The Jewish Revolts and the Parting of the Ways

"My qualification as historian of the war was that I had been an actor in many, and an eyewitness of most, of the events." -- Josephus, Against Apion, about AD 95¹

"Apparently, there never was a single edict which caused the so-called irreparable separation between Judaism and Christianity." -- Reuven Kimelman, 1981²

Summary

Between AD 66 and 136 the Jews of Judea and of the eastern Mediterranean fought Rome three times and lost each time. In the same century the followers of Jesus went from a Jewish movement that met in the Temple courts to a church that was mostly Gentile and that many Jews and Romans treated as something else. Popular accounts tie the two stories together with a few dramatic events: the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, the mass suicide at Masada, a "Council of Jamnia" around AD 90 that fixed the Jewish Bible and cursed the Christians, and the defeat of a false messiah in 135. This article tests each of those events against the documents and physical remains that survive, and asks what they can and cannot establish.

The main findings:

The wars are real and well dated, but the fall of Jerusalem was not the end of the war. The Temple burned in late summer AD 70 and the upper city fell about a month later. Fortresses held out at Herodium, Machaerus and Masada, which fell in the spring of 73 or 74. A second, separate war broke out among the Jews of Egypt, Cyrene, Cyprus and Mesopotamia in 115 to 117. A third war in Judea, led by Shimeon bar Kosiba, ran from 132 to 135 or 136.
Josephus is the main witness to the first war, and he is a good one with known biases. He fought the Romans in Galilee, was captured in 67, and watched the siege of Jerusalem from the Roman camp. He was in Rome when Masada fell. Titus endorsed his book, so it is an authorised Flavian account. His totals are estimates, not counts. He defends his 1,100,000 dead in Jerusalem with a Passover calculation that he gets wrong on its own terms, and Tacitus heard a figure of 600,000 for the whole besieged population. The physical evidence (burned houses, revolt coins, the Arch of Titus, the Judaea Capta coins) confirms the siege, the fire and the Roman triumph. It cannot test the speeches, the motives, or Josephus's claim that Titus wanted to spare the Temple. A Christian writer of about AD 400, Sulpicius Severus, says the opposite, and the theory that he copied a lost page of Tacitus is a modern inference, not a surviving quotation.
Masada's siege works confirm a Roman siege; the collective death of 960 people rests on Josephus alone. The eight camps, the 4.5-kilometre siege wall and the ramp survive. The ramp sits on a natural spur, and the siege probably took weeks, not years. Josephus's own account is not 960 separate suicides: the men killed their families, ten men chosen by lot killed the other men, and one of the ten killed the nine and then himself. His source for this, he says, was a surviving woman. The excavation found the remains of about 28 people, not 960, and the co-author of the final report on the inscribed sherds doubts that they were the lots. Archaeology neither proves nor disproves the story.
The Bar Kokhba war preserves documents from the rebel administration itself. The leader's own letters and coins call him Shimeon bar (or ben) Kosiba, "president" or "prince" of Israel, and date events by "the redemption of Israel" and the "freedom" of Israel and Jerusalem. The letters and coins cited here do not call him messiah. "This is the King Messiah," credited to Rabbi Akiva, appears in the Jerusalem Talmud, compiled about 400 to 450. The Christian Justin Martyr, writing about 155, says the rebel leader punished Christians who would not deny Jesus. Ancient writers disagree about what started the war: Cassius Dio blames the founding of a pagan city, Aelia Capitolina, on Jerusalem's ruins; the late Historia Augusta blames a ban on circumcision; Eusebius, quoting a second-century Christian, puts Aelia after the war.
There was no "Council of Jamnia" in the popular sense. The rabbinic sources describe a school and court at Yavneh after 70, led by Yohanan ben Zakkai and then Gamaliel II, that issued rulings and argued about scripture. They describe no council that closed the canon for all Jews, and nothing in them is an act of excommunication against Christians. Rabbinic authority over other Jews grew slowly over centuries.
The "curse on the heretics" is real, but its first form, date and target are uncertain. The Babylonian Talmud (compiled about 500 to 600) says Samuel the Small composed a benediction against the minim (heretics) at Yavneh. The third-century Tosefta already knows a prayer about the minim. The first texts that name notsrim (Nazarenes or Christians) are medieval copies from the Cairo Genizah. Christians first clearly report a curse in the daily prayer around 375 (Epiphanius) and in the early 400s (Jerome). John's Gospel says that people who confessed Jesus would be put out of the synagogue, but no other early Christian text uses that word, and nothing in John mentions a prayer. Reuven Kimelman and Lawrence Schiffman, who read the same evidence in the same 1981 volume, agree that a Yavneh-era benediction targeted Jewish sectarians including Jewish Christians, and agree that it expelled no one from the Jewish people. They disagree about how far it pushed Jewish Christians out of synagogues.
Jewish Christians and Christian Judaizers lasted for centuries. Eusebius records fifteen Jewish bishops of Jerusalem up to 135. Justin, about 155, describes Christians who kept the Law, and Christians who refused to associate with them. Epiphanius and Jerome describe law-keeping "Nazoraeans" in the late fourth century. Meanwhile the Romans already treated "Christians" as a separate group in Rome in AD 64, and a Roman governor punished the name itself about 112.
No single event separated church and synagogue. The year 70 changed Judaism by removing the Temple. The decades after 70 probably saw rabbinic boundary-drawing at Yavneh, though its date and reach are uncertain, and under Domitian Rome enforced its Jewish tax harshly. Eusebius places the replacement of Jerusalem's Jewish-Christian leadership by Gentile leadership after the war of 132 to 135, and Justin reports the rebel government's persecution of Christians. But the boundary was crossed in practice for centuries, and it fell at different times in Rome, Judea, Antioch and Asia. The best-supported model is a set of local separations, some early and sharp, some late and incomplete.

What this means for Christian claims. This history confirms the setting the New Testament assumes: a Temple that stood and then fell, a Jesus movement that began inside Judaism, and a Roman world that knew Christians by name within a generation of the crucifixion. It does not confirm any Gospel event, miracle or date of writing. Some arguments that Christians use need retiring: Masada as proof of Josephus's accuracy, the birkat ha-minim as a fixed date for John's Gospel, and "the Jews expelled the Christians in AD 90" as a historical event. The same goes for some skeptical arguments: a late compiled source is not worthless because it is late, and the absence of 960 skeletons does not by itself disprove the reported death toll.

