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Hence the Apostle seeks to put his case to them so as to show his true adherence to the central principles of Judaism, insisting that he is guiltless of revolt against either the nation or the law and traditional observances; that he had been found innocent by the Palestinian representatives of Roman authority; that his appeal to Caesar, which would naturally seem hostile to the rulers in Jerusalem, was not meant as an accusation of the nation to which he felt himself to belong, and so was no sign of deficient patriotism, but had been forced on him as his only means of saving his life.
Even the impoverished, much-detested and powerless Muslims of the northern Caucasus Chechens, Circassians and Dagestanis have benefited from this newfound awareness of their electoral power. Though divided by their common creed Shiites vs. Sunnites vs. Wahabbites and so on the Muslims of Europe are united in supporting the Palestinian cause and in opposing the Iraq war.
He there describes the crime of the high priest John in killing his brother in the Temple as more cruel and impious than anything done by the Greeks or Barbarians an expression which must have originated in a Jewish, probably a Palestinian, authority, to whom Greek connoted cruelty.
And the ritual vessels of the tabernacle have also their universal significance. "If," says the Palestinian Hellenist, "any man do but consider the fabric of the tabernacle and regard the vestments of the high priest, he will find that our legislator was a Divine man, and that we are unjustly reproached by those who attack us for tribal narrowness.
Any ten Jews had a right to form a synagogue of their own, and general community of interests, joined to opinions differing from those of others, would be the natural basis of its organisation; but it is sometimes hard for Christians, who have come to think of identity of opinion, especially on points beyond the reach of proof, as the basis of ecclesiastical life, to understand that Palestinian Judaism admitted the widest possible range of thought, and that the Church of Israel rested not on uniformity of thought, but on obedience to the Law.
The crisis came when numerous 'Hellenists' attached themselves to the Church Jews of the Dispersion, from Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere. A threatened rupture between these and the Palestinian Christians was averted by the appointment of seven deacons or charity commissioners, among whom Stephen soon became prominent by the dangerously 'liberal' character of his teaching.
Now the whole of the rationalistic doubt about the Palestinian legends, from its rise in the early eighteenth century out of the last movements of the Renascence, was founded on the fixity of facts. Miracles were monstrosities because they were against natural law, which was necessarily immutable law.
Whoever believes in the Torah, it is written, shall be exalted, as it is said, "From the gift of the law man attains the heritage of God, and by that heritage he reaches Heaven." In this passage of Palestinian allegorism, it may be noticed that the Torah is regarded as a spiritual bond between man and God, and as a sort of intermediary power between them.
They possessed as much political independence as the Palestinian community when under Roman rule; and enjoyed all the advantages without any of the narrowing influences, physical or intellectual, of a ghetto.
The first Ptolemy, to whom at the dismemberment of Alexander's empire Egypt had fallen, continued to the Jewish settlers the privileges of full citizenship which Alexander had granted them. For the next hundred years the Palestinian and Egyptian Jews were under the same rule, and for the most part the Ptolemies treated them well.
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