Jew (The Wandering).
1. Of Greek tradition. Aris´teas, a poet who continued to appear and disappear alternately for above 400 years, and who visited all the mythical nations of the earth.
2. Of Jewish story. Tradition says that Cartaph´ilos, the door-keeper of the judgment hall, in the service of Pontius Pilate, struck our Lord as he led Him forth, saying, “Get on! Faster, Jesus!” Whereupon the Man of Sorrows replied “I am going; but tarry thou till I come [again].” This man afterwards became a Christian, and was baptized by Ananias under the name of Joseph. Every hundred years he falls into a trance, out of which he rises again at the age of 30.
⁂ The earliest account of the Wandering Jew, is in the Book of the Chronicles of the Abbey of St. Alban’s, copied and continued by Matthew Paris (1228). In 1242 Philip Mouskes, afterwards bishop of Tournay, wrote the “rhymed chronicles.”
Another legend is that Jesus, pressed down by the weight of His cross, stopped to rest at the door of a cobbler, named Ahasue´rus, who pushed him away, saying, “Get off! Away with you! away!” Our Lord replied, “Truly, I go away, and that quickly; but tarry thou till I come.”
⁂ This is the legend given by Paul von Eitzen, bishop of Schleswig, in 1547. *—Greve, Memoirs of Paul von Eitzen (1744).
A third legend says that it was the cobbler Ahasue´rus who haled Jesus to the judgment seat; and that, as the Man of Sorrows stayed to rest awhile on a stone, he pushed Him, saying, “Get on, Jesus! Here you shall not stay!” Jesus replied, “I truly go away, and go to rest; but thou shalt go away, and never rest till I come.”
3. In German legend, the Wandering Jew is associated with John Buttadæus, seen at Antwerp in the thirteenth century, again in the fifteenth, and again in the sixteenth centuries. His last appearance was in 1774, at Brussels.
⁂ Leonard Doldius, of Nürnberg, in his Praxis Alchymiæ (1604), says that the Jew, Ahasue´rus, is sometimes called “Buttadæus.”
Signor Gualdi, who had been dead 130 years, appeared in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and had his likeness taken by Titian. One day he disappeared as mysteriously as he had come.—Turkish Spy, ii. (1682).