Archive for the ‘History’ Category

Our best historical evidence, based on the computer programs that reconstruct the astronomical past, as well as various ancient calendars, including the Jewish, indicate that Jesus was crucified on a Thursday, April 4, in the year 30 AD.

That means today at sundown, April 3/4, as Thursday fades into Friday by Jewish reckoning, marks the actual day and date, 1978 years ago, that Jesus died. For those readers who are unfamiliar with the evidence that Jesus died on a Thursday, rather than on the traditional “Good Friday,” see the evaluation and discussion in my Book, The Jesus Dynasty, Chapter 12.

I append here the relevant calculations based on a highly accurate computer program developed by Eugene Faulstich:

The subject heading is the title of a most famous book by Jim Bishop, The Day Christ Died, published in 1957 by Harper Collins with an official Imprimatur by the famous Archbishop of New York Francis Cardinal Spellman–guaranteeing it “free of doctrinal or moral error.” The book is still available in reprint editions. I highly recommend it for a kind of retrospective history reading. I remember devouring this book when it came out. I was eleven years old. It captivated me utterly, I could not put it down.

Fifty years later I write this post on a Thursday night, on the eve of “Good Friday,” that happens this year to also be the night of Purim as well as the Vernal Equinox–a kind of triple package of markers and observances. Today is Thursday. I have been absolutely convinced for several years now, as I explain in my book, The Jesus Dynasty, that Jesus died on Nisan 14th, which in the year A.D. 30, fell on a Thursday not a Friday. So this is indeed, the “day Christ died.” He was put in the temporary rock hewn tomb just before sunset, and Friday, the following day, was the first day of Passover. This means the Passover meal or Seder was eaten that Thursday night, just as the Gospel of John records (John 13:1; 18:28). The next day, Friday, was indeed a “Sabbath,” but not Saturday, the weekly Sabbath, but rather one of the seven “annual” Sabbaths of the Jewish festival cycle (see Leviticus 23:7). This means there were two Sabbaths, back to back, Friday and Saturday, that year. Sunday morning, when Mary Magdalene went early to the tomb and found it empty, it was indeed “three days and three nights” that Jesus had laid in that tomb (Thurs, Friday, Saturday nights), which comports with the tradition that Matthew has received (Matthew 12:40). Surely a million Sunday school kids over the years have asked, not to mention adults, how can you get three nights, from Friday to Sunday morning. It simply will not work.

Modern astronomical programs completely confirm this chronology of the Spring of A.D. 30. I have had quite a few dozens of readers write me to point out that the Jewish calendar never allows the 14th of Nisan to fall on a Thursday. But this adjustment in the calendar, based on what are called “postponements,” was not instituted until well into the 2nd century. In the time of Jesus the month of Nisan was set by the new moon, and that particular year, A.D. 30, the 14th day of the first month (14 days after the new moon) fell on a Thursday. The “last supper,” that Jesus ate with his disciples the night before, a Wednesday evening, was not the Passover Seder, but a messianic banquet or Eucharist of “bread and wine,” such as mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Didache. One way of putting it is that Jesus did not eat the Passover, he was the Passover, at least as understood by the Gospel of John and by Paul (1 Corinthians 5:7). According to Josephus it was between 3pm and sundown the Passover sacrifices were made, just as the 14th of Nisan ended and the 15th, an annual Sabbath, began. Christians subsequently saw great symbolism in this chronology.

The research of many scholars of early Christianity over the past two centuries has enabled us to recover a lost and alternative perspective on the Jesus movement following the crucifixion. This perspective is in sharp contrast to the standard portrayal of Luke-Acts, in which Peter and Paul, as the two chief apostles, work in harmony to take a unified gospel message beyond the confines of Judaism. This reconstruction centers on James, the brother of Jesus, as undisputed leader of a community that remains devoted to Jewish Law or Torah. Peter is fully allied with James, while Paul seen as an enemy or apostate who has abandoned the Jewish faith. Our sources for this perspective, sometimes called “Jewish Christianity,” or “Ebionite,” are scanty. Some have been completely lost, others survive as fragmented quotations, while a few are detectable as embedded sources within larger works.

Prof. April DeConick of Rice University and I will be doing a Biblical Archaeology Seminar on some of these lost and forgotten sources in San Antonio, Texas on October 19th and 20th. The complete program with full information can be found at the BAS Web site. Perhaps we will see some of you there.

