Page:Selections. Translated by H. St. J. Thackeray (1919).djvu/34

 experts to have been as superficial as, judged by his interpretation of proper names, was his knowledge of Hebrew. But it is only when we come down to about the last century before our era and to the N.T. period itself that his evidence acquires supreme importance. Here he gives us the background of Jewish and world history in the time of our Lord and the infant Church; without his labours such a work as Schürer's ''Jewish People in the time of Jesus Christ'' could not have been written. Some figures which in the N.T. are little more than names become clothed with life; side-lights are cast on others with which we are more familiar. We may follow in detail the story, told with all the moving pathos of Greek tragedy, of the rise of Herod the Great to the height of his fame and of the nemesis which blasted his domestic happiness. We have full and lifelike portraits of Roman governors and generals, comparable with the slighter sketches in the Gospels and Acts; on the one hand we may read of the causes of the unpopularity of Pilate and of his successors, the last of the procurators, whose corrupt administration and shameless peculation precipitated the war, on the other of high-minded governors like Petronius, claiming kinship with similar noble characters in the N.T.

Among other such illustrations of the N.T. which will be found in the selected passages below the following may be noted. Herod's dying provision to secure himself a national mourning exhibits the cruelty of the murderer of the innocents. In illustration of St. Luke's account of the infancy (ii. 1 ff.) we may read the full story of an enrolment under Quirinius; also of the revolt of Judas to which it gave rise and of the later insurrection of Theudas, both of which are mentioned in Gamaliel's