of the great cities of the empire there w.ie men who had been rescued from idolatry and its attendant de- basements, and brought under the power of a higher moral law. It is possible that in BOme cases the purity of Jewish life may have contributed to this result, and attracted men or women who shrank from the unutter- able contamination in the midst of which tiny lived. Tim converts w ho wen' thus attracted joined, with va- rying strictness (see below >. in the worship of the .lews. They wen- present in their synagogues (Acts xiii, 42, 13, 50; x\ii. 4: xviii. 7). They came up a- pilgrims I., the great leasts at Jerusalem (ii. 10). In Tale-tine its. If the influence was often stronger and Tetter. Even Roman centurions learned to love the conquered nation,
PROSELYTE
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PROSELYTE
built synagogues for them (Luke vii, 5), tasted and prayed, and gave alms, after the pattern of the strictest Jews (Acts x, 2, 30), and became preachers of the new faith to the soldiers under them (ver. 7). Such men. drawn by what was best in Judaism, were naturally among the readiest receivers of the new truth which rose out of it, and became in many cases the nucleus of a Gentile church.
Proselytism had, however, its darker side. The Jews of Palestine were eager to spread their faith by the same weapons as those with which they had de- fended it. Had not the power of the empire stood in the way, the religion of Moses, stripped of its higher elements, might have been propagated far and wide by force, as was afterwards the religion of Mohammed. As it was, the Idumaeans had the alternative offered them by John Hyrcanus of death, exile, or circumcision (Jo- sephus, Ant. xiii, 9, 3). The Ituraeans were converted in the same way by Aristobulus {ibid, xiii, 11, 3). In the more frenzied fanaticism of a later period, the Jews under Joseph us could hardly be restrained from seizing and circumcising two chiefs of Trachonitis who had come as envoys (Josephus, Life. 23 J. They compelled a Roman centurion, whom they had taken prisoner, to purchase his life by accepting the sign of the covenant (Josephus, War, ii, 11. 10). Where force was not in their power (the " veluti Juda?i, cogemus" of Horace, Sat. i, 4, 142, implies that they sometimes ventured on it even at Rome), they obtained their ends by the most unscrupulous fraud. They appeared as soothsayers, di- viners, exorcists, and addressed themselves especially to the fears and superstitions of women. Their influ- ence over these became the subject of indignant satire (Juvenal, Sat. vi, 543-547). They persuaded noble matrons to send money and purple to the Temple (Jo- sephus, .4 nt. xviii, 3, 5). At Damascus the wives of nearly half the population were supposed to be tainted with Judaism (Josephus, War, ii, 10, 2). At Rome they numbered in their ranks, in the person of Poppsea, even an imperial concubine (Josephus, Ant. xx, 7, 11). The converts thus made cast off all ties of kindred and affection (Tacitus, But. v, 9). Those who were most active in proselytizing were precisely those from whose teaching all that was most true and living had departed. The vices of the Jew were ingrafted on the vices of the heathen. A repulsive casuistry released the convert from obligations which he had before recognised, while in other things he was bound hand and foot to an un- healthy superstition. The Law of the Corban may serve as one instance (Matt, xv, 4-6). Another is found in the rabbinic teaching as to marriage. Circumcision, like a new birth, cancelled all previous relationships, and unions within the nearest degrees of blood were therefore no longer incestuous (Maimon. ex Jebam. p. 982; Selden, De Jure Nat. ei Gent, ii, 4; Uxor Bebr. ii, 18). It was no wonder that the proselyte became "twofold more the child of Gehenna" (Matt, xxiii, 15) than the Pharisees themselves.
The position of such proselytes was indeed every way pitiable. At Rome, and in other large cities, they be- came the butts of popular scurrility. The words "cur- tus," " verpes," met them at everv corner (Horace, Sat. i, 4, 142; Martial, vii, 29, 34, *81 ; xi, 95; xii, 37). They had to share the fortunes of the people with whom they had cast in their lot, might be banished from Italy (Acts xviii, 2; Suet. Claud. 25), or sent to die of malaria in the most unhealthy stations of the empire (Tacitus, Ami. ii, 85). At a later time, they were bound to make a public profession of their conver- sion, and to pay a special tax (Sueton. Dnmit. xii). If they failed to do this and were suspected, they might be subject to the most degrading examination to ascer- tain the fact of their being proselytes (ibid.) Among the Jews themselves their case was not much better. For the most part, the convert gained but little honor even from those who gloried in having brought him over to their sect and party. The popular Jewish feel-
ing about them was like the popular Christian feeling about a converted Jew. They were regarded (by a strange rabbinic perversion of Isa. xiv, 1) as the leprosy of Israel, " cleaving" to the house of Jacob {Jtbam. xlvii, 4; Kiddush. lxx, 0). An opprobrious proverb coupled them with the vilest profligates ("proselyti et paedera- staj") as hindering the coming of the Messiah (Light- foot, Bor. Iteb. in Matt, xxiii, 5). It became a recog- nised maxim that no wise man would trust a proselyte even to the twenty-fourth generation (Jidkuth Ruth, f.- 1G3 a).