Verdict: the Roman wars are attested by Roman, Jewish and Christian writers and by physical remains. The parting of church and synagogue was a long, uneven process with several sharp local breaks, not one event.

Part 1: Three wars, and when each one actually ended

The first war, AD 66 to 73 or 74

Josephus dates events by Macedonian month names and by the years of emperors. The emperors fix the years. Modern scholars still argue about which calendar his month names stand for, so a day can be off by a few weeks.³

Date	Event	Main source
Spring 66	War breaks out after riots in Caesarea and Jerusalem	Josephus, War 2.284⁴
November 66	Jewish forces rout the Syrian governor Cestius Gallus near Beth-horon	War 2.555⁴
Summer 67	Jotapata falls; Josephus, a rebel general, surrenders	War 3.339⁴
Autumn 67	Gamala falls	War 4.83⁵
68 to 69	Nero dies; civil war in Rome; Vespasian is proclaimed emperor in the east	Tacitus, Histories 1-2; War 4
Spring 70	Titus's army is already camped at Jerusalem when Passover begins	War 5.98-99⁵
Late summer 70	The Temple burns on the 10th of Lous	War 6.250⁵
About a month later	The upper city falls on the 8th of Gorpiaeus	War 6.407⁵
71	Vespasian and Titus celebrate a triumph in Rome	War 7.123-157⁵
71 to 72	Herodium and Machaerus are taken by Lucilius Bassus	War 7.163-209⁵
Spring of 73 or 74	Masada falls on the 15th of Xanthicus	War 7.401⁵

So "the fall of Jerusalem" and "the end of the war" are different events, three or four years apart. When Josephus finishes his account of the city's capture he says "Thus ended the siege of Jerusalem," not the war.⁵ Only after Masada does he write that "not an enemy remained throughout the country."⁵

Josephus gives Masada's day and month but not its year. Thackeray's Loeb note says the year in his margin follows the German historian Emil Schurer, and records that Benedikt Niese put it a year earlier, in 72.⁵ Modern historians divide between 73 and 74, because inscriptions from the career of the Roman commander Flavius Silva and a papyrus found at Masada itself bear on when he governed Judea. Jonathan Roth, who studied the length of the siege, calls the year "a matter of controversy" and lists the arguments on both sides.³ This article writes "73 or 74."

The diaspora war, AD 115 to 117

The second war was not in Judea. Eusebius, writing about 315, dates it to "the eighteenth year of Trajan's reign," which began in 115. He places it "in Alexandria and in the rest of Egypt, and also in Cyrene," names the rebel leader as "Lucuas," and says the emperor also had the Jews of Mesopotamia put down.⁶ Cassius Dio, writing about a century earlier than Eusebius, names the leader in Cyrene as Andreas and adds a rising in Cyprus "under the leadership of a certain Artemion."⁷

Dio's numbers for this war are often misquoted. His "two hundred and twenty thousand" for Cyrene and "two hundred and forty thousand" for Cyprus are the people the rebels killed, Greeks and Romans, not Jewish dead.⁷ They come with a list of atrocities (eating the flesh of victims, sawing people in two) of the kind ancient writers attached to enemies they hated, so the figures carry the same doubt as the stories around them. No other ancient total survives.

The Bar Kokhba war, AD 132 to 135 or 136

The third war was in Judea again. Its leader's coins supply a relative chronology: the first-year dating legend is "Year one of Israel's redemption," and the numismatist Ya'akov Meshorer equates that year with AD 132. The coins do not name an emperor or give an independently fixed Roman calendar year.⁸ Cassius Dio describes a guerrilla war fought from fortified villages and underground tunnels, which Rome ended only by sending its best general, Julius Severus, from Britain.⁹ Eusebius puts the decisive siege, at a fortress he calls Bithara (Betar), in "the eighteenth year of Adrian," that is 134 to 135.⁶

In the first war the decisive siege came years before the last resistance ended, and the Bar Kokhba war was fought village by village rather than at one city. The capture of one city therefore cannot stand for every stage of either war.

What the ground and the coins confirm

Four kinds of physical evidence bear on the first war. None of them passed through Josephus's hands.

Burned houses in Jerusalem's Upper City. In the "Burnt House" in the Jewish Quarter, the archaeologist Nahman Avigad found one phase of occupation under fallen stones, ash, soot and charred wood: "the building had been destroyed by fire, and the walls and ceiling had collapsed along with the burning beams, sealing over the various objects in the rooms."¹⁰ Coins on the floors carried the revolt's own legends, "Year Two/The Freedom of Zion" through "Year Four/Of the Redemption of Zion," and in Avigad's words, "The latest of them, of the fourth year of the revolt, are from A.D. 69."¹⁰ Against a wall lay the bones of a lower arm and hand, which the anthropologist who examined them identified as a woman's in her early twenties.¹⁰
The rebels' own coins. The revolt minted silver shekels dated by years of the revolt, up to Year Five. The slogan changes from "Freedom of Zion" in years two and three to "for the redemption of Zion" in year four.⁸ Year-five shekels were struck "in the last four months of the Jewish War against the Romans," when bronze coinage had stopped.⁸ A government that dates its silver by years of its own era existed: the coins confirm a rebel government issuing its own currency from the first year of the revolt into its fifth, which is what Josephus describes.
Rome's victory monuments. The Arch of Titus still stands at the top of the Sacred Way in Rome. Its inscription reads, in translation, "The Senate and the Roman People to the deified Titus Vespasian Augustus, son of the deified Vespasian,"¹¹ so it was finished after Titus died in 81. Its relief shows the Temple treasures carried in triumph: "on the first the table for the show-bread and the trumpets of the year of jubilee, on the second the seven-branched candlestick."¹² That matches Josephus's list of spoils in the triumph of 71 (table, lampstand, and "last of all the spoils ... a copy of the Jewish Law").⁵ Rome also struck an unusually large series of "Judaea Capta" coins, showing a mourning woman under a palm tree. Meshorer notes that "No other victory was commemorated by such a large number of coins."⁸
A Roman claim that is demonstrably false. A second arch, in the Circus Maximus, carried an inscription dated by Titus's titles to 80 or 81. In translation it says Titus "subdued the Jewish people and destroyed the city of Jerusalem, which by all generals, kings and peoples before him had been either attacked in vain or not attempted at all."¹¹ The monument is lost and its text survives only in a copy made before the ninth century. The claim is propaganda. Tacitus himself writes that "The first Roman to subdue the Jews and set foot in their temple by right of conquest was Gnaeus Pompey," in 63 BC.¹³ The inscription is good evidence of what Rome wanted remembered, not of what happened before Titus.

