Chapter 16
He sent two sons of Simon to wage war against Cendebeus the commander. Judas, the son of Simon, was wounded. Simon is killed together with his sons at a banquet. John, his son, succeeds his brother in the leadership of the priests.
16:1 And John went up from Gazaris and announced it to his father Simon, etc.
We said above that Simon is the chief of the priests, that is, the one who through obedience to the Cross offered himself to the Father for us, in whose house the Son has two peoples of believers, from the Jews and from the Gentiles. To these the Father entrusts the power of war against all enemies and adversaries of the truth, that is, against Jews, pagans, and heretics, and likewise against evil spirits, so that they may defend the Christian faith and protect the true confessors of God.
16:3 Be, he says, in my place, and my brothers’, and go out and fight for our people, but let help from heaven be with you.
Who are these brothers if not those of whom Truth itself, rising from the dead, says in the Gospel to the women visiting His tomb: Go, tell my brothers to go into Galilee; there they will see me (Matt. 28:10). Therefore, in the place of Christ and His apostles are the saints, who, doing the will of the heavenly Father, seek both the victory of truth and the salvation of souls; for them there is help from heaven, from Him indeed of whom it is written in the Psalm: Wonderful is the Lord in his saints, the God of Israel, he himself will give power and strength to his people (Ps. 68:35). These chose twenty thousand men of war, because they consider only those fit for spiritual warfare who, in the two commandments of love, become fulfillers and doers of the commandments of God.
16:6 And he brought his camp up in front of them, he himself and his people, etc.
When the commander, on seeing the people anxious about crossing the flood, crossed first, he showed that those who fulfill in the Church the place of the sick [perhaps: of the masters] and the office of teacher ought, by the example of their faith and commitment, to strengthen the fearfulness of their subjects, and with sacred trumpets, that is, with divine doctrines, to rouse them to battle against the enemies. And therefore, the spiritual Cendebaeus and his camp are put to flight, and many from them fall wounded, because, shaken with fear, they finally feel the power of the divine majesty.
16:9 Then Judas, the brother of John, was wounded, etc.
That Judas was wounded in battle and John pursued the enemies signifies, unless I am mistaken, what Paul says: “Blindness in part has come upon Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has entered in, and then all Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:25-26). For since the Jewish people delayed in coming to faith in Christ, the Church of the Gentiles vigorously presses its enemies, until by a saving contest it converts them to repentance, or, by proclaiming the punishment to come, chastises those who persist in wickedness. But when the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled and their fullness has entered into the faith, then all Israel, that is, the whole Church, from both peoples, through saving confession by faith, hope, and love, will be saved by the gift of Christ.
16:11 And Ptolemy, the son of Abob, was appointed commander in the plain of Jericho, etc.
What is signified by Ptolemy, if not hypocritical and crafty men? These, then, with a insincere submission attaching themselves to good teachers, and pretending devotion, whose power they utterly ignore, generally attain to honor and ecclesiastical dignity, the teachers themselves granting it to them: for this is what it means to be the sons-in-law of the high priest, to take into the power of one’s own government those persons whom good teachers were regenerating by water and the word. But when, having received promotion, they begin to be under their own authority, each one, enslaved to his desires, strives by tricks and lies to trip up and overthrow the very authors of his honor; and they likewise destroy their sons and little children, since they spare no person living with them, but by means of money and flattery they subject secular powers to themselves . . . [Something is missing.]. . . They harass the Church with hidden snares and with open persecutions.
Nor is it surprising that such wickedness can sometimes prevail in the Church, since we read that the Church itself (so to speak) received the treachery of Judas the betrayer; a magician was baptized by Philip, but was not cleansed of the wickedness of his mind; Julian, the apostate, having been raised up from reader in the Church, persisted in his undertaking of evil as a savage enemy until the end of his life. The age of this present time likewise has some people of this sort who, although they do not kill their teachers with the sword, nevertheless do not cease to persecute them with envy and hatred.
16:21 And someone running ahead announced to John in Gazara that his father had perished, etc.