I plan to deal with four major sources, each of which potentially provides insight into the Nazarene community led by James, brother of Jesus:

1. The Syriac “Ascents of James.” There is a corpus of literature called the Pseudo-Clementines (PsCl) that dates to the 4th century CE but apparently incorporates and thus preserves materials that are much earlier. The PsCl corpus is made up of two lengthy novel-like treatises called the Homilies and the Recognitions, as well as three shorter “epistles,” including a letter of Peter to James. Embedded in the Recognitions, is an older text that Robert Van Voorst has identified as the “Ascents of James.” Although the Recognitions as a whole survives only in Latin, this section, R 1.33-71, is contained in two Syriac manuscripts. F. Stanley Jones has argued that this early source functioned as a kind of competitive “counter-history” to that found in Luke-Acts.

2. An Arabic 11th century Muslim Anti-Christian text written by ‘Abd al-Jabbar. This text, published by Shlomo Pines in 1966 (The Jewish Christians of the Early Centuries of Christiantiy According to a New Source), is intended as a Muslim refutation of Christianity and a defense of Mohammed as the Prophet. The author, in the course of his polemic, quotes Christian texts that clearly do not derive from our canonical gospels but are reflective of a Jewish-Christian community that is observant of the Torah. These embedded texts touch on Jesus’ teachings, his execution, and the history of his early followers in Jerusalem.

3. Old Slavonic version of Josephus, Jewish War. Our Greek texts of Josephus, Antiquities mention John the Baptist, Jesus, and James, as I have discussed in a recent post, while the Greek version of his earlier work, Jewish War, contain no such references. However, there is extant, in a number of Old Slavonic/Russian manuscripts of the War, three passages on John the Baptist, four on Jesus, and one on the early Christians–none of which are found in the Greek. These were first published in the West in 1906 in German. Scholars are divided over the date and provenance of these passages, but they are quite fascinating and worth considering for their possible historical value.

4. A Recovered Apocalypse of John the Baptist. Josephine Ford and others have argued that embedded within our present Greek book of Revelation, at the end of the New Testament, is a primitive “apocalypse” developed within circles related to John the Baptizer. It is found primarily in chapters 4-11, and represents the core apocalyptic expectations of the movement arising from the preaching of John and Jesus.

I will begin to discuss some of these materials here over the coming days and weeks.

I am of the view that the descriptions that Josephus, the 1st century CE Jewish historian, gives us of John the Baptizer, Jesus, and James, the brother of Jesus, are of immense value to the historian of early Christianity. These three figures, all brutally murdered by the political and religious establishment, just happen to be the founding figures of what scholars call “the Jesus movement.” And yet, properly understood in its historical contexts, this Messianic movement is broader than Jesus, beginning with John the Baptist, and advancing significantly under the leadership of Jesus’ successor, his brother James. It is noteworthy that in Josephus’s earlier work, The Jewish War, John, Jesus, or James go comletely unmentioned. It is only decades later, in the 90s CE, when Josephus comes to write the Antiquities, that he includes this material. My own guess is that he is well aware that the emperor Vespasian, following the heat of the War in Judea, is very keen to suppress any movement that might be deemed “Messianic,” and particularly one built around the expectations of a Davidic ruler as rightful king of the Jews. Josephus is surely aware of the Nazarene movement, but he is not inclined to expose them to imperial scrutiny, and perhaps he even wants to shield them in that regard.

What he says about John and James is truly precious material, coming as it does from an “outsider” with no Christian theological agenda. Josephus, of course, has his own multiple and tendentious purposes, but supporting any particular side of controversies about the place and role of John or James in the movement is not on his radar screen.
His “testimony” to Jesus is more problematic since it has been so heavily interpolated by medieval Christian copyists. However, we are more than fortunate that these pious scribes had such heavy hands, since their additions appear to be so blatant and obvious, in both placement and phrasing. Scholars have worked on this text quite extensively and I recommend the summary discussion by John Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (Doubleday, 1991), Vol I, pp. 57-88.

Taking the passage and removing the obvious interpolations we end up with the following results:

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonders, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew many after him both of the Jews and the Gentiles. He was the Christ. When Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things about him, and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day (Antiquities 18:63-64).

