But again later, when religious ideas of the sort were more and more disappearing before a cool examination of actual nature, when the tale of diseases originating in the anger of a deity was growing every day fewer, belief became impossible in the religious meaning of circumcision, or indeed such belief was deliberately rejected, now that a clear and natural explanation of the rite was to be found. The religious motive in turn made way for the medical-hygienic, as in _Philo_ in the passage quoted above, and even Our Lord seems to have held no other view of the rite, when he says[227]: “If a man received circumcision on the sabbath, that the law of Moses may not be broken; are ye wroth with me, because I _made a man every whit whole_ on the sabbath?” _De Wette_ in his Translation adds: “that is to say, not simply, as in circumcision, in one member, but in the whole body.” In fact the question is here of the healing of the man “which had been thirty and eight years in his infirmity” (Ch. V.), whom Christ had made whole at the Pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath, for which reason the Jews wished to put him to death. The sick man was afflicted in his whole body, i. e. in every limb, for without help he could not leave his bed and go down into the Pool. Thus Christ we see contrasts the healing of all the members with circumcision, making it plain that in his view the latter makes whole merely a single member, the penis, or at least puts it in such a condition that it cannot become sick (ὑγιῆ ἐποίησα,—I made whole); accordingly the rite possessed for him only a purely medico-hygienic aim. As to the introduction of Circumcision among the Jews, this may very likely, as we have already pointed, have taken place in the following mode: Evidently the Jews when in Egypt were not yet circumcised, as the speech of the lord Joshua clearly implies, “This day have I taken the reproach of Egypt from off you;” for in the eyes of the Egyptians the uncircumcised condition of the Jews was a reproach, just as in later times “Uncircumcised” was the strongest word of abuse with the Jews themselves.[228] Moses brought up by the Egyptian Priests, initiated into their secret wisdom, must necessarily have been circumcised, and so have known the hygienic as well as religious point of view. Convinced of its expediency, he determined to introduce it among the Jews, in order to make them by outward sign in some sort a holy and pure priestly Nation.[229] For this reason we find the command to circumcise on the eighth day after birth specified among the _Laws of Purification_,[230] yet without any further supplemental addition,—which would certainly not have been omitted, if it had at that time been regarded as a symbolic sign of covenant. Circumcision did not yet possess its purely symbolic meaning; and so it is not yet included among the laws given at Sinai, where the blood of the Burnt Offerings seals the covenant with God.