John, indeed, after his father had been deceitfully killed, carefully keeps watch against the enemy and puts to death the men who had come to destroy him, because anyone from the number of the faithful who is saved by the grace of God and is wise and concerned about preserving his own salvation, when he learns of the deception of other enemies, strives to guard against their ambushes and to crush their perverse schemes. For simple-mindedness alone is not sufficient for anyone to preserve salvation, but together with simplicity there must also be carefulness. Therefore the Savior in the Gospel says to his disciples: “Be therefore wise as serpents and simple as doves” (Matt. 10:16); and the Apostle says: “Do not become children in understanding, but in hatred be infants” (1 Cor. 14:20). Therefore simplicity ought to be possessed by us so that we harm no one; carefulness also, so that we are not despised by others; nor is there much difference between deceiving someone and being able to be deceived by another.
16:23 And so forth regarding the words of John and his wars, etc.
This John, both leader of the Jews and high priest, was a man of virtue and accomplished many wondrous deeds. He also received the name Hyrcanus, and, requesting from the Romans the right of friendship, was by decree of the Senate listed among their allies. How Josephus relates about this same Hyrcanus, in order to clarify what is briefly stated at the end of the book of the Maccabees, does not seem inappropriate for us to insert here. After he has recalled some of Simon’s victories, he reports his end in this way (Antiquities, Book 13.13–17): “Therefore Simon, having held the leadership of the priesthood of the Jews for eight years, dies at a banquet, ensnared by the plots of Ptolemy, his son‑in‑law, who, after imprisoning his wife and two sons, sent certain friends to kill John, the third son, whose name was Hyrcanus. But when the attack being prepared was discovered, the young man hurried to the city, relying on the support of a great multitude, both because of the memory of his father’s eternal courage and because Ptolemy’s wickedness was hateful to all. Ptolemy also tried to enter the city by another gate, but he was driven back by the people, who had received Hyrcanus more promptly, and from there he immediately withdrew to a certain fortress beyond Jericho which is called Dagon.”
Hyrcanus, having obtained his father’s honor of the high priesthood and, after offering sacrifices to God, quickly set out for Ptolemy, intending to be a help to his mother and brothers alike. Attacking the fortress, he was superior in other respects, but he yielded to just grief: for whenever Ptolemy was pressed, he brought Hyrcanus’s mother and brothers up onto the wall where they could be plainly seen, beat them, and threatened to throw them down. Therefore Hyrcanus was moved more by fear than by anger. But his mother, unconcerned by the blows or the threat of death, stretched out her hands and begged her son not to spare her, for she herself, by her own command, would regard the death Ptolemy had set before her as better in her mortal condition, provided that he exacted punishment for the deeds committed against his house. John, however, sometimes thinking of his mother’s determination and then listening to her pleas, was driven to fight, but whenever he saw her being beaten and torn, he lost heart completely and was filled with grief. Because of this, the siege was prolonged for a long time, until the sabbatical year arrived, which it is the custom among the Jews to observe every seventh year as a time of rest, following the example of the seventh days; and during this period, Ptolemy, having gained a respite from the siege, killed John’s brothers along with their mother and fled to Zeno, surnamed Cotilas, the tyrant of Philadelphia. Antiochus, angered by what he had suffered at the hands of Simon, led an army into Judea and, encamping at Jerusalem, overwhelmed Hyrcanus there. But Hyrcanus, having opened the tomb of David, who had been the richest of kings, and taken from it more than three thousand talents of money, persuaded Antiochus, by giving him three hundred talents, to abandon the siege, and he was the first of the Jews by his transgressions to begin supporting foreign forces with wealth.
Then Hyrcanus, after learning of Antiochus’ death, immediately prepared an expedition against the cities of Syria, thinking that they were left without defenders, as indeed they were. For he captured Medaba, and Samoga, and Sychem, and Garizim with the neighboring places, and the proud race of the Cirtheans [Cuthaeans] who inhabited the places adjoining the temple, built on the model of that which is at Jerusalem. He also captured in Idumaea not a few other cities, and besides these Adoreon [Aoracum] and Marasa [Marisa]. Advancing further into Samaria, to the place where the city of Sebaste, founded by King Herod, now stands, he surrounded it on every side and put his sons Aristobulus and Antigonus in charge of the siege. Since those who were within the city offered no resistance, pressed by the necessity of famine, they came to such a point that they were compelled to touch unfamiliar flesh.
