less a refuge from Roman taxes than from the dead hand which the Jewish rabbis laid upon his spirit. It is obvious that his conception of new birth and new life in a loving creative activity was understood by few, if any, of the men and women who trooped after him, craving mental and physical healing, bread and fish, and power and place in the physical kingdom over which they persisted in believing he was to reign.
He was unable to explain his idea to the satisfaction of his own family. Even his most intimate friends misunderstood him absurdly, quarreled over left and right hand places in the throne room, and on one occasion went so far as to suggest that they should call down fire from heaven on a house which had refused them hospitality. As for the leading representatives of the established order among his countrymen, they regarded him as a dangerous radical, an habitual Sabbath-breaker, a blasphemer and a fomenter of sedition against the state—not to mention the fact that in his hotter moods he had designated them personally as liars and vipers.
From the Jewish point of view there was abundant evidence to support all these charges. Furthermore, the cures and resurrections attributed to Jesus seem not to have impressed the hierarchy as they impressed the common people. They regarded them as orthodox physicians regarded the miracles of M. Coué. That the Roman Pilate was not offended by his breaking the Jewish Sabbath or by his identifying himself with the Jewish God or by his assumption of the Jewish kingship, temporal or spiritual, was irrelevant to the Jewish case against him.
Jesus, as we must suppose, did his best to explain and justify himself to his own generation. On the