What this evidence does and does not test:

It confirms a siege, a fire in the city, a rebel government with its own coinage, a Roman victory, a triumph with the Temple vessels, and the scale of Roman celebration.
It does not test Josephus's numbers, his speeches, or who threw the fire into the Temple.
Some popular claims go further than the finds. Avigad imagined the arm's owner as "a young woman working in the kitchen when the Roman soldiers burst into the house."¹⁰ The bones show that human remains were trapped in the destruction layer. They do not show who set the fire or on which day.

Part 2: Josephus as witness, and how far he can be checked

What he saw, what he heard, and what he wrote for effect

Josephus son of Matthias was a priest from Jerusalem who commanded the rebel forces in Galilee in 66 and 67. When Jotapata fell he hid in a cave with "forty persons of distinction," who resolved to die rather than surrender.⁴ By his own account they drew lots to kill one another, and he was one of the last two left, "should one say by fortune or by the providence of God?" He then persuaded the other man to live, and surrendered.⁴ That story is worth keeping in mind when reading his account of Masada, where the same device of lots appears.

After his capture Josephus stayed with the Roman commanders. He describes his position for the siege of Jerusalem this way:

"after my capture I was a prisoner in the Roman camp. Vespasian and Titus, keeping me under surveillance, required my constant attendance upon them, at first in chains; subsequently I was liberated and sent from Alexandria with Titus to the siege of Jerusalem. During that time no incident escaped my knowledge. I kept a careful record of all that went on under my eyes in the Roman camp, and was alone in a position to understand the information brought by deserters."¹

He wrote in Rome, "with the aid of some assistants for the sake of the Greek."¹ He also says he had read the official field reports, the "Commentaries" of Vespasian and Titus, and that he presented his books to the emperors, who approved them. Titus "affixed his own signature to them and gave orders for their publication," and King Agrippa II wrote sixty-two letters vouching for them.¹

That gives four layers in his account of the war:

Eyewitness: Roman siege operations at Jerusalem, Titus's movements, the camp, and what happened in view of the walls.
Second-hand from named or obvious sources: events inside the city (from deserters and prisoners), the Roman field reports, and Masada, which fell when he was in Rome. For Masada he describes an informant, without naming her: one of two women who hid in the water channels and later told the Romans "both the speech and how the deed was done."⁵
Rhetoric: the speeches he gives to Titus, Eleazar and others, and his theology of the disaster (the Temple was a building that "God, indeed long since, had sentenced to the flames").⁵ Ancient historians composed speeches as a matter of course; Ancient Historiography and Compositional Convention covers that convention.
Self-interest: his own conduct as a general, and the conduct of his patrons. Titus approved the book. That approval gives reason for particular caution over claims favourable to Titus; it does not establish how every passage was composed.

His own editor in the standard edition weighs it this way. H. St. J. Thackeray accepts "the historian's narrative as a whole" as trustworthy, then adds: "The Commentaries themselves were written from the Roman standpoint, and the pro-Roman bias of this client of the conquerors ... is frequently evident. His repeated references to the clemency of the Roman generals, his hero Titus in particular, and his representation of them as the saviours of an oppressed people, are specially open to suspicion."⁴

The right use of Josephus follows from these layers. Dismissing him for bias throws away the only detailed narrative, written by a man who was there. Accepting everything he says ignores the places where he had a motive or no access. Each claim has to be sorted into a layer and checked where a check exists.

The numbers

Josephus says 97,000 prisoners were taken in the whole war and 1,100,000 died in the siege.⁵ He explains the size by the Passover crowds, and backs it with a count he says the chief priests took under the governor Cestius: 255,600 lambs sacrificed at one Passover, which at "an average of ten diners to each victim" gives "a total of two million seven hundred thousand."⁵

The arithmetic is wrong on its own terms. 255,600 times 10 is 2,556,000, not 2,700,000. Thackeray's note says so: "Text or arithmetic is at fault."⁵ More important, the method is an estimate stacked on an estimate: a sacrifice count of uncertain origin, times an assumed company size that Josephus himself says could be "as many as twenty." It is not a census of people.¹⁴

Tacitus, writing about 105 to 110, says only that he had heard ("We have heard") that the besieged numbered 600,000 of all ages.¹³ Sulpicius Severus, writing about 400, repeats Josephus's 1,100,000 dead and gives 100,000 captives, which closely resembles Josephus's 97,000 rounded.¹⁵ The later repetition therefore supplies no securely independent confirmation of Josephus's death toll. The honest statement is that the siege killed a very large number of people, that Josephus's figure is an ancient estimate, and that no source supplies a count.

Who burned the Temple?

Josephus says that Titus held a council of six senior officers, heard arguments for destroying the Temple, and ruled against it: he "would not wreak vengeance on inanimate objects instead of men, nor under any circumstances burn down so magnificent a work."⁵ In Josephus the fire starts when "one of the soldiers, awaiting no orders ... moved by some supernatural impulse," throws a burning brand through a golden door, and Titus runs to the Temple and signals in vain for the fire to be put out.⁵

Sulpicius Severus, a Christian writing about AD 400, describes the same council with the roles reversed. Some advisers wanted the Temple spared, "but on the opposite side, others and Titus himself thought that the temple ought specially to be overthrown, in order that the religion of the Jews and of the Christians might more thoroughly be subverted."¹⁵ Cassius Dio, about 200 to 230, has Titus force his reluctant soldiers into the Temple precinct, and does not say who set the fire.¹⁶

How to weigh these:

Josephus was present and Sulpicius was not. But Josephus wrote under Titus's eye, and clearing Titus of the burning is exactly the kind of claim Thackeray flags as "specially open to suspicion."⁴
A long-standing scholarly theory holds that Sulpicius took this passage from the lost part of Tacitus's Histories. Thackeray reports the view cautiously: Sulpicius "has been thought to be here dependent on the lost work of Tacitus."⁴ Tacitus's surviving text breaks off in book 5, before the siege ends. So this is an inference about a lost source, not a Tacitus quotation, and Sulpicius's own numbers show he also drew on Josephus.
Sulpicius's "Christians" clause is the weakest part of his account. Thackeray calls it something that "can hardly be correct," and it reads like Sulpicius's own theology.⁴
Dio's surviving account agrees with neither in full. He has Titus push the attack on the precinct, but ordering an assault does not establish that Titus intended the building to burn.

