f he heard Jesus say, "Love your enemies,
do good to them that hate you, bless them that curse you ... as ye
would that men should do to you do ye to them likewise; for if ye love
them that love you what thank have you ... love ye your enemies," what
would such a man have thought? In the light of the experiences of our
own time there is no reason for wonder that Jesus in the end found it
impossible to live in Galilee. The marvel is that he escaped with his
life.

The contrast between such teaching and that of the Fourth Philosophy is
so obvious that it could never either escape attention or be denied if
it were not for the absence of any definite mention of this party in
the gospels. The probable explanation is that by the time that the
gospels were written the Fourth Philosophy had ceased to exist, and
that in Greek circles this party was never prominent. The result was
that there was no reason to perpetuate any tradition as to controversy
between Jesus and the Fourth Philosophy. The only dispute with the
{32} Jews in which the Christians of the generation that produced the
gospels were interested was that with the rabbis, the lineal
descendants of the Pharisees. Thus they preserved the story of
arguments between Jesus and the Pharisees, but not between him and the
representatives of other schools. This, however, did not mean that the
teaching of Jesus called out by the Fourth Philosophy was not
preserved. The teaching itself was given, but, just as in the Talmud
the sayings of rabbis are often given without historic context, so also
in Christian tradition the sayings of Jesus usually appear without the
incidents which had called them out. In exactly the same way, except
for the final scene in Jerusalem, the priests and Sadducees are not
mentioned; they played no part in the life of the Christian generation
which produced the gospels. There was, however, a special reason why
the non-resistant teaching of Jesus should be preserved even when its
historic background was lost. Though the Fourth Philosophy had ceased
to have any contact with the Church, the persecution of Christians was
an actual problem, and the practical difficulty of right conduct under
its stress kept alive teaching which might otherwise have been
forgotten.

The question is sometimes asked whether such teaching is really
consistent with the violent cleansing of the Temple. The true answer
is probably not to be found in any ingenious harmo