A point of considerable practical importance today is that he expressly
repudiates the idea that forms of religion, once rooted, can be weeded
out and replanted with the flowers of a foreign faith. "If you try to
root up the tares you will root up the wheat as well." Our proselytizing
missionary enterprises are thus flatly contrary to his advice; and their
results appear to bear him out in his view that if you convert a man
brought up in another creed, you inevitably demoralize him. He acts on
this view himself, and does not convert his disciples from Judaism
to Christianity. To this day a Christian would be in religion a Jew
initiated by baptism instead of circumcision, and accepting Jesus as the
Messiah, and his teachings as of higher authority than those of Moses,
but for the action of the Jewish priests, who, to save Jewry from being
submerged in the rising flood of Christianity after the capture of
Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, set up what was
practically a new religious order, with new Scriptures and elaborate
new observances, and to their list of the accursed added one Jeschu, a
bastard magician, whose comic rogueries brought him to a bad end like
Punch or Til Eulenspiegel: an invention which cost them dear when the
Christians got the upper hand of them politically. The Jew as Jesus,
himself a Jew, knew him, never dreamt of such things, and could follow
Jesus without ceasing to be a Jew.