who would listen to no compromise with the Romans, gained a complete ascendancy, and their leaders, Simon (Bargiora), Eleazar and John of Giscala, assumed a temporary sovereignty in Jerusalem after the massacre of their principal opponents. This second "Redemption of Israel" was commemorated by coins, in which the legends, symbols and character of the Maccabæan coinage were reproduced. The silver coin here represented will shew how exact was the imitation.

The obverse reads Eleazar Hakkohen, Eleazar the Highpriest, with a vase and a palm-branch. The reverse, Shenath Achath Ligullath Isr[ael], Year one of the Redemption of Israel, with a bunch of grapes. Simon Bargiora, the head of a rival faction of the Zealots, struck coins also, closely resembling those of Eleazar, except that he does not claim the title of high-priest. This revival of the coinage of the former times of Israel's independence was well calculated to encourage the hopes of the patriotic party. But in order that it should produce this effect, we must suppose that the old coinage was still in circulation and the old character still familiar to the people. This is a strong presumption against the opinion that the square Hebrew had already supplanted it; for who would endeavour to work upon the popular mind by the use of an obsolete alphabet? Of John of Giscala, the leader of another of the factions, who were doing the work of the Romans within the walls, no coins have been found.

The conquerors of Jerusalem celebrated their bloody and hard-won victory by a variety of medals. Those of Vespasian and Titus, representing Judæa bound and weeping beneath a palm-tree, a Jew with his hands tied and stripped of his armour, and similar devices, are too familiar to need special illustration. The conquered nation continued to be oppressed and persecuted; what was called the Fiscus Judaicus, the payment to the Imperial treasury of the former tribute to the Temple, was exacted with great harsh

ness during the reign of Domitian. A coin of Nerva, inscribed on the reverse FISCI JUDAICI CALUMNIA SUBLATA, while it commemorates its abolition, confesses its abuse.* But the discontent of the Jewish people was too deeply seated to be removed by a slight act of grace. They watched the opportunity of the forces of the Empire being engaged in a Parthian war, A.D. 115, to rise in insurrection, and put their enemies to death wherever they could. These insulated movements had probably no definite object beyond revenge upon a hostile population; but the rebellion in Palestine, which began in A.D. 131, aimed at the recovery of Jerusalem and the re-establishment of Jewish independence. Such was the determination with which the Jews fought under the leadership of Barcocheb,† that it required the best troops and ablest generals of Hadrian to put down the insurrection after a severe struggle of two years. Here, again, the Jewish coinage comes in to illustrate the Jewish history. Mr. Madden's work contains representations of numerous coins, with archaic Hebrew characters and symbols, bearing the name of Simon, struck over those of Roman emperors subsequent to the time of Vespasian-Titus, Domitian and Trajan, but so imperfectly struck that the original legend can still be traced. Whether the leader's true name was Simon, or Barcocheb assumed it as an encouragement to his followers, which is not improbable; or whether he used the stamp of Simon Bargiora, preserved since the first revolt, there can be no doubt that these coins belong to the second. We give an example of one of them.

The obverse exhibits the name of Simon; the reverse, imperfectly struck, Lacher[uth] Ierusalem, The deliverance

* The Calumnia here acknowledged answers to the σukopavría (false accusation) which Zacchæus (Luke xix. 8) confesses, we presume, as practised by his subordinates.

+"Son of a Star," an allusion to Numbers xxiv. 17, "There shall come a star out of Jacob."

of Jerusalem-while round the margin may be distinctly read TITVS CAESAR VESP. What a stern joy, what a luxury of revenge must Barcocheb's have been, when he placed the stamp of Jewish independence on the head of Titus of Titus, who had destroyed the Holy City and razed the Temple to its foundations, had slaughtered its unresisting inhabitants or condemned them to the slow death of the mines, and carried the sacred vessels of the Temple in triumph to the Capitol! The success of Barcocheb was shortlived; the second revolt ended, like the first, in a bloody catastrophe, and, instead of Jerusalem being delivered, a Roman colony, bearing the name Elia Capitolina, commemorated the victory of Hadrian and the triumph of Paganism.

