The Gnostics and Their Remains

powers to the secondary rank of angels, and used the name Devas in a bad sense only. The Zoroastrian was the established religion of the Persians at the time when they conquered Assyria; and to a great extent it superseded the material idolatry of the Babylonians, whose gods Darius and Xerxes melted down without any scruple. But Matter is of opinion that the College of Magi, established long before the Persian conquest of Babylon, accepted the new religion upon the change of masters, retaining nothing of the old besides Astrology and Divination.

It must not be forgotten how large a portion of the Jewish captivity remained permanently in Assyria--only two tribes, Judah and Levi, having been sent back to Jerusalem by Cyrus; and Babylon long continued the seat of a most flourishing Rabbinical school, whilst Judea itself, down to the time of the Macedonian conquest, remained a province of the Persian Empire. How important a part of the Persian population at a much later period were either Jews, or under Jewish influence, appears from the very remarkable assertion of Josephus, "that his nation were encouraged to brave all extremities in their final struggle against the power of Rome by the confident expectation of aid from their brethren beyond the Euphrates." And three centuries later Ammianus notices that Julian's invading army came upon a city entirely inhabited by Jews in the very centre of Persia. After the captivity, the principal literary establishments of the Jews appear to have been seated in central Asia. The schools of Nahardea, of Sora, of Punbiditha, were at least as famous as the schools of Palestine (cf. Jos. Ant. xviii. 12). The latter even appear to have paid a sort of filial deference to these foundations: the Chaldee version of the Pentateuch, made by Onkelos of Babylon, was accepted as the authorised version by all the Jews living in Palestine; and the Rabbi Hillel, coming from that capital to Jerusalem, was received by the doctors of the Holy City as an ornament of the same national school, and this only a few years before the birth of Christ. From all these circumstances it is easy to perceive how much of the Zoroastrian element may have pervaded the Jewish religion at the time of the promulgation of Christianity, when its principal teachers

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