Therefore they summon to their aid Antiochus, called the Spirit of the Lord, who, having complied with his ready will, is overcome by Aristobulus and Antigonus, and he indeed escapes as far as Scythopolis from the pursuit of the aforementioned brothers.
Then, indeed, when they had returned to Samaria, they drove the crowd back within the wall and, having taken the city by storm, they destroyed it and led away the inhabitants as captives. And since their operations were successful as they withdrew, they did not allow their zeal to grow cold, but, advancing with the army as far as Scythopolis, they struck that city as well and divided the fields between Carmel among themselves. The prosperity of John and his sons aroused the envy of the nations and stirred up rebellion, and many who gathered against them did not cease until, in open war, they were defeated. For the rest of his life, John lived with exceptional good fortune, and after administering affairs in excellent fashion for thirty‑three years, he died, leaving five children. He was truly a most blessed man, one who had given no cause for anyone to complain that fortune had wronged him. In short, he possessed three things above all, and in a unique way: he was the leader of the nation, and he was high priest, and, moreover, he was a prophet with whom God spoke, so that he was utterly ignorant of nothing that was to come, for he foresaw and foretold even concerning the two women, his daughters, that they would not remain mistresses of affairs.
He himself held the high priesthood, after his father’s death, according to the authority of the chronicles, for twenty‑six years. His father, Simon, had been high priest before him for eight years; before Simon, his brother Jonathan held it for eighteen years. Judas, also, brother of Jonathan and Simon, had the high priesthood for only three years, although he had previously waged many wars with the generals of the kings of Syria. After John, indeed, Aristobulus, his son, received the high priesthood among the Jews; wishing also to become king, he took up the emblem of the crown.
Four hundred eighty‑four years after the founding of the city of Babylon, he treacherously killed his brother Antigonus, and, when one year of his reign was completed, he ended his life in a miserable death as a friendly fire. He was succeeded in the kingdom by his brother Amiects [Janneus], who is also called Alexander, and he held it for twenty‑seven years with such cruelty that, when the people were enraged and he asked them what he could do to win back their goodwill, the reply was: “If you were to die; for scarcely even after your death, having suffered so grievously, would they return to favor, so as to lay aside their hatred against the deceased.” Roused by this and, being accustomed to warfare, after killing many, he forced the survivors into a city whose name is Belselel; its capture brought a plague more bitter than usual, through a course of cruelty so savage that out of that number he nailed [crucified] eight hundred in the middle of the city and ordered their wives and children to be slaughtered before their eyes. He watched this while reclining among his concubines, rejoicing amid wine and cups, yet more intoxicated by blood than by wine.
By this single deed he terrified the people more than by war, so that on the very next night eight thousand Jews departed beyond Judea, for whom the end of their flight would be the death of Alexander. When he was dead, his wife Alexandra, who was also surnamed Salma [Salome], reigned in Jerusalem for nine years. Thereafter, when Alexander’s two sons, the brothers Hyrcanus and Aristobulus, were fighting over the rule, the Romans found an opportunity to invade Judea. Therefore Pompey, at Hyrcanus’ invitation, came to Jerusalem; after taking the city and leaving the temple deserted, he went as far as the Holy of Holies, and he took Aristobulus, the younger brother, with him, confirmed the high priesthood, and made Antipater, son of Herod the Ascalonite, procurator of Palestine. And so Hyrcanus, a man of sluggish spirit, with the help of Antipater, the aforementioned procurator, held the high priesthood for thirty‑four years. Afterwards, however, when Antipater was killed by poison at a banquet, his son Herod succeeded to the kingdom, and he also put Hyrcanus to death. From this point Herod, son of the aforementioned Antipater the Ascalonite and of his mother Cypris the Arabian, received the leadership of the Jews from the Romans; in his time, when Christ’s birth was near, the kingdom and priesthood of Judea, which had previously been held by succession over the years, were destroyed, and the prophecy was fulfilled which speaks therefore through Moses: “The ruler shall not fail from Judah, nor the leader from his loins, until he comes to whom it is laid up, and he shall be the expectation of the nations” (Gen. 49:10).