This bare and minimal account I find quite instructive. If one reads it again, without the additions, we have:

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, for he was a doer of wonders. He drew many after him. When Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day (Antiquities 18:63-64).

The content of this short report is strikingly close to what critical historians would distill as a kind of bare minimum regarding the historical Jesus–a wise teacher and wonder-worker who ran into opposition from the religious and political authorities and was crucified, but whose movement continued after his death. That Josephus does not mention anything about Jesus being resurrected was what obviously most troubled the medieval Christian copyists.

I am working this semester to complete my new book on Paul, as well as teaching a graduate class in which we are examining the ways in which the presentation of Luke in his two-volume work we call Luke-Acts, functions as a “master narrative” of what happened after Jesus’ crucifixion in such a way that alternative versions become almost impossible to imagine. I am more convinced than ever that the followers of John the Baptist and James the brother of Jesus, in contrast to those influenced by Paul, shaped their post-crucifixion hopes and expectations without any faith in Jesus as raised from the dead and ascended to heaven as cosmic Savior and Lord. Like John before him, and James to follow, the faith of the community was in the eschatological “resurrection on the third day,” spoken of by Hosea, which would culminate in the revival of the Israelite nation and sitting at table with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the elect. Evidence for this perspective has to be teased out of our sources, given the overwhelming influence of the letters of Paul and Luke-Acts and other documents in the New Testament, but it does survive, here and there, and I think it can be adequately reconstructed. It is found in the N.T. texts themselves, and in a variety of sources such as the Didache, the so-called Pseudo-Clementine writings, the gospel of Thomas, fragments of Hebrew gospels, materials from Hegesippus, and these texts of Josephus.

Within such a Jewish context of resurrection hope “on the third day,” the clustered burials in family tombs, or in cemeteries with shaft tombs like those at Qumran, Ain el-Ghuweir, and in Jerusalem, took on a potential meaning beyond ritual segregation and memory of the dead. On the “last day,” those sleeping in the tombs will come forth in a collective way. The notion of the Yachad, the group, together in life, death, and in the future, was a characteristic feature of what one might call sectarian messianism.

Joseph bar Matthias, better known to English readers as Josephus (b. 37 C.E.), the 1st century Jewish historian, is our best literary source for the practice of crucifixion in Palestine during the 1st century CE. At one point he describes the practice as “that most wretched of deaths” (War 7. 203). As a general in command of the Jewish forces of Galilee in the Great Revolt against Rome (66-73 C.E.), he subsequently surrendered to the Romans and befriended himself to the Roman general Vespasian and his son Titus, both of whom who became emperors of Rome in a successive father-son dynasty. Josephus ended up living in Rome, a patron of the royal family, where he wrote his Life, his account of the Jewish War, an apologetic work defending Judaism against the attack of a Greek author, Against Apion, and his massive multi-volume work, The Antiquities of the Jews, that sketched the history of the “world” from the standpoint of the Hebrew people from the “Creation” to the Revolt in his own time.

The following are his main references to crucifixion. I have used the rather outdated translation of Whiston to facilitate keying in these passages, and because it is a translation in the public domain. For this reason I have included the old referencing system found in Whiston as well as the Loeb system that is now the standard.

The archaeological evidence for crucifixion in 1st century Roman Palestine was significantly advanced by the discovery in a tomb in 1968 just north of Jerusalem with the skeletal remains of a Jewish male who had been crucified. There is a nice discussion of this find and its implications by James Charlesworth archived at the Frontline PBS “Jesus to Christ” site.

Josephus attempt to save three of his acquaintances from crucifixion:
And when I was sent by Titus Caesar with Cerealins, and a thousand horsemen, to a certain village called Thecoa, in order to know whether it were a place fit for a camp, as I came back, I saw many captives crucified, and remembered three of them as my former acquaintance. I was very sorry at this in my mind, and went with tears in my eyes to Titus, and told him of them; so he immediately commanded them to be taken down, and to have the greatest care taken of them, in order to their recovery; yet two of them died under the physician’s hands, while the third recovered. Life 77 [420-421]

The invasion of Palestine by Antiochus Epiphanies c. 167 B.C.E. giving rise to the Maccabean revolt (Hanukkah). Josephus graphic and bloody account mentions crucifixion — not clear just what it implies in this context but certainly some kind of hanging.
3. King Antiochus returning out of Egypt for fear of the Romans, made an expedition against the city Jerusalem; and when he was there, in the hundred and forty-third year of the kingdom of the Seleucides, he took the city without fighting, those of his own party opening the gates to him. And when he had gotten possession of Jerusalem, he slew many of the opposite party; and when he had plundered it of a great deal of money, he returned to Antioch.

