Note 76 — Chapter IV · THE EVOLUTION OF THE CULT

The embodiment of the rite of baptism on the basis of the Baptist’s alleged acclamation of Jesus as the Messiah, either carried with it or followed upon the claim that Jesus, hitherto regarded as a simple Saviour-God, was a Messiah. After the fall of Jerusalem, the old dream of an earthly Messiah who should restore the Kingdom of Judah or Israel76 was shattered for the vast majority of Jews. Even in the Assumption of Moses, in the main the work of a Quietist Pharisee, written in Hebrew probably between 7 and 29 of the first century,77 there is a virtual abandonment of Messianism, the task of overthrowing the Gentiles being assigned to “the Most High.”78 In the composite Apocalypse of Baruch, written in Hebrew, mainly by Pharisaic Jews, in the latter half of the first century, probably as an implicit polemic against early Jesuism,79 we see the effect of the catastrophe. In the sections written before the fall of Jerusalem, the hope of a Messianic Kingdom is proclaimed; in those written later there is either at most a hope of a Messianic Kingdom without a Messiah or a complete abandonment of mundane expectations.80 What the Jesuist movement did was to develop, outside of Jewry,81 the earlier notion of a Messiah “concealed,” pre-appointed, and coming from heaven to effect the consummation of all things earthly.82