Theudas and the Passover Riot

While Fadus was procurator of Judea, an impostor named Theudas persuaded most of the common people to take their possessions and follow him to the river Jordan. He told them he was a prophet, and that at his command the river would divide and give them an easy crossing. By saying this he deceived many. But Fadus did not let them reap the fruit of their folly. He sent out a squadron of cavalry against them, which fell on them unexpectedly, killed many and took many alive. They captured Theudas himself alive, cut off his head and carried it to Jerusalem. These were the things that happened to the Jews in the time when Cuspius Fadus was procurator. [a]

Tiberius Alexander came to succeed Fadus. He was the son of Alexander, who had been alabarch in Alexandria and who surpassed everyone there in his time in family and wealth. The father also excelled his son Alexander in piety toward God, for the son did not remain in the customs of his ancestors. It was under Tiberius Alexander that the great famine took place in Judea, in which Queen Helena bought grain from Egypt for large sums of money and distributed it to the needy, as I said before. Besides this, the sons of Judas the Galilean were brought to trial: the Judas who stirred the people to revolt from the Romans when Quirinius was taking the census of Judea, as we showed earlier. Their names were James and Simon, and Alexander ordered them to be crucified. Herod, king of Chalcis, removed Joseph son of Camydus from the high priesthood and gave the succession to that honor to Ananias son of Nebedaeus. And Cumanus came to succeed Tiberius Alexander. Herod, the brother of the great king Agrippa, died in the eighth year of the reign of Claudius Caesar. He left three sons: Aristobulus, born to him by his first wife, and Berenicianus and Hyrcanus, by Bernice, his brother’s daughter. But Claudius Caesar gave his kingdom to the younger Agrippa. [c]

While Cumanus was governing Judea, a riot broke out in the city of Jerusalem, and many of the Jews perished in it. But first I will explain the cause from which it arose. When the feast called Passover had come, at which it is our custom to eat unleavened bread, and a great crowd had gathered from every quarter for the feast, Cumanus was afraid that they might start some uprising. So he ordered one company of soldiers to take up their arms and stand on the colonnades of the temple to put down any uprising, if one should begin. The procurators of Judea before him had also done this at the festivals. On the fourth day of the feast a soldier uncovered himself and exposed his genitals to the crowd. Those who saw it were filled with anger and fury, saying that it was not they who had been insulted, but God who had been outraged. Some of the bolder ones even reviled Cumanus, saying that the soldier had been put up to it by him. When Cumanus heard this, he too was greatly provoked by their insults. Still, he urged them to give up their desire for revolution and not to kindle riots at the festival. But he could not persuade them; instead they pressed on with their abuse all the more. So he ordered the whole army to take up their full armor and come to Antonia, which was a fortress, as we said before, overlooking the temple. When the crowd saw the soldiers arrive, they were terrified and rushed to flee. The ways out were narrow, and thinking the enemy were pursuing them, they crowded together as they fled, and many were crushed to death by one another in the narrow passages. Twenty thousand were counted as having perished in that riot. Instead of a feast there was mourning from then on; all of them forgot their prayers and sacrifices and turned to lamentation and weeping. Such suffering did the lewdness of a single soldier bring about. [h]

Before their first mourning had ended, another disaster befell them. Some of those who had turned to revolt robbed Stephanus, a slave of Caesar’s, as he traveled along the public road about twelve miles from the city, and plundered everything he had. When Cumanus heard what had happened, he at once sent soldiers with orders to plunder the nearby villages and bring their most prominent men to him in chains. While the plundering was going on, one of the soldiers found the laws of Moses lying in one of the villages, brought them out where everyone could see, and tore them apart, uttering blasphemies and heaping mockery on them. When the Jews heard of this, they gathered in great numbers and went down to Caesarea, where Cumanus happened to be, begging him to avenge not themselves but God, whose laws had been outraged; for they could not bear to live, they said, if the laws of their ancestors were to be insulted like this. Cumanus was afraid that the people would revolt again, and on the advice of his friends he had the soldier who had outraged the laws beheaded, and so stopped the uprising that was about to flare up a second time. [j]