The evidence does not settle Titus's intention. It does settle that Josephus's version is not the only ancient one, and that his is the version most likely to be shaped by his patron.

Independent and not independent

A further caution applies to all the literary checks on Josephus. Two writers who agree have not confirmed each other if they used the same source. The clearest case is the oracle that, Josephus says, did more than anything else to start the war: a prophecy in the Jewish scriptures "that at that time one from their country would become ruler of the world," which Josephus applies to Vespasian.⁵ Tacitus and Suetonius both tell the same story, in nearly the same terms, and both apply it to Vespasian.¹³¹⁷ Thackeray's note: "Tacitus is not likely to have read Josephus: both are apparently dependent on a common source."⁵ Three witnesses here are probably one Flavian tradition.

That makes the physical evidence more valuable, because it does not come through any writer.

Part 3: Masada, a test of text against spade

Masada lets a detailed literary account be compared with a well-excavated site. Both defenders and critics of Josephus have claimed that the finds settle its most famous episode.

What Josephus actually says

The rock was held from the start of the war by the Sicarii, the faction Josephus hates most.⁵ He records that at Passover they raided the nearby town of Ein Gedi, where "those unable to fly, women and children numbering upwards of seven hundred, were massacred," and carried the crops back to Masada.⁵ This is the same garrison whose last stand he describes, so his praise of their deaths is not the praise of an admirer.

His siege narrative has four parts:

Encirclement. Silva "threw up a wall all round the fortress," posted guards, and camped where the rock met the next hill. Water and food were carried in by Jewish prisoners.⁵
The ramp. On a spur called Leuce, "still three hundred cubits below the elevation of Masada," the soldiers raised "a solid bank to the height of two hundred cubits," topped by a stone platform fifty cubits high and an iron-clad tower of sixty cubits.⁵ At Roth's conversion of 200 cubits to 90 metres, that is a 135-metre gap closed by a 112.5-metre bank and platform and a 27-metre tower.¹⁸
The decision. When the wall was breached, Eleazar ben Yair gave two long speeches urging death over slavery.
The deaths. The men killed their own wives and children. Then, "having chosen by lot ten of their number to dispatch the rest, they laid themselves down each beside his prostrate wife and children ... and offered their throats." The ten "ordained the same rule of the lot for one another, that he on whom it fell should slay first the nine and then himself last of all." The last man set the palace on fire and "drove his sword clean through his body."⁵ Two women and five children hid in the water channels and survived. "The victims numbered nine hundred and sixty, including women and children; and the tragedy occurred on the fifteenth of the month Xanthicus."⁵

So the familiar label needs care. In Josephus's detailed sequence only one person kills himself. Everyone else is killed by a husband, a father, or one of ten men chosen by lot. His summary does use the language of self-killing: the defenders were seized by a passion "to slaughter their wives, their little ones and themselves."⁵ At Jotapata, Josephus says, he proposed the lot for exactly this reason, so that "we shall be spared from taking our lives with our own hands."⁴ Modern writers on every side use "mass suicide" as shorthand.¹⁹ The more exact description is a collective decision to die, carried out mostly by killing, with one suicide at the end.

His source, he says, was one of the two surviving women, who reported "both the speech and how the deed was done."⁵ The speeches are his own composition in their wording; one of them holds up the example of "those Indians" who burn themselves to death.⁵ He was in Rome at the time.

What the excavations found

Yigael Yadin excavated Masada from 1963 to 1965, and the final reports appeared from 1989. Later scholars have re-read the finds. The results sort into three groups.

Physical remains and estimates drawn from them:

The siege system. The siege wall runs "some 4500 meters in length," with "eight military camps and one civilian camp."³ Yadin estimated that the built camps "could house almost 9,000 troops, including the legion," and the whole force, with Jewish prisoners as labour, at perhaps 15,000.²⁰
The ramp, but smaller than it looks. The ramp is real. But "the Roman ramp is built on top of a large natural spur," as von Lammerer saw in 1933 and the geologist Dan Gill confirmed. Von Lammerer reconstructed the original ramp at about 150 metres long and 25 metres wide.³ Roth computes its volume at about 37,500 cubic metres and the wall and camps at another 38,000 or so.³¹⁸
A short siege. From the volume of the works and Roman building rates, Roth concludes that "a nine week siege is the likely maximum, a four week siege the likely minimum, and a siege of seven weeks the most probable." Earlier estimates had run from "four to seven months" to "as high as three years."³ This reconstruction challenges the popular picture of a years-long siege. Its duration depends on estimated construction rates; it is not a date read from the ruins. Josephus never says the siege was long.
Roman occupation afterward. Yadin found that a Roman garrison held the site for decades after the fall, as Josephus says.²⁰

Found, but disputed in meaning:

Human remains. Yadin reported three skeletons on the steps of a small bath-house in the northern palace: a man of about twenty, a young woman whose braided hair survived, and a child.²⁰ He also found "about twenty-five skeletons" in a small cave on the southern cliff, which he took for defenders thrown there by the Romans.²⁰ His own summary is careful: "apart from the twenty-five skeletons found in the cave and possibly the three found in the palace-villa, no physical remains of the last defenders of Masada were left."²⁰ The physical anthropologist Joe Zias has disputed both groups. As reported by Nachman Ben-Yehuda and Jodi Magness, he argues that the palace bones are not one family, that one "child" was a man of about forty, that burial with armour points to Romans, and that the cave held documentary evidence for only five skeletons, found with pig bones.²¹¹⁹ Zias's own papers were not obtained for this article, so his case is given here as reported.
The "lots." Near the Water Gate the excavators found eleven small sherds, each with one name in the same handwriting, one reading "Ben Ya'ir." Yadin asked whether these were the very lots, and answered: "We shall never know for certain."²⁰ In the final report on the inscriptions, his co-author Joseph Naveh listed the difficulties: "there are not ten but twelve tags in the group," and many other name tags of the same size were found in the same room. He added that he had "not dealt with the problem of Josephus' credibility," and quoted Shaye Cohen's doubts beside Yadin's "unquestioning acceptance."²²
The breach. Gideon Hadas argued in 2023 that the Romans entered "from the south through the Southern Gate," not by the ramp and battering ram.²³ Only his abstract could be read for this article. Hillel Geva reads a mound of debris by the northern palace as a second Roman assault ramp, which, as Magness puts it, "if true, would disprove the mass suicide story," because it would mean fighting inside the walls.¹⁹

