Note 368 — Chapter XX · THE FINAL REVOLTS OF THE JEWS

In the case of non-Jews, the Messianic hope was simply the dread of an impending cataclysm. As far as this dread was connected with the failure of the Julian line, it proved groundless. But the Jewish Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of this time are full of prophecies of the end of the world. It was the general belief that the world was very old, and that a fixed cycle, then rapidly coming to its end, determined the limits it would reach.