In this period Christ also, whom the Scripture of Daniel foretells (Dan. 9:24-27), reached his end. For up to Herod, the Christs, that is, the priests, were the kings of the Jews, who began to rule from the sixty‑fifth Olympiad and the restoration of the Temple under Darius up to Hyrcanus, and to the one hundred and eighty‑sixth Olympiad, with four hundred thirty‑three years passing in between: which Daniel likewise indicates, saying: “And you shall know and understand that from the going forth of the word to restore and build Jerusalem until the rule of Christ, there shall be seven weeks and sixty‑two weeks.” These sixty‑nine weeks make four hundred eighty‑three years, during which the Christs, that is, the priests consecrated by anointing, reigned up to Hyrcanus. When he, last of all, was taken by the Parthians, Herod, son of Antipater, received from Augustus and the Senate Judaea, which in no way belonged to him, and his sons reigned after him up to the latest captivity of Jerusalem, with high priests appointed who were by no means of priestly lineage, nor serving God in continuousness of life according to the law of Moses. Men of low birth indeed, and at different times different men, and some for a single year or a little more, would buy the priesthood from the Romans. All these things the prophet Daniel also foretold, saying: “And after seven and seventy‑two weeks the anointing shall perish, and judgment shall not remain in it, and the people shall corrupt the holy Temple: when the leader comes they shall be slain in the crash of war;” and in the passages that follow: “And upon the Temple,” he says, “shall be the abomination of desolations; and until the completion of the time, completion shall be poured out upon the desolation.”
Herod appointed as high priest of the Jews a certain Awanulus [Ananelus], summoned from Babylon, and after a short time he gave Aristobulus, the brother of his wife and grandson of Hyrcanus, as successor to him. When he had killed this last one [after a year], he again restored the priesthood to Ananelus. And there was no longer a legal succession in the priesthood, but as the end of the law itself and of the priesthood drew near, everything was thrown into confusion. Herod, moreover, was energetic in warfare and in the governance of the kingdom and the restoration of buildings, but exceedingly unfortunate and of most cruel character. In Jerusalem he built many and great churches; he raised Samaria, once sitting in ashes, from the foundations, and in honor of Augustus he called it Sebaste, and in Paneas, that which is called Panion, he constructed; he founded Caesarea in the name of Caesar, which was previously called Strato’s Tower. He also founded Anthedon and Antipatris and Herodium in honor of his father Antipater, and built his own. He very skillfully constructed countless works in each of the cities he ruled.
But between Hyrcanus, who had formerly been priest of the Jews and who had returned from Parthian captivity, and his son, who had succeeded his father in the priesthood, he killed them; he likewise most cruelly murdered his sister, his own wife, together with his two sons already grown, and the mother of his murdered wife, his mother‑in‑law. For Herod himself, lest he be perhaps reproached as shameful and a foreigner removed from the seed of the Jews, burned all the books in which the nobility of the Jewish people, preserved in the Temple, was recorded, so that, the proofs having been destroyed, he too might be thought to belong to this lineage, and moreover that he might mix his own offspring with their royal race. From a certain woman of Jerusalem, whom he had taken as his wife while still a private citizen, and from the son born to him, Antipater, he allied to himself Mariamme, daughter of Alexander, granddaughter of Aristobulus, brother of Hyrcanus, who before him had been king over the Jewish people. She bore him five sons, two of whom, Alexander and Aristobulus, he himself killed in Samaria; and not long after he destroyed by a similar crime the mother of these sons, than whom he knew nothing more dear. From them Aristobulus had received by Berenice a son, Herod, whom in the Acts of the Apostles we read was struck down by an angel (Acts 12). Moreover, in addition to those cruel deeds mentioned above, he added this also, that he killed the husband of his sister Salome, and when he had given her in marriage to another man, he killed that man too; and he slew the scribes and interpreters of the divine law by a similar crime.