Dependent on Josephus alone:

The number 960, the speeches, the lots, the killing sequence and the survivors' story have no witness but Josephus. Ben-Yehuda, a sociologist who traced how the Masada story was built into a national symbol, puts it this way: the finds "support some of Josephus's statements (e.g., the Roman siege and storming Masada, the architectural findings)," but "they do not support all of them (e.g., the mass suicide, the riddle of the 960 missing skeletons, the burning of Masada)."²¹ In her 2019 study, Magness declines to decide whether the collective deaths happened: "this is not a question archaeology is equipped to answer."¹⁹

How to weigh it

Two errors are common, and they mirror each other.

"No 960 skeletons, so no mass death." An absence proves little here. Josephus says a Roman garrison stayed on the rock, and Yadin found that it did. Soldiers living on a site clear away bodies. The remains Yadin reported amount to about 3 percent of 960,¹⁸ but neither the proportion of bodies removed nor the number that should survive is known. Later occupation makes the surviving remains an unreliable census; it does not prove what happened to the missing bodies.
"The lots and the skeletons prove Josephus right." The sherds and bones were identified by reading Josephus first. Naveh's own doubts and Zias's challenges show they cannot carry that weight.

The arguments for the core of the story are real. Josephus wrote within about a decade of the event, while the officers of the siege were alive, named an informant, and despised the faction whose last stand he described. That hostility weighs against simple partisan praise, but it does not remove his literary motives. The arguments against are also real. Shaye Cohen argues that Josephus enlarged the death of some defenders into a unanimous act, using literary parallels and his own Jotapata story.²⁴ His case is stronger than the mere absence of 960 skeletons: the excavations found separate fires in several buildings and burned food stores, whereas Josephus describes a common pile of possessions and food left for the Romans. Cohen also argues that bodies in the southern cave fit people hiding there better than Yadin's suggestion that Romans moved bodies there from the palace.²⁴ These are challenges to the reported sequence. They do not independently identify who lit each fire or when, and Cohen's cave argument assumes the disputed identification of its dead as Jewish defenders. He labels his alternative reconstruction conjectural; his claim that some defenders died fighting rests on plausibility.²⁴ Magness adds that "mass suicides are a common literary motif in stories told by ancient historians including Josephus," who tells similar stories of Gamala and Jotapata.¹⁹

The verdict that the evidence supports is limited. Rome besieged Masada with a large force, built the camps, wall and ramp, took the fortress and garrisoned it. Roth estimates weeks of siege work. Josephus reports almost no survivors, but the physical remains do not establish how many defenders died, were captured or escaped. That some of them killed their families and themselves rather than surrender is plausible and has one ancient witness. That all 960 did so, by the procedure and after the speeches Josephus reports, is a literary account that the surviving finds do not settle.

Part 4: The later wars, in their own documents

Egypt, 115 to 117

The diaspora war is poorly covered by historians but well covered by papyri from Egypt. Appian of Alexandria, writing about 150, mentions it in passing as something he lived through: a shrine near his city was destroyed "in my time, while the Roman emperor Trajan was exterminating the Jewish race in Egypt."²⁵ Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum, the standard edition of papyri concerning Jews, collects the letters of a district governor named Apollonios and his family written during the fighting. It also prints a petition of about AD 200 in which the town of Oxyrhynchus reminds the emperors of its loyalty "in the war against the Jews, giving aid then and even now keeping the day of victory as a festival every year."²⁶ The editors take this to be the war of 115 to 117, still celebrated about eighty years later.²⁶ The petition says the townspeople fought alongside the Romans. In Egypt the war was fought between neighbours, not only between Jews and Roman soldiers, and it was remembered as a victory by the Greek side for generations.

Shimeon bar Kosiba, in his own words

For the third war the leader's own letters survive, found in caves by the Dead Sea at Wadi Murabba'at and in the Cave of Letters at Nahal Hever, which Yigael Yadin excavated. Yadin's account of what they show:

"Only the 'wooden' letter, mentioned earlier, has the title: 'President over Israel'; the other letters begin simply: 'from Shimeon ben/bar Kosiba', once more a confirmation that Bar-Kokhba's real name was Ben Kosiba ... It was only from one of the Greek letters that we learned that his name was pronounced Kosiba."²⁷

The letters were dictated, in several hands, and "Not one letter is signed by Shimeon bar Kosiba personally."²⁷ They deal with supplies and discipline. One orders palm branches and citrons, myrtles and willows, the "four kinds" for the festival of Tabernacles, to be sent to the camp after tithing.²⁷ The rebel government kept the religious law. His coins carry four first-year legends: "Year one of Israel's redemption," "Shimon, prince of Israel," and two others. In later years "redemption" gives way to "Freedom of Israel" and then "Freedom of Jerusalem."⁸ The Hebrew title is nasi, which Yadin renders "president" and Meshorer "prince."

So the contemporary evidence gives a name (Kosiba), a title (nasi of Israel), a program (redemption, then freedom), and an administration that issued coins. It does not use the word messiah.

"Son of the star": where the messianic title comes from

The name Bar Kokhba, "son of the star," comes from his opponents and later admirers, not from his documents.

Justin Martyr, about 150 to 155. The earliest datable source calls him Barchochebas, "the leader of the revolt of the Jews."²⁸ So the star-name was in use within twenty years of his death.
Eusebius, about 315. He explains the name as meaning "a star" and says the leader "pretended that he was a star that had come down to them out of heaven to bring them light."⁶
The Jerusalem Talmud, compiled about 400 to 450. Here Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai reports that his teacher Rabbi Akiva read Numbers 24:17, "A star shall step forth from Jacob," as "Koziba steps forth from Jacob," and that when Akiva saw Bar Koziba he said, "This is the King Messiah." Rabbi Yohanan ben Torta answered, "Akiva, grass will grow in your cheeks and the son of David will still not have come."²⁹ The standard introduction to rabbinic literature dates the redaction of this Talmud to "the first half of the fifth century," and its only complete manuscript was "completed in 1289."³⁰
The Babylonian Talmud, about 500 to 600. "Bar Koziba reigned two and a half years. He said to the rabbis, 'I am the Messiah.'" The rabbis test him by the messianic sign of judging by smell, and when he fails, "they killed him."³¹ The Aramaic does not name the killers. Eusebius places the leader's punishment within his account of Rome's siege of Betar, without explaining its manner.⁶ Neither text is contemporary with the war, and the Talmud's messianic test is not independently corroborated.

