But the development which the doctrine of the Minokhired has taken among the Parsees is modern, and may imply a foreign influence.  The “Divine Intelligence” (Maiyu-Khratu) appears in the Zend books; but it does not there serve as basis to a theory; it only enters into some invocations.  The comparisons which have been attempted between the Alexandrian theory of the Word and certain points of Egyptian theology may not be entirely without value.  But nothing indicates that, in the centuries which preceded the Christian era, Palestinian Judaism had borrowed anything from Egypt.]

[Footnote 6:  Acts viii. 10.]

Jesus appears to have remained a stranger to these refinements of theology, which were soon to fill the world with barren disputes.  The metaphysical theory of the Word, such as we find it in the writings of his contemporary Philo, in the Chaldean Targums, and even in the book of “Wisdom,"[1] is neither seen in the Logia of Matthew, nor in general in the synoptics, the most authentic interpreters of the words of Jesus.  The doctrine of the Word, in fact, had nothing in common with Messianism.  The “Word” of Philo, and of the Targums, is in no sense the Messiah.  It was John the Evangelist, or his school, who afterward endeavored to prove that Jesus was the Word, and who created, in this sense, quite a new theology, very different from that of the “kingdom of God."[2] The essential character of the Word was that of Creator and of Providence.  Now, Jesus never pretended to have created the world, nor to govern it.  His office was to judge it, to renovate it.  The position of president at the final judgment of humanity was the essential attribute which Jesus attached to himself, and the character which all the first Christians attributed to him.[3] Until the great day, he will sit at the right hand of God, as his Metathronos, his first minister, and his future avenger.[4] The superhuman Christ of the Byzantine apsides, seated as judge of the world, in the midst of the apostles in the same rank with him, and superior to the angels who only assist and serve, is the exact representation of that conception of the “Son of man,” of which we find the first features so strongly indicated in the book of Daniel.

[Footnote 1:  ix. 1, 2, xvi. 12.  Comp. vii. 12, viii. 5, and following, ix., and in general ix.-xi.  These prosopopoeia of Wisdom personified are found in much older books.  Prov. viii., ix.; Job xxviii.; Rev. xix. 13.]

[Footnote 2:  John, Gospel, i. 1-14; 1 Epistle v. 7; moreover, it will be remarked, that, in the Gospel of John, the expression of “the Word” does not occur except in the prologue, and that the narrator never puts it into the mouth of Jesus.]

[Footnote 3:  Acts x. 42.]

[Footnote 4:  Matt. xxvi. 64; Mark xvi. 19; Luke xxii. 69; Acts vii. 55; Rom. viii. 34; Ephes. i. 20; Coloss. iii. 1; Heb. i. 3, 13, viii. 1, x. 12, xii. 2; 1 Peter iii. 22.  See the passages previously cited on the character of the Jewish Metathronos.]