But when he had learned from the testimony of the teachers about the birth of Christ our Lord, that in the thirty‑second year of his reign He was born in Bethlehem, he ordered all the infants to be killed. But after he had completed the thirty‑seventh year of his reign, he died miserably, as he deserved, either of the disease of dropsy or of retention of water, and with worms swarming over his entire body. How Josephus relates the end of Herod does not seem inappropriate to insert into this our little work; he reports it in this way (Antiq. 17.9). For indeed he had no slight fever, and he suffered from an intolerable itching over the entire surface of his body; he was also constantly tormented by pains in his bowels, and his feet were swollen as though from the disease of retained water, since the swelling of his belly and the decay of his testicles generated little worms; in addition, frequent shortness of breath and gasping sighs and the contraction of all his limbs exhausted him, so that those who attributed these things to the Divinity said that such torments were the punishment of sophists. He, however, although he struggled with the tortures of so many afflictions, was still eager for life and hoped for recovery from created remedies.
Finally, after crossing the Jordan, he made use of the hot waters at Callirrhoe, which, flowing into a lake rich in tar, called Asphaltitis, are drinkable despite their bitterness. But there his body, which the physicians had decided should be treated with hotter oil, was immersed in a full tub and so dissolved that, like a dead man, he rolled his eyes as they released. Then, when those who were tending him were thrown into confusion, he seemed, at their shouting, to look around. When his recovery was give up on of, he ordered that fifty drachmas be given to each soldier and that a large sum of money be distributed among the magistrates and his friends.
But when, on returning, he had come to Jericho, he was seized by black bile and was himself almost given over to death; he conceived a monstrous deed: for he ordered that from every village of all Judea the most noble men be gathered and kept in a place called the Hippodrome. Then, after summoning his sister Salome and Alexander, her husband, to him, he said: “I know that the Jews will celebrate my death with festive rejoicing; yet through others I shall be able to be mourned and to obtain very splendid honors at my burial, provided you do what I myself command: these men whom you have in custody, when I have breathed my last, immediately surround them with soldiers and kill them, so that all Judea, which hates me, and every household may weep.” And at the same time, while he was giving these orders, letters from the messengers whom he had sent to Rome were brought in, in which it was indicated that at Caesar’s command Archelaus had been declared intemperate (so) and Antipater condemned to death; it was written that Caesar had given their father the choice whether he preferred to send him into exile.
Herod, however, somewhat cheered by this report and again overcome by pains, was worn out as his strength was strained alike by starvation and the violence of disease; and therefore, attempting to forestall his fate, he took an apple and asked for a little knife, for he was accustomed to eat it sliced. Then, after looking around to see that no witness would hinder him, he lifted his right hand as though he were about to strike himself. But when Achiabus, his cousin, ran up and restrained his hand, a great wailing at once arose in the palace, as though the king were dead. At this, Antipater, roused and having quickly heard of it, took courage, and, now joyful, was even asking the guards, having promised them money, to release and dismiss him. Their leader not only refused to do this, but also reported it quickly to the king. He, crying out more strongly than the strength of a sick man would seem to allow, immediately sent soldiers, had Antipater killed, and ordered him to be buried without any honor in Hyrcanium.
Then once more he revised his will, and wrote Archelaus, the eldest brother of Antipater, as his successor, but Antipas as tetrarch. After the death of his son and when six days had passed, he himself died, in the thirty‑fourth year from the time he had killed Antigonus and seized the throne, and the thirty‑seventh year from the time he had been declared king by the Romans; he therefore died in the forty‑seventh year of the reign of Augustus. In his place, by decree of Augustus, his son Archelaus was appointed and reigned for nine years, that is, until the end of Augustus himself. For then, when they could no longer bear him and had accused him before Augustus, seeing his brutality, Augustus exiled him to the city of Vienne in Gaul; and, in order to diminish the power of the Jewish kingdom and to tame its arrogance, four of his brothers were appointed tetrarchs in his stead: Herod, Antipater, Lysias, and Philip, and then afterward Archelaus.
After Archelaus, however, Herod the tetrarch held rule over the people of Judea for twenty‑four years, to whom the emperor Tiberius had granted this authority. In his twelfth year, Pilate was sent by him as procurator in Judea, and there he remained for ten consecutive years, almost up to the very end of Tiberius. In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar (Luke 3), likewise the fifteenth year of the reign of Herod, as the historians record, John, the son of Zechariah, preaching in the desert near the river Jordan, testified that Christ, the Son of God, was in their midst. This same Herod, at the urging of Herodias, the wife of his brother Philip, ordered him to be beheaded at a banquet at the request of a dancing girl, as the holy Gospel clearly shows (Matt. 14).