The present age is distinguished by the sympathy which it feels for nations struggling to recover their independence, and we are disposed to claim a share in it for the Jews. They were certainly a "down-trodden nationality," and their national feeling was stronger than ordinary, because their religion was an element of strong repulsion between them and their polytheistic neighbours. It was increased by the obligation of simultaneous resort to the national sanctuary, by laws making them in every respect a peculiar people, by traditions of wonderful deliverances wrought for them in past ages, by prophecies of future glory and prosperity, surpassing all that their history recorded. The sympathy which is so freely accorded to Greeks, Poles or Italians, is denied to the Jews, partly because they are supposed to have committed a crime without a parallel-not a homicide, but a deicide-partly because their national depravity was also without a parallel. With regard to the first, the legal maxim may fairly be urged, that before sentence is passed and punishment is inflicted, the corpus delicti, the fact that the crime has been committed, must first be proved, and that here the proof fails. The general depravity of the nation in our Lord's time and during the first rebellion has been assumed on grounds none of which are satisfactory. The testimony of Josephus is alleged to prove that the whole nation was utterly corrupt; but he is by no means a veracious historian, and he had special reasons for depreciating those whose cause he had deserted. The crimes committed in the course of the struggle were of an atrocious kind, but it is

most unjust to impute to a whole nation the deeds done or instigated by the bold bad men whom revolutions or insurrections raise to power. The worst epidemics leave the great majority of a people in sound health. Could "salvation have been of the Jews," could they have been the means of the moral regeneration of mankind, if in their average moral quality they had not been far superior to the heathen? The gospel narrative brings prominently before us the least estimable part of our Lord's contemporariesthe self-righteous Pharisee, the sceptical Sadducee, the Herodian, a political religionist, the fickle populace of Jerusalem, a priest and a Levite without human sympathies. And these represent to us the Jewish people. But we doubt not that there were among them many a true Israelite, like Nathaniel-many a household like that of Lazarus and his sisters. A new light has lately broken upon us, from our increased knowledge of the Jewish traditional literature. When we find how closely the morality taught in their schools approached to that of the New Testament,* we are obliged to confess, that in our zeal to exalt the Gospel we have done injustice to the teachers of the Law.

The outward position of the Jew among us has greatly improved. He is no longer subject to the brutal outrages and exactions of former times; Christians no longer spit upon his gaberdine. The Legislature, as usual in religious matters, "slowly wise and meanly just," has allowed him to steal into the House of Commons. His evil days are past; but his liability to evil tongues continues, if not in his own person, in that of his ancestors. We take no account of missionary sermons or speeches on missionary platforms, but we regret to read such a sentence as the following, in a work of so high a character as the Rev. C. Merivale's History of the Romans under the Empire:+"There is another point of view which the heathen philosopher" (Tacitus) "could not seize, from which the Christian must regard the position of the Jews. Whether we consider their sin to have lain in their carnal interpretation of prophecy, or in

See the remarkable article in the Quarterly Review for October last, p. 437. In reference to a late sermon of the Archbishop of York at Whitehall, it may be remarked, that there is no reason to doubt that the precepts of the Rabbi Hillel, for example, really preceded the preaching of Christ.

+ VI. 567.

their rejection of truth and godliness in the person of Jesus Christ, they were judicially abandoned to their own passions and the punishment which naturally awaited them." We protest against either of these suppositions as constituting the Christian point of view. The notion that judicial blindness, involving a psychological miracle, has been inflicted on a people as the means of their destruction, is Jewish, or indeed heathen (Quos Jupiter vult perdere, &c.), rather than Christian. Such phrases are obsolete in philosophical history. By the carnal interpretation of prophecy, we suppose Mr. Merivale means the literal. But was it a sin on the part of the Jews, meriting extermination, to have been ignorant of the devices of "double senses," "types and antitypes," "adumbrations," "immediate and remote references," &c., to which Christian interpreters of prophecy have been driven, in order to justify what Mr. Merivale would call its spiritual, as opposed to its carnal, interpretation? He himself admits "that as apostles of national liberty the Zealots were contending for a noble principle." They contended also for what they believed to be the only true religion; and when we consider the intense power of these two principles, acting in unison, we need not seek in judicial blindness for the cause of the desperate energy with which they fought against the Romans. Their loss of independence was the gain of humanity, but we are not therefore justified in imputing to them a wilful resistance to the designs of Providence, which are not revealed beforehand.

K.

VI. THE EPISTLE OF JUDE AND THE PROPHECY AND ASSUMPTION OF MOSES.

Novum Testamentum extra Canonem receptum. Edidit A. Hilgenfeld. Leipzig. 1866.

Mosis Prophetia et Assumtio.

Eine Quelle für das Neue Testament, zum ersten Male Deutsch herausgegeben, von Dr. Gustav Volkmar. Leipzig. 1867.

Now that questions relating to the authorship and constitution of the books of the New Testament are being every day