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After Nero had held the power thirteen years, and Galba and Otho
had ruled a year and six months, Vespasian, who had become
distinguished in the campaigns against the Jews, was proclaimed
sovereign in Judea and received the title of Emperor from the armies
there. Setting out immediately, therefore, for Rome, he entrusted
the conduct of the war against the Jews to his son Titus. For the
Jews after the ascension of our Saviour, in addition to their crime
against him, had been devising as many plots as they could against his
apostles. First Stephen was stoned to death by them, and after him
James, the son of Zebedee and the brother of John, was beheaded,
and finally James, the first that had obtained the episcopal seat in
Jerusalem after the ascension of our Saviour, died in the manner
already described. But the rest of the apostles, who had been
incessantly plotted against with a view to their destruction, and had
been driven out of the land of Judea, went unto all nations to preach
the Gospel, relying upon the power of Christ, who had said to them,
"Go ye and make disciples of all the nations in my name."
But the people of the church in Jerusalem had been commanded by a
revelation, vouchsafed to approved men there before the war, to leave
the city and to dwell in a certain town of Perea called Pella. And
when those that believed in Christ had come thither from Jerusalem,
then, as if the royal city of the Jews and the whole land of Judea
were entirely destitute of holy men, the judgment of God at length
overtook those who had committed such outrages against Christ and his
apostles, and totally destroyed that generation of impious men. But
the number of calamities which every where fell upon the nation at that
time; the extreme misfortunes to which the inhabitants of Judea were
especially subjected, the thousands of men, as well as women and
children, that perished by the sword, by famine, and by other forms
of death innumerable, all these things, as well as the many great
sieges which were carried on against the cities of Judea, and the
excessive sufferings endured by those that fled to Jerusalem itself,
as to a city of perfect safety, and finally the general course of the
whole war, as well as its particular occurrences in detail, and how at
last the abomination of desolation, proclaimed by the prophets, stood
in the very temple of God, so celebrated of old, the temple which was
now awaiting its total and final destruction by fire, all these things
any one that wishes may find accurately described in the history written
by Josephus.
But it is necessary to state that this writer records that the
multitude of those who were assembled from all Judea at the time of the
Passover, to the number of three million souls, were shut up in
Jerusalem "as in a prison," to use his own words. For it was right
that in the very days in which they had inflicted suffering upon the
Saviour and the Benefactor of all, the Christ of God, that in
those days, shut up "as in a prison," they should meet with
destruction at the hands of divine justice.
But passing by the particular calamities which they suffered from the
attempts made upon them by the sword and by other means, I think it
necessary to relate only the misfortunes which the famine caused, that
those who read this work may have some means of knowing that God was
not long in executing vengeance upon them for their wickedness against
the Christ of God.
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