The Hebrew Koziba means roughly "of the lie." The comparison of the documents' Kosiba with Kokhba (star) and Koziba (lie) distinguishes his recorded name from the interpretations attached to it, and it shows the rabbinic tradition judging him a false hope after the disaster.

How much does this establish? The coin slogans of "redemption" and the star-name known to Justin within a generation make it likely that many supporters saw the war in messianic terms during his lifetime. The specific saying of Akiva comes to us through a compilation three centuries later, with a chain of transmission it names but cannot prove. That lateness is a reason for caution, not a reason to reject it: the saying is unflattering to the rabbis' greatest teacher and was kept anyway. The comparison of Bar Kosiba with Jesus and other claimants belongs to Was Jesus One of Many Would-Be Messiahs? and Second Temple Messianic Expectations.

Christians in the war

Justin, a native of Flavia Neapolis in Palestine writing about 150 to 155, makes the one direct statement about Christians in this war:³²

"For in the Jewish war which lately raged, Barchochebas, the leader of the revolt of the Jews, gave orders that Christians alone should be led to cruel punishments, unless they would deny Jesus Christ and utter blasphemy."²⁸

Eusebius repeats it, but by quoting Justin, so it is one witness, not two.⁶ It is a hostile witness, writing to the emperors to show that Christians were loyal, which gives him a motive to stress Jewish persecution. But Justin came from Palestine and wrote within about twenty years of the war. If his report is right, the rebel government demanded a denial of Jesus that Christians could not accept. This is direct testimony to religious coercion during the revolt. Justin does not identify these Christians' ancestry, say that they refused military service, or establish the conduct of every Jewish or Christian community.

What started the war, and in what order

The ancient sources give three accounts:

Cassius Dio (about 229): Hadrian founded a Roman city on Jerusalem's site, "naming it Aelia Capitolina, and on the site of the temple of the god he raised a new temple to Jupiter. This brought on a war."⁹
The Historia Augusta (late fourth century, under false names): "At this time also the Jews began war, because they were forbidden to practice circumcision."³³ Its editor in the Loeb series notes that Dio's is "probably a more correct account" and that this sentence "is not in chronological order."³³ The Latin speaks of mutilating the genitals, not of circumcision by name.³⁴
Eusebius, citing the second-century Christian Aristo of Pella: after the war the Jews were barred from the district, and only then the city "was colonized by a different race ... and was called Aelia."⁶

These are compatible if Hadrian decided on the colony before the war and the city was built and settled after it. Gunter Stemberger, reviewing the evidence in 2014, notes that it "has long been disputed whether the ban on circumcision was the cause of the revolt or rather one of its consequences," with the decision to found Aelia perhaps at its start. He reports Ra'anan Abusch's view that "no Hadrianic prohibition of circumcision ever existed ... neither before the outbreak of the war nor in its wake," and that the rescript of Antoninus Pius allowing Jews to circumcise their sons was about protecting slaves, not reversing a ban.³⁴ The cause of the war is therefore one of the open questions of the period, with Aelia the better-attested trigger.

What the war cost

Dio's totals are the only ones: "Fifty of their most important outposts and nine hundred and eighty-five of their most famous villages were razed to the ground. Five hundred and eighty thousand men were slain in the various raids and battles."⁹ That is about 590 dead for every village destroyed.³⁵ Like Josephus's numbers, these are an ancient historian's figures, not a count. The Roman side also suffered. Hadrian left out of his report to the Senate the customary line "I and the legions are in health."⁹

Two consequences matter most for this article:

Jews were barred from Jerusalem. Justin tells the emperors, about 150, that the city "is guarded by you lest any one dwell in it, and that death is decreed against a Jew apprehended entering it."³² Eusebius, citing Aristo, says the same.⁶
Jerusalem's church acquired Gentile leadership. Eusebius records fifteen bishops of Jerusalem up to this war, "all of whom are said to have been of Hebrew descent," for "their whole church consisted then of believing Hebrews." After it, "the church there was now composed of Gentiles," under a bishop named Marcus.⁶ Eusebius admits he found no dates and that "tradition says that they were all short lived." Thirteen bishops between Symeon's death under Trajan and 135 would average about two years each.³⁵ The list is a late tradition. The change it records, from a Jewish-Christian to a Gentile church in the new Aelia, is consistent with the ban. It does not establish that all Jewish believers in the region disappeared.

Part 5: After the Temple: Yavneh, and the council that never met

What changed in 70

The Temple was the only place where Jewish law allowed sacrifice. When it burned, the priests lost their service, and the annual half-shekel that Jews everywhere had sent to Jerusalem was redirected by Rome to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol.⁵ Judaism had to continue without its centre.

The rabbinic sources remember the response as the work of a group of sages at Yavneh (Jamnia), a town near the coast. The Mishnah, compiled about AD 200, records rulings of Yohanan ben Zakkai that begin "When the Temple was destroyed": for example, that the ram's horn should now be blown on a Sabbath New Year "in every place that has a court," not only in the Temple. The next line shows a later sage disagreeing about whether this applied anywhere except Yavneh.³⁶ These are real traces of how the practice of the Temple was transferred to courts, synagogues and homes. The famous story that Yohanan slipped out of the besieged city and asked Vespasian, "Give me Yavneh and its sages," is first found in the Babylonian Talmud, compiled four to five centuries later.³⁷

The "Council of Jamnia"

Many older textbooks say that a council of rabbis at Jamnia around AD 90 closed the canon of the Hebrew Bible and expelled the Christians. The council part of this story has a known modern origin. Roger Beckwith, a conservative scholar who argues for an early closed canon, traces it: "The theory that an open canon was closed at the Synod of Jamnia about AD 90 goes back to Heinrich Graetz in 1871."³⁸

The ancient evidence is much thinner. The only text within a century of Yavneh that mentions a discussion of biblical books is a single mishnah. It records that "on the day they seated Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah" as head of the session, the elders ruled that the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes "defile the hands," the rabbinic way of saying that a book is holy scripture. Rabbi Akiva immediately objects that no one ever disputed the Song of Songs, "and if they disputed, they disputed only about Ecclesiastes."³⁶ This is a debate about two books, not a list of the canon, and its own text shows the rabbis disagreeing about what had been decided.