The Lord Jesus Christ himself then from that point proclaimed to the people the way of salvation, confirming by signs and miracles that what he said was true. Likewise, in the eighteenth year of the rule of them both, Jesus Christ, in accordance with the prophets who had foretold of him, came to his Passion; when, having been presented to this Herod by those sent by Pilate, he was not received in faith but, despised through worldly pride, was clothed in a white garment and sent back again to Pilate, by whom, through the service of soldiers, he was crucified and on the third day rose again from the dead.
Moreover, divine Scripture relates that the beginning of the evangelical preaching started in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, and that Jesus himself spent all the time of his teaching under the high priests Annas and Caiaphas; that is, in the year when the period of their high priesthood began he had started to teach, and he continued until the beginning of Caiaphas’s term, within which span scarcely four whole years are encompassed.
Meanwhile, the legal ordinances had by that time ceased along with ambition: for to no one among the Jews was the honor of the high priesthood being granted by right of birth or lineage, but by Roman authority the high priesthood was discussed now on some, then on others, so that they were changed with yearly interruptions. Finally, this same Josephus (Antiquities, 18.4) reports that four men in succession, up to Caiaphas, discharged the office of high priest after Annas, writing this in these words:
Valerius Gratus, after disturbing Annas’ priesthood, appointed Ishmael, the son of Bassus; but after removing him not long afterward, he substituted Eleazar, the son of the high priest Annas, in the high priesthood. Yet, after the first year he also removed this man from office, and handed over the duty of the high priesthood to a certain Simon, the son of Camus, who himself did not hold it for more than the space of one year, and then received Joseph, who was also called Caiaphas, as his successor. Therefore, throughout the whole time in which our Lord and Savior is described as having taught on earth, within the span of four years, during which those four successions of high priests that Josephus mentions are recorded, scarcely any of them administered the office for even a single year.
Moreover, Josephus relates how Herod the tetrarch lost his kingdom, saying: Herod the tetrarch having been accused, Agrippa, the son of Aristobulus, whom Herod his father had killed, came to Tiberius. Since Tiberius did not receive the accusation, Agrippa stayed in Rome, seeking the favor of certain powerful people; but he cultivated with the greatest attentions Gaius, the son of Germanicus, while Gaius was still a private citizen. One day, amid an sufficient display of banquets at which he was dining with this same Gaius, with his hands stretched out at the end, he began openly to pray to the Lord that, once Tiberius had quickly died, the empire might be given to Gaius. When this was reported to Tiberius, he immediately ordered Agrippa to be imprisoned; and Agrippa, under great hardship, was held in jail for six months, until the death of Tiberius. But when Tiberius died, after a reign of ten years and three days, Gaius Caesar, succeeding to the empire, released Agrippa from his chains, gave him the tetrarchy of Philip (for Philip had already died), and called him king.
When Agrippa came into power, he stirred up through envy the ambitions of Herod the tetrarch. Herod’s wife, in particular, provoked him in regard to the appearance of royal dignity, reproaching him for his agreement and saying that through his refusal to sail to Caesar he was deprived of greater authority. For since Agrippa had been made king from being a private person, how could Gaius hesitate to grant the same honor to Herod by raising him from tetrarch to king? Persuaded by these arguments, Herod went to Gaius, but, having been vehemently rebuked for his greed, he fled into Spain. Agrippa, who had followed as his accuser, also obtained Herod’s tetrarchy from Gaius; and therefore, while Herod was in exile in Spain, his wife Herodias departed with him.
