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But with that part of the Palestinian story which is told in the New Testament I am not directly concerned till the next chapter; and the matter here is a more general one. The truth is that through a thousand channels something has returned to the modern mind. It is not Christianity. On the contrary, it would be truer to say that it is paganism.
In the same chapter he describes some magical plant, "Baaras, possessing power to drive away demons, which are no other than the spirits of the wicked that enter into living men and kill them, unless they obtain some help against them." This apparently was a commonplace of Palestinian natural science, as known to the Greco-Roman world, and Josephus simply copied it.
But Santayana does not make the mistake of regarding the Reformation as a return to Palestinian Christianity. This was, indeed, the opinion of the Reformers themselves; but all religious innovation seeks to base itself on some old tradition.
The differences in general tone and in geographical details can readily be explained by the later date about the eighth century and the character of the Palestinian landscape.
We must not, consequently, expect to find in the lists any exhaustive catalogue of Palestinian towns or even of the leading cities. They mark only the lines of march taken by the army of Thothmes or by his scouts and messengers. Besides the Canaanitish lists there are also long lists of localities conquered by the Pharaoh in Northern Syria. With these, however, we have nothing to do.
They betray a belief in diabolical possession, a local superstition from which the author of the Fourth Gospel, who evidently was not a Palestinian Jew, was free. There is discrepancy between the first three Gospels and the fourth, notably as to the day and consequent significance of Christ's celebration of the Passover.
Of these about twenty thousand were Anatolian Turks trained soldiers, splendid fighting material, as was shown by their resistance at the Dardanelles. The rest were Palestinian Arabs, and very inferior troops they were. The Arab as a soldier is at once stupid and cunning: fierce when victory is on his side, but unreliable when things go against him.
Nor was he the man to write anonymously. It reveals, indeed, a mastery of the arts of Greek rhetoric, such as the Palestinian soldier who learnt Greek only late in life, and who required the help of friends to correct his syntax, could never have acquired.
Yet there can be no doubt that under the conditions prevailing at the time the continued existence of the colonies was only made possible through the liberal assistance which came from the outside. The progress of the Palestinian colonization, slow though it was, provided a concrete basis for the doctrines preached by the "Lovers of Zion" in Russia.
If at times he supports a greater severity than the Palestinian rabbis eventually allowed, that is where greater severity implies a closer relation to Roman Law.
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