Jack P. Lewis, who did the most to dismantle the theory, sums it up:

"It is prudent to be careful in speaking of the assemblies at Jamnia between 70 and 100 C.E. since a recent review of the literary evidence concerning those meetings indicates that the early biblical critics since Johannes Salomo Semler had gone beyond what the evidence indicates. We especially should not speak of a Council of Jamnia as introductions and handbooks on the O.T still do."³⁹

He adds that "M. Yadayim 3:5 remains the only text dating within a hundred years of Jamnia which speaks of discussion of biblical books. The Talmud texts preserve traditions, but date more than three centuries after the events."³⁹ Beckwith agrees from the other side of the canon debate: "The term 'synod' or 'council' is inappropriate," and "The session at Jamnia was not a council, and the decision it made was not regarded as authoritative."³⁸ On this point a conservative who dates the canon early and critical scholars who date it late now say the same thing.

How far rabbinic authority reached

If there was no council, how much authority did the Yavneh sages have over other Jews? Probably little at first. Ruth Langer, whose book is the standard history of the benediction against heretics, notes that "evidence that the rabbis succeeded in spreading their liturgical system beyond their own narrow circles is lacking for several centuries after the destruction of the Temple."⁴⁰ She summarises Gunter Stemberger's 1977 study the same way: "It is not clear at what point the Jews recognized the rabbis as their religious and political leaders, but that certainly required a long time, and took even longer to spread beyond the Land of Israel to the diaspora."⁴⁰

So the picture after 70 is not one Judaism replacing many at a single meeting. It is a slow growth of one school's influence, recorded mainly by that school's own later compilations.

Part 6: The curse on the heretics and the expulsion stories

The texts, in the order they were written

The birkat ha-minim, "the blessing concerning the heretics," is the twelfth of the eighteen benedictions of the daily standing prayer, the Amidah, recited three times on weekdays.² It is a "blessing" in the sense that it ends "Blessed are you, O Lord"; its content is a curse. The common claim that this prayer expelled Christians around AD 90 depends on reconstructing its early history. Here is the evidence in order of the date of the text that carries it, not the date of the event it describes:

John's Gospel (late first century on most datings; this article does not argue its date, which When Were the Gospels Written? covers). Three times it says that those who confessed Jesus would become aposynagogos, "out of the synagogue": 9:22, 12:42, 16:2.⁴¹ It mentions no prayer and no curse.
Justin Martyr (about 155). Justin says repeatedly that Jews curse Christ and Christians "in your synagogues." Once he links it to prayer: "scoff not at the King of Israel, as the rulers of your synagogues teach you to do after your prayers."⁴²
The Tosefta (third century). Its rule for the eighteen benedictions says that "one includes that about the minim in the blessing about the separatists."⁴⁰ This is the earliest unambiguous reference to a prayer about minim. It says nothing of Yavneh or Christians.
Epiphanius (about 375). Of the Jewish-Christian Nazoraeans he writes that the Jews "stand up in the morning, at noon and in the evening, three times a day, and when they say their prayers in the synagogues they curse and anathematize them," saying "May God curse the Nazoraeans."⁴³
Jerome (about 390 to 410). In his Isaiah commentary the Jews "three times a day in all their synagogues anathematize the Christian name under the name of Nazarenes."⁴⁴ In a letter to Augustine of about 404 he describes "throughout all the synagogues of the East among the Jews a sect which is called that of the Minaei and is condemned by the Pharisees to this day; people commonly call them Nazaraei."⁴⁵
The Jerusalem Talmud (about 400 to 450). It says that "the sages already established [the blessing] of the minim at Yavneh."⁴⁶
The Babylonian Talmud (about 500 to 600). It tells the story: "Shimon ha-Pakuli arranged the eighteen benedictions in order before Rabban Gamaliel at Yavneh. Rabban Gamaliel said to the sages, 'Is there anyone who knows how to compose the benediction against the minim?' Samuel the Small stood up and composed it. The next year he forgot it."⁴⁶
The Cairo Genizah (manuscripts of roughly 1000 to 1300). The first texts that contain the actual wording, published by Solomon Schechter in 1898, include the line "and the notsrim and the minim, let them perish in a moment."⁴⁷

So the words of the prayer are known only from medieval manuscripts, and its Yavneh origin only from Talmuds compiled three to five centuries after Yavneh. The word minim means heretics or sectarians; Jewish Christians were among the groups it could cover. The term notsrim, Nazarenes, appears in no surviving Hebrew wording of this benediction earlier than the Genizah, though Epiphanius's and Jerome's "Nazoraeans" show that a form naming them existed in the late fourth century.

Two scholars, one volume, different readings

In 1981 Reuven Kimelman and Lawrence Schiffman published chapters on this question in the same volume of Jewish and Christian Self-Definition. Each read the rabbinic and Christian evidence directly.

Kimelman's conclusions:

"1. Birkat ha-minim was not directed against Gentile Christians, but against Jewish sectarians. 2. The Genizah version which reads ha-nosrim ve-ha-minim was primarily directed against Jewish Christians. 3. There is no unambiguous evidence that Jews cursed Christians during the statutory prayers. 4. There is abundant evidence that Christians were welcome in the synagogue. 5. Thus birkat ha-minim does not reflect a watershed in the history of the relationship between Jews and Christians in the first centuries of our era. 6. Apparently, there never was a single edict which caused the so-called irreparable separation between Judaism and Christianity. The separation was rather the result of a long process dependent upon local situations and ultimately upon the political power of the church."²

His reasons: he argues that "internal rabbinic evidence makes it highly unlikely that nosrim was part of the original birkat ha-minim"; he warns against "filling in the lacunae of first- and second-century sources with fourth-century material"; and he notes that Justin's one link to prayer speaks of scoffing, not cursing, and of something done "after" the prayers, while the benediction falls in the middle of them.²