Pontius Pilate, the governor in the same year in which the Savior suffered, secretly placed images of Caesar in the temple by night, as Josephus relates, and this proved to be the clear cause of the first sedition and disturbances. Later, spending the sacred treasury, which the Jews call the corban, on the canal of Jerusalem, he provided the seeds of a second treason. But when Pilate reported to Tiberius about the doctrine of the Christians and mentioned certain things concerning the deeds, passion, and resurrection of the Redeemer himself, Tiberius referred the matter to the senate, so that Christ might be received among the other sacred objects. However, when, by decree of the fathers, it was decided that the Christians should be driven out of the City, Tiberius, by an command, threatened death to the accusers of Christians, as Tertullian writes in the Apology (chapter 5) . Many senators and Roman knights were killed by him. Therefore, he condemned the Jews with divine vengeance for the crime they had committed; and Pilate himself, who had served in the office of an unjust judge against the Savior, was in those same times of Gaius tortured by such great and various disasters that it is reported he pierced himself through with his own hand and violently cast off his wicked life. For the minister of so great a crime could not escape unpunished, as we find in the histories of the Greeks, at least in those who write about the Olympiads and compose annual records of deeds for the memory of successors.
Agrippa, the son of Herod’s son Aristobulus, after the killing of James the son of Zebedee, threw the apostle Peter into prison (Acts 12) and stirred up a persecution against those who believed in Christ; but he did not escape unpunished. Therefore Luke in the Acts of the Apostles shows clearly, and Josephus recounts it in the eighteenth book of the Antiquities, who reports about him in this way (Antiquities 19.8): “He had completed,” he says, “the third year of his rule over the whole of Judea, when he happened to come to Caesarea, which was formerly called the Tower of Strato. There, in honor of Caesar, he put on spectacles for the citizens on what seemed to be a ritual day for Caesar’s safety; and when men of the whole province, endowed with rank and means, had assembled there, on the second day of the spectacles, clothed with a garment shining and wondrously woven of gold and silver, at daybreak he came forth to the theater. When he received the first rays of the sun on the fold of his silver robe, the reflected brightness poured forth a doubled light to the spectators from the quivering gleam of the metal, so that the spectacle dazzled their sight through its terror, and by this, the craftsman arrogance falsely claimed for him something beyond what belongs to human nature. Immediately the voices of the flattering crowd resounded, proclaiming honor, but bestowing it upon one whom they said was equal to the rising sun, and from here and there, the flatterers shouting together declared that he was a god and simply begged that he should be favorable. The people said that up to now we have feared you as a man, but from now on we confess that you are above human nature. But the king did not limit the cheers which was made contrary to right, nor did he shudder at the wickedness of unlawful flattery, until a little later, looking up, he saw a barn owl sitting above his head on a rope. He immediately understood that this was the messenger of his death, whom he had previously known as the messenger of honors. And behold, suddenly a torment seized him with incredible pain in his belly and with swelling. Looking at his courtiers he said: ‘See, I, your god, am compelled to change my life immediately; a certain divine power refutes the false words recently bestowed upon me, and I who was just now called immortal by you am already being snatched away into death. But the sentence which God has decreed must be accepted.’”
For we have lived in a way not to be despised, and we have fulfilled the length of days that was considered blessed; and when he had said this, being more violently tormented by the force of the pain, he was at once carried back to the palace, and when it was reported that he would soon die, a huge multitude of every age and sex gathered, and, according to the custom of their fathers, lying upon sackcloth, they prayed to Almighty God for the safety of the king. The whole royal house echoed with weeping and groans, while meanwhile the king himself, reclining in a lofty upper room and looking down, and seeing beforehand with tears them all lying prostrate and bowed to the ground, hardly restrained himself from tears. Tormented by continuous pains of the belly for five days, he violently broke off his life, in the fifty-fourth year of his age, and the seventh of his reign, for he reigned four years under Gaius Caesar, and held Philip’s tetrarchy for three years; then, adding that of Herod to himself in the fourth year, and the remaining three years under Claudius Caesar. After Agrippa the father had held the kingdom of Judaea for six years, his son Agrippa was appointed by Claudius to the kingdom, which he held for twenty-six years, that is, until the second year of Vespasian, when the destruction of the city took place. How Josephus narrates this (Antiquities 20.13), we have determined should be set down in this place. “Claudius,” he says, “made Agrippa, the son of Agrippa, king of the Jews; but he sent Flen(s) [Cuspius Fadus] as procurator of the whole province, and also of Samaria, Galilee, and the region called Transjordan.” And shortly after he added this: “A most bitter agitation broke out, stirred up by the chief priests against the other priests and the leading men of the populace of Jerusalem, each of whom, complaining, drew together bands of desperate youths who delighted in new laws, and each one of them seemed to be a leader. And, joining themselves in arguments, they hurled insults at one another and pelted one another with stones, nor was there anyone who restrained them; instead, everything was done as though in a city that had no ruler. So the chief priests came into such want that, sending their servants to the threshing floors, they seized the tithes that were owed to the priests; it happened that some of the lesser priests, whose means of nourishment had been seized, perished from hunger: therefore the violence of the agitations confused law and right.” Likewise, shortly after he adds this as well: “Sometimes, too, meeting in the midst of the city, they slaughtered one another; especially on feast days, assassins mingled with the crowds, wandering about with daggers hidden, so that anyone singled out by them, if he came near, they killed him; and by a wicked art, when the man whom they struck with a secret wound fell, the very assassins themselves pretended to be outraged against those who committed such deeds in the midst of the city; and in this way their crimes remained concealed, and first of all Jonathan the high priest was killed by them; after him many others were butchered, so that now, by these very deaths, fear of death became more grievous, while each man, as if always drawn up in battle array, expected to be killed at every moment.”
