46 Human Levitation. (January, 
Jesus, first near the upper Jordan (where both make His 
movement to have commenced) and afterward at Jerusalem. 
In each, this results in levitations and aérial journeys of 
both together, and they are simultaneously seen over the 
Temple. In each, the adversary’s aim is a precipitation of 
Jesus from a great height into the crowds of the holy city. 
In each, he fails ;* and we may add that, in the only account 
naming and identifying him, he is the same man who, in 
the speech ascribed to Peter (Acts, 1., 18) is stated to 
have incurred, three years later, the exact fate he here plans 
for his victim; and, further, that he is the only man to 
whom is anywhere appropriated the term Ata@odoc, which, in 
narratives, is peculiar to the opponent who “ taketh” and 
‘“‘setteth”’ Jesus in these strange positions. Surely, on the 
whole, we must regard this devil as a man—the tool 
employed (doubtless by the great real Satan).to play a 
similar part towards this ‘‘ last man-Adam ”’ to that borne 
toward his and our greatest ancestor, the Messiah of Eden, 
by the villain ‘‘ Ha-nachash,” remembered only by the 
name his punishment earned; ‘‘ the crawler,” doomed on 
his belly to go, and dust to eat with all his food, all the 
remaining days of that life. And as the other application 
made of this term AtaBoroc is to that father of Pharisees and 
‘“murderer from the beginning,” may we not conclude that 
Jesus, whose view of resurrection was so plainly Pytha- 
gorean, implied these two to be incarnations of the very 
same ‘‘ wicked-one;” and probably Doeg, against whom the 
* The above story, whose end is untranslatable, makes this, like all the 
other miracle contests, a drawn one ; neither magician displaying any advan- 
tage, like Aaron’s, over the other; and any moral aspect, such as the gospels 
give to the struggle, being absent, as there is no moral element in these 
legends. In the ancient ‘‘Toldoth Jeshu” quoted, he merely works wonders, 
chiefly of healing, and maintains that he is not of illegitimate birth, as the 
Sanhedrin insist, but is the Creator of heaven and earth, ‘‘ Deus, et quidem 
Filius Dei,” and requires all to obey him as such; the crowd acknowledging 
him purely on the strength of his miracles. Hence a reader is more reminded 
of the fourth gospel than of the others, wherein such claims are subordinate 
to moral parables and precepts. In this document, however, his condué& has 
no more spot than in any of them,—Mr. Voysey would say it has less. It is 
far otherwise with the medieval ‘‘Toldoth Jeshu Natzri,” published by 
Huldrich, in which he is made atrocious, and murders his father Joseph. 
Both documents agree with the gospels, against present “criticism,” in 
placing his birth at Bethlehem. ‘They also startlingly dissolve some of the 
seemingly most incompatible differences in Matthew and Luke. Thus, they 
both make Mary a Bethlehemite, but, one of them, Joseph a Nazarene, which 
would most naturally reconcile the annunciation stories, if Mary was at that 
time on a visit to her future husband’s town. Again, if Judas (whom they 
agree with the fourth gospel in making a spy deputed by the rulers from the 
first, always feigning discipleship, merely to effect the capture intended through- 
out) was, as they both make him, a member of the Sanhedrin, the purchase of 
the field Aceldama might be indifferently called his act or that body’s. 