4. Now it came to pass, after two years, in the hundred forty and fifth year, on the twenty-fifth day of that month which is by us called Chislev, and by the Macedonians Apelleus, in the hundred and fifty-third olympiad, that the king came up to Jerusalem, and, pretending peace, he got possession of the city by treachery; at which time he spared not so much as those that admitted him into it, on account of the riches that lay in the temple; but, led by his covetous inclination, (for he saw there was in it a great deal of gold, and many ornaments that had been dedicated to it of very great value,) and in order to plunder its wealth, he ventured to break the league he had made. So he left the temple bare, and took away the golden candlesticks, and the golden altar [of incense], and table [of shew-bread], and the altar [of burnt-offering]; and did not abstain from even the veils, which were made of fine linen and scarlet. He also emptied it of its secret treasures, and left nothing at all remaining; and by this means cast the Jews into great lamentation, for he forbade them to offer those daily sacrifices which they used to offer to God, according to the law. And when he had pillaged the whole city, some of the inhabitants he slew, and some he carried captive, together with their wives and children, so that the multitude of those captives that were taken alive amounted to about ten thousand. He also burnt down the finest buildings; and when he had overthrown the city walls, he built a citadel in the lower part of the city, for the place was high, and overlooked the temple; on which account he fortified it with high walls and towers, and put into it a garrison of Macedonians. However, in that citadel dwelt the impious and wicked part of the [Jewish] multitude, from whom it proved that the citizens suffered many and sore calamities. And when the king had built an idol altar upon God’s altar, he slew swine upon it, and so offered a sacrifice neither according to the law, nor the Jewish religious worship in that country. He also compelled them to forsake the worship which they paid their own God, and to adore those whom he took to be gods; and made them build temples, and raise idol altars in every city and village, and offer swine upon them every day. He also commanded them not to circumcise their sons, and threatened to punish any that should be found to have transgressed his injunction. He also appointed overseers, who should compel them to do what he commanded. And indeed many Jews there were who complied with the king’s commands, either voluntarily, or out of fear of the penalty that was denounced. But the best men, and those of the noblest souls, did not regard him, but did pay a greater respect to the customs of their country than concern as to the punishment which he threatened to the disobedient; on which account they every day underwent great miseries and bitter torments; for they were whipped with rods, and their bodies were torn to pieces, and were crucified, while they were still alive, and breathed. They also strangled those women and their sons whom they had circumcised, as the king had appointed, hanging their sons about their necks as they were upon the crosses. And if there were any sacred book of the law found, it was destroyed, and those with whom they were found miserably perished also. Antiquities 12. 5. 3-4 [12. 246-256]

Alexander Jannaeus, the Maccabean king (103-76 B.C.E.), turns against the Pharisees and has hundreds crucified.
2. Now as Alexander fled to the mountains, six thousand of the Jews hereupon came together [from Demetrius] to him out of pity at the change of his fortune; upon which Demetrius was afraid, and retired out of the country; after which the Jews fought against Alexander, and being beaten, were slain in great numbers in the several battles which they had; and when he had shut up the most powerful of them in the city Bethome, he besieged them therein; and when he had taken the city, and gotten the men into his power, he brought them to Jerusalem, and did one of the most barbarous actions in the world to them; for as he was feasting with his concubines, in the sight of all the city, he ordered about eight hundred of them to be crucified; and while they were living, he ordered the throats of their children and wives to be cut before their eyes. This was indeed by way of revenge for the injuries they had done him; which punishment yet was of an inhuman nature, though we suppose that he had been never so much distressed, as indeed he had been, by his wars with them, for he had by their means come to the last degree of hazard, both of his life and of his kingdom, while they were not satisfied by themselves only to fight against him, but introduced foreigners also for the same purpose; nay, at length they reduced him to that degree of necessity, that he was forced to deliver back to the king of Arabia the land of Moab and Gilead, which he had subdued, and the places that were in them, that they might not join with them in the war against him, as they had done ten thousand other things that tended to affront and reproach him. However, this barbarity seems to have been without any necessity, on which account he bare the name of a Thracian among the Jews (40) whereupon the soldiers that had fought against him, being about eight thousand in number, ran away by night, and continued fugitives all the time that Alexander lived; who being now freed from any further disturbance from them, reigned the rest of his time in the utmost tranquillity. Antiquities 13. 14. 2 [379-383]

