80 THE APOSTLE PAUL Greek philosophy and Mysteries; it was foreign to genuine Palestinian Judaism. The hope of the latter was directed towards the earthly blessedness of the Theocratic nation; and when the Palestinian Jews began to postulate a share in the future Messianic happiness for the pious dead, they could only represent that to themselves in the form of a bodily resurrection: therefore the resurrection of the sleeping righteous forms an essential act in the apocalyptic drama. But how could the Alexandrian Jew feel any enthusiasm for the resurrection of a body which he regarded, quite in the manner of Plato and Seneca, as a mere perishable envelope and heavy burden of the soul! (Wisd. ix. 15). It is therefore intelligible that in Hellenistic Judaism the hope of immortality prevailed over the Messianic idea, and either forced this so completely into the background as we shall find it in the case of Philo and the Essenes, or modified it greatly in the direction of a spiritual hope concerned with the other world, such as we have found in the later apocalypses. It is also quite possible, though not clearly demonstrable, that the conception of a Messiah pre-existing in heaven before His mani- festation upon earth, has a historical connection with the Platonic-Alexandrian philosophumenon of a heavenly ideal man, who was the prototype of the creation of man upon earth, a doctrine which passed from Alexandrianism into the Rabbinic theology. It is in any case certain that the Alexandrian- Jewish religious philosophy, which I reserve for fuller treatment in a later context (vol. iii), was an extremely important link of connection between