The Flight to Pella

After Nero had held power for thirteen years, and the reigns of Galba and Otho had lasted a year and six months, Vespasian, who had won distinction in the campaigns against the Jews, was declared sovereign in Judea itself, being proclaimed emperor by the armies there. He set out at once for Rome and handed over the war against the Jews to his son Titus. [a]

For after our Savior’s ascension the Jews, in addition to their crime against him, had devised very many plots against his apostles. First they killed Stephen by stoning; after him James, the son of Zebedee and brother of John, was beheaded; and finally James, who was the first after our Savior’s ascension to be allotted the bishop’s throne there, died in the way already described. The rest of the apostles, after countless plots against their lives, were driven out of the land of Judea and went to all the nations to teach the message, with the power of Christ, who had said to them, “Go and make disciples of all the nations in my name.” [b] But the people of the church in Jerusalem had been commanded, by an oracle given through revelation to approved men there before the war, to leave the city and live in a town of Perea called Pella. When those who believed in Christ had moved there from Jerusalem, as if holy men had utterly forsaken both the royal capital of the Jews and the whole land of Judea, the justice of God at last overtook them for their many crimes against Christ and his apostles, and wiped that generation of the godless entirely from among men. [d]

How many evils poured in on the whole nation everywhere at that time; how the inhabitants of Judea above all were driven to the last extremity of disaster; how many tens of thousands of grown men, with women and children, fell by the sword, by famine and by countless other kinds of death; how many sieges the cities of Judea underwent, and of what kind; what terrors, and worse than terrors, those saw who fled to Jerusalem itself as to a most strongly fortified capital; the course of the whole war and each thing that happened in it in detail; and how at last the abomination of desolation proclaimed by the prophets stood in the very temple of God, famous of old, which suffered utter ruin and final destruction by fire: all this anyone who wishes may read in exact detail in the history Josephus wrote. [e] But it is necessary to point out that this writer records that those who had gathered from all Judea in the days of the Passover feast, about three million in number, were shut up in Jerusalem “as in a prison,” to use his own words. [g] For it was right that in the very days in which they had brought the passion on the Savior and Benefactor of all, the Christ of God, they should be shut in “as in a prison” and meet the destruction that pursued them from divine justice. Passing over, then, the particular things attempted against them by the sword and in other ways, I think it necessary to set down only the calamities caused by the famine, so that those who read this work may know in part how the punishment from God for their crime against the Christ of God overtook them before long.