But when Claudius, after completing fourteen years in the imperial office, seven months, and twenty-eight days, died, [Nero] received the empire, which he held for fourteen years, seven months, and twenty-eight days. In his second year Festus, procurator of Judea, succeeded Felix, by whom Paul, in chains, is sent to Rome, remaining for two years in free custody (Acts 24:27). After this he is released to preach, Nero not yet bursting forth into such great crimes as history reports of him. James, the brother of the Lord, after he had ruled the Church of Jerusalem for thirty years (Acts 12), in the seventh year of Nero is slaughtered by the Jews, who took vengeance on him because they had not been able to kill Paul.
Festus, as magistrate of Judea, was succeeded by Albinus, and Albinus by Florus, whose wickedness and greed and other crimes the Jews, being unable to endure, rebelled against the Romans; against them Vespasian, commander of the army, was sent, and he captured very many cities of Judea. Nero, first of all his crimes, also persecutes the Christians, and from among their number at Rome he crucified Peter and killed Paul with the sword. This man, attempting nothing at all in regular military fashion, almost lost Britain. For two very noble towns under Roman rule there were captured and destroyed. Finally, when he was being sought by the senate for punishment, fleeing from the palace, at the fourth milestone from the City, in the suburban estate of his freedman, between the Salarian and Nomentan roads, he killed himself at the age of thirty-two, and in him the whole family of Augustus came to an end.
After Nero, indeed, Galba in Iberia, Vitellius in Germany, and Otho in Rome seized the imperial power: Galba, in the seventh month of his rule, is beheaded in the middle of the Roman forum; Vespasian forced the Jews, defeated in two battles, to destruction; Otho, in the third month of his reign, [near Bebriacum] fell by his own hand while on a hunting expedition; Vitellius was thrown into the Tiber by the generals of Vespasian. Vespasian, the seventh of the Romans to reign, ruled for eight years, eleven months, and twenty-two days. He, having been proclaimed emperor by the army among the Jews, and quickly entrusting the war to his son, set out for Rome by way of Alexandria. In his second year, Titus, after Judea had been captured and Jerusalem destroyed, killed six hundred thousand men. Josephus, however, with conviction affirms that six hundred [and eleven hundred hundred] thousand men perished by the sword and by famine, and another hundred thousand captives were publicly sold.
Now, in order that such a multitude should be found in Jerusalem, he reports that the feast of Unleavened Bread was the cause, on account of which the Jews from every nation, flocking to the Temple, were shut up in the city as though in a prison; for it was fitting that they should be slain in those same days of Passover in which they crucified the Savior. The whole time is reckoned from the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, and from the beginning of the preaching of the Gospel, to the second year of Vespasian and the final destruction of Jerusalem, as forty-two years. But from the captivity which they endured under Antiochus, there were two hundred and thirty-eight [nine] years. Moreover, from the second year of Darius, under whom the Temple was again built, there were five hundred and ninety years. But from the first building of the Temple under Solomon up to its final ruin, which took place under Vespasian, there were five hundred and ninety thousand two hundred [eleven hundred and two] years.