Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/522

506 governors, wholly apart from the governed. To say that the Gadarenes "adopted the Pompeian era on their coinage" out of gratitude, must almost be a jest. If Pompey re-annexed Gadara to the Syrian province, it is most improbable that he should have altered its laws respecting religion. Mr. Huxley supposes this change was popular as a restoration of Roman authority. But, had he consulted the text of Josephus, he would have seen it was approved, because the cities were restored by him to the "Home Rule" of their own proper inhabitants.

—Mr. Huxley comes nearer to the point when he touches the text of Josephus, on which, indeed, apart from the Synoptic Evangelists, we have chiefly to depend. He deals with the passages found in the 18th chapter of Book II of the Judaic War. Now, these passages are most dangerous and seductive to those of his opinion, because, if severed from other passages, they would prove his point: on one condition, however, namely this, that we admit what is, indeed, his master fallacy, to be sound in logic and in fact.

He says that the revolted Jews are stated by Josephus to have laid waste the villages of the Syrians, "and their neighboring cities, and after them Gadara and Hippos." He then cites from Section 5 the passage which states that Scythopolis, Askelon, Ptolemais, and Tyre slew or put in prison great numbers of Jews. "Those of Hippos and those of Gadara did the like; as did the remaining cities of Syria." And hereupon Prof. Huxley assumes that his case is proved: causa finita est.

And so, perhaps, it might be were we to adopt what I have termed his master fallacy. That master fallacy is his assumption as to the cleavage of the Palestinian communities. According to him, all that was anti-Roman was Jewish or Hebrew, and all that acted on the other side was Gentile. Where, as in Tyre or Ptolemais, the population generally is known to have been Gentile, this assumption would, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, be a fair one. Such, in Mr. Huxley's view, was the case of Gadara, where the Jews were only local immigrants, like the inhabitants of a Ghetto. But this is just what he ought to prove; and it is not proved by showing either that those Jews who were in revolt attacked a part of the Gadarite population, or that the Gadarite population afterward did the like to some Jews among themselves. For the whole text of Josephus testifies that the Jews, as often happens in a case where foreign domination exists over a people of high nationalism, were sharply divided among themselves on the point of resistance. There were among them