The Nahum Pesher found in Cave 4 of the Dead Sea Scrolls appears to refer to him and his cruelty in a cryptic manner:
4Q169 (Nahum) “He fills his cave with prey and his den with game. This refers to the Lion of Wrath…vengeance upon the Flattery Seekers, because he used to hang men alive, as it was done in Israel in former times…”

Following the death of Herod in 4 B.C.E. there were outbreaks of revolt throughout Judea. Varus, the Roman legate of Syria took two legions and brutally pacified the country, particularly in Galilee.
10. Upon this, Varus sent a part of his army into the country, to seek out those that had been the authors of the revolt; and when they were discovered, he punished some of them that were most guilty, and some he dismissed: now the number of those that were crucified on this account were two thousand. After which he disbanded his army, which he found no way useful to him in the affairs he came about; for they behaved themselves very disorderly, and disobeyed his orders, and what Varus desired them to do, and this out of regard to that gain which they made by the mischief they did. As for himself, when he was informed that ten thousand Jews had gotten together, he made haste to catch them; but they did not proceed so far as to fight him, but, by the advice of Achiabus, they came together, and delivered themselves up to him: hereupon Varus forgave the crime of revolting to the multitude, but sent their several commanders to Caesar, many of whom Caesar dismissed; but for the several relations of Herod who had been among these men in this war, they were the only persons whom he punished, who, without the least regard to justice, fought against their own kindred. Antiquities 17. 10. 10 [17. 295-298]

Josephus mentions the crucifixion of Jesus in passing. The passage is judged authentic by most scholars once the obvious Christian additions (marked here in brackets and italics) are removed. See “Josephus on Jesus” for more details.
Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, [if it be lawful to call him a man;] for he was a doer of wonderful works. [a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure,] He drew many after him [of the Jews and of the Gentiles. He was the Christ.] And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, (9) those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; [for he appeared to them alive again the third day; (10) as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him.] And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day. Antiquities 18. 3. 3 [63-64]
In the very next paragraph Josephus recounts the crucifixion in Rome of the priests of Isis, ordered by the Emperor Tiberius himself, for their misdeeds in arranging the sexual seduction of a virtuous woman.
4. About the same time also another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder, and certain shameful practices happened about the temple of Isis that was at Rome . . . When he had said this, he went his way. But now she began to come to the sense of the grossness of what she had done, and rent her garments, and told her husband of the horrid nature of this wicked contrivance, and prayed him not to neglect to assist her in this case. So he discovered the fact to the emperor; whereupon Tiberius inquired into the matter thoroughly by examining the priests about it, and ordered them to be crucified, as well as Ide, who was the occasion of their perdition, and who had contrived the whole matter, which was so injurious to the woman. He also demolished the temple of Isis, and gave order that her statue should be thrown into the river Tiber; while he only banished Mundus, but did no more to him, because he supposed that what crime he had committed was done out of the passion of love. And these were the circumstances which concerned the temple of Isis, and the injuries occasioned by her priests. I now return to the relation of what happened about this time to the Jews at Rome, as I formerly told you I would. Antiquities 18. 3. 4 [18. 65, 78-80]

The sons of Judas the Galilean, who had led a revolt in 6 C.E. over the Roman taxation census, were crucified by the Roman procurator Tiberius Alexander (46-48 C.E.), who was the nephew of the philosopher Philo.
2. Then came Tiberius Alexander as successor to Fadus; he was the son of Alexander the alabarch of Alexandria, which Alexander was a principal person among all his contemporaries, both for his family and wealth: he was also more eminent for his piety than this his son Alexander, for he did not continue in the religion of his country. Under these procurators that great famine happened in Judea, in which queen Helena bought corn in Egypt at a great expense, and distributed it to those that were in want, as I have related already. And besides this, the sons of Judas of Galilee were now slain; I mean of that Judas who caused the people to revolt, when Cyrenius came to take an account of the estates of the Jews, as we have showed in a foregoing book. The names of those sons were James and Simon, whom Alexander commanded to be crucified. But now Herod, king of Chalcis, removed Joseph, the son of Camydus, from the high priesthood, and made Ananias, the son of Nebedeu, his successor. And now it was that Cumanus came as successor to Tiberius Alexander; as also that Herod, brother of Agrippa the great king, departed this life, in the eighth year of the reign of Claudius Caesar. He left behind him three sons; Aristobulus, whom he had by his first wife, with Bernicianus, and Hyrcanus, both whom he had by Bernice his brother’s daughter. But Claudius Caesar bestowed his dominions on Agrippa, junior. Antiquities 20. 5. 2 [20. 100-104]

