the vicarious death of the Messiah before his conversion. But nothing is more unlikely. There is in late pre-Christian Jewish literature not a trace of such a doctrine.[121] The Messiah in 4 Ezra is represented, indeed, as dying, but His death is of benefit to no one. He dies, along with all the inhabitants of earth, simply in order to make way for the new world.[122] In Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho, the Jew Trypho is represented as admitting that the Messiah was to suffer. But the suffering is not represented as vicarious. And since the Dialogue was written in the middle of the second century after Christ, the isolated testimony of Trypho cannot be used as a witness to first-century conditions. It is perfectly possible, as Schürer suggested, that certain Jews of the second century were only led to concede the suffering of the Messiah in the light of the Scriptural arguments advanced by the Christians. The rabbinical evidence as to sufferings of the Messiah is also too late to be used in reconstructing the pre-Christian environment of Paul. And of real evidence from the period just before Paul's day there is none. In 4 Maccabees vi. 28, 29, indeed (less clearly in xvii. 21, 22), the blood of the righteous is represented as bringing purification for the people. The dying martyr Eleazar is represented as praying:[123] "Be merciful unto thy people, and let our punishment be a satisfaction in their behalf. Make my blood their purification, and take my soul to ransom their souls." This passage, however, is entirely isolated. There is no evidence whatever that the vicarious suffering of the righteous was anything like an established doctrine in the Judaism of Paul's day, and in particular there is no evidence that in pre-Christian Judaism the idea of vicarious suffering was applied to the Messiah. Undoubtedly Isaiah liii might have formed a basis for such an application; it may even seem surprising that that glorious passage was not more influential. But as a matter of fact, Judaism was moving in a very different direction; the later doctrine of the Messiah had absolutely no place for a vicarious death or for vicarious suffering. All the sources are here in agreement. Neither in the apocalypses nor in what is presupposed in the New Testament about Jewish belief is there any trace of a vicarious death of the Messiah. Indeed, there is abundant evidence that such an idea was extremely repulsive to the Jewish mind.