Josephus reports on the Jewish custom of taking down the bodies of those crucified by the Romans during the Great Revolt and burying them, if permitted, before sundown. This was in response to the Torah Mitzvah found in Deuteronomy 21:22-23: “When someone is convicted of a crime punishable by death and is executed, and you hang him on a tree, his corpse must not remain all night upon the tree; you shall bury him that same day, for anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse.”
2. But the rage of the Idumeans was not satiated by these slaughters; but they now betook themselves to the city, and plundered every house, and slew every one they met; and for the other multitude, they esteemed it needless to go on with killing them, but they sought for the high priests, and the generality went with the greatest zeal against them; and as soon as they caught them they slew them, and then standing upon their dead bodies, in way of jest, upbraided Ananus with his kindness to the people, and Jesus with his speech made to them from the wall. Nay, they proceeded to that degree of impiety, as to cast away their dead bodies without burial, although the Jews used to take so much care of the burial of men, that they took down those that were condemned and crucified, and buried them before the going down of the sun. I should not mistake if I said that the death of Ananus was the beginning of the destruction of the city, and that from this very day may be dated the overthrow of her wall, and the ruin of her affairs, whereon they saw their high priest, and the procurer of their preservation, slain in the midst of their city. Jewish War 4. 5. 2 [4. 314-318]

Josephus reports that the Romans crucified many before the walls of Jerusalem during the siege of 70 C.E. The idea was to terrorize the population and force a surrender. The number reached 500 a day at one point until there was no wood left in the area for this purpose.
5. Now it happened at this fight that a certain Jew was taken alive, who, by Titus’s order, was crucified before the wall, to see whether the rest of them would be aftrighted, and abate of their obstinacy. But after the Jews were retired, John, who was commander of the Idumeans, and was talking to a certain soldier of his acquaintance before the wall, was wounded by a dart shot at him by an Arabian, and died immediately, leaving the greatest lamentation to the Jews, and sorrow to the seditious. For he was a man of great eminence, both for his actions and his conduct also. Jewish War 5. 6. 5 [5: 289-290]
1. So now Titus’s banks were advanced a great way, notwithstanding his soldiers had been very much distressed from the wall. He then sent a party of horsemen, and ordered they should lay ambushes for those that went out into the valleys to gather food. Some of these were indeed fighting men, who were not contented with what they got by rapine; but the greater part of them were poor people, who were deterred from deserting by the concern they were under for their own relations; for they could not hope to escape away, together with their wives and children, without the knowledge of the seditious; nor could they think of leaving these relations to be slain by the robbers on their account; nay, the severity of the famine made them bold in thus going out; so nothing remained but that, when they were concealed from the robbers, they should be taken by the enemy; and when they were going to be taken, they were forced to defend themselves for fear of being punished; as after they had fought, they thought it too late to make any supplications for mercy; so they were first whipped, and then tormented with all sorts of tortures, before they died, and were then crucified before the wall of the city. This miserable procedure made Titus greatly to pity them, while they caught every day five hundred Jews; nay, some days they caught more: yet it did not appear to be safe for him to let those that were taken by force go their way, and to set a guard over so many he saw would be to make such as great deal them useless to him. The main reason why he did not forbid that cruelty was this, that he hoped the Jews might perhaps yield at that sight, out of fear lest they might themselves afterwards be liable to the same cruel treatment. So the soldiers, out of the wrath and hatred they bore the Jews, nailed those they caught, one after one way, and another after another, to the crosses, by way of jest, when their multitude was so great, that room was wanting for the crosses, and crosses wanting for the bodies. Jewish War 5. 11. 1 [5:446-451]