Schiffman reads the same material as a real boundary:

"The birkat ha-minim, the benediction against the heretics, was directed at excluding such people from serving as precentor in the synagogue. Indeed, this restriction probably went a long way toward making the Jewish Christians feel unwelcome in the synagogues and causing them to worship separately."⁴⁸

A precentor is the person who leads the congregation in prayer. Schiffman accepts the Gamaliel of the story as Gamaliel II of Yavneh, thinks the expulsion in John "may have been the result" of the benediction, and suggests that the Christians named in the Genizah text were added later, "perhaps by 150 CE but definitely by 350 CE." He insists that the benediction "in no way implied expulsion from the Jewish people."⁴⁸

The two agree on more than is usually said. Both place a benediction against minim in the Yavneh period, both count Jewish Christians among its targets, both deny that the word "Christians" was in its first form, and both deny that it expelled anyone from Israel. They disagree on its effect: Schiffman thinks it drove Jewish Christians out of synagogues in practice, while Kimelman thinks Christians remained welcome for centuries.

Others go further in each direction. James Dunn holds that "the best explanation of John 9.22 is that it refers directly to something like the birkat ha-minim, if only a local equivalent."⁴⁹ Langer reports that William Horbury reads "every mention of Jews' cursing of Christians (or Jesus) as a reference to the rabbinic, synagogue-based birkat haminim."⁴⁰ Horbury's own article could not be obtained for this one. At the other end, Daniel Boyarin doubts "that the so-called curse of the heretics was formulated under Gamaliel II at Yavneh or that it existed at all before the end of the second century," and calls the Babylonian story no reliable evidence, "or indeed evidence at all."⁵⁰ Langer herself declines to give an origin: "We simply cannot say with any certainty that the birkat haminim became part of Jewish liturgy as a specific response to Christianity."⁴⁰

John's Gospel and the "two-level drama"

In 1968 J. Louis Martyn proposed that John 9, the story of a blind man whose parents fear being put out of the synagogue, is a "two-level drama": a story about Jesus that also describes the experience of John's own community decades later. He identified the cause: "The formal separation between church and synagogue has been accomplished in John's milieu by means of the Jewish Benediction Against Heretics."⁵¹ He dated it: "the wording of the Benediction Against Heretics was a Takkanah, published by the Jamnia academy about A.D. 85."⁵¹

The step from the Talmud to an empire-wide decree is Martyn's own inference. He writes that the academy "Presumably" published the order "via an official enactment (Takkanah) binding on the order of worship in all synagogues," and that "Such an important measure would naturally have constituted an official enactment."⁵¹ Langer notes that the Talmud's verb can mean "fixing" a text as well as "enacting" a law.⁴⁰ Martyn himself observed that in Acts the separation "does not at all appear to have been the formal separation of two rivals," since Paul keeps preaching in synagogues.⁵¹

Kimelman's objection is the strongest one: "It is hard to believe that a major rabbinic practice which is supposed to have originated in Yavneh about the turn of the first century is attested to in only one Christian document. ... the term for exclusion from the synagogue, aposynagogos, appears nowhere else in early Christian literature and has no precise parallel in rabbinic terminology."² Langer records that "Beginning in the mid-1990s, some prominent New Testament scholars who had previously advocated Martyn's theory backed away from it."⁴⁰ Adam Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed go further, writing that Peter Schafer, Boyarin and others "have convincingly established that the 'Council of Yavneh' was a much later construct, rather than an historical event."⁵² Martyn's reading still has defenders, among them Horbury and Joel Marcus, whose work could not be obtained for this article.

What John can and cannot bear:

John portrays exclusion, or fear of exclusion, for confessing Jesus. That may preserve events during Jesus's ministry, reflect the writer's later circumstances, or do both. The text alone does not locate a later Johannine community or establish when its members were excluded.
John does not by itself establish a curse in the liturgy, a decree from Yavneh, or a policy across the Jewish world. Connecting its exclusion scenes with the Talmud's later story requires additional evidence.
The benediction cannot date John's Gospel. If its date is uncertain by a century or more, it cannot fix the date of a text that is supposed to reflect it.

Part 7: Jewish Christians, Gentile Christians, and how Rome told them apart

Believers who kept the Law

The first followers of Jesus were Jews who kept the Law. In Acts, James and the elders of Jerusalem tell Paul of "how many tens of thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed, and they are all zealous for the law."⁴¹ What happened to them after 70 is known only from later writers.

The flight to Pella. Eusebius, about 315, writes that "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."⁵³ He names no source. Epiphanius, about 375, tells the story twice, once saying that "Christ" told them to leave and once tying it to the origin of the Ebionites.⁴³ In another work he says the warning came through "an angel of God."⁵⁴ So the earliest surviving form is about 245 years after the event, and the later forms disagree about who gave the warning. The tradition is possible, but it has a difficulty that its critics press: Josephus records that in 66 Jewish bands attacked the Gentile cities of the region, in a list that ends "Pella, and Scythopolis."⁴ A flight of Jewish believers to Pella would then have been a flight to a city just raided by Jews, though Eusebius places the warning "before the war," and the raid and the flight need not have coincided. The tradition cannot be verified, and no excavation result was found for this article that bears on it. Whether it confirms the Gospels' warning to flee (Mark 13:14) is a question for When Were the Gospels Written? and Eschatology and Israel.

Jerusalem's Jewish-Christian bishops. Eusebius's list of fifteen bishops "of the circumcision," ending in 135, is the main evidence that a Jewish-Christian church existed in or near Jerusalem between the wars (Part 4).

Justin's four kinds of believer. Justin's Dialogue, set just after the Bar Kokhba war, is the earliest text after the New Testament to discuss Jewish believers who kept the Law, and it shows Christians divided over them. Trypho asks whether such a person can be saved. Justin answers:

A Jewish believer who keeps the Law but does not press it on Gentiles "will be saved."
Some Christians disagree, and "do not venture to have any intercourse with or to extend hospitality to such persons; but I do not agree with them."
Gentiles who keep the Law "along with their confession of God in Christ" because Jewish believers persuaded them "shall probably be saved."
Those who confessed Christ and then "have gone back from some cause to the legal dispensation, and have denied that this man is Christ ... shall by no means be saved."⁴²

So in Justin's world, about 155, there were law-keeping Jewish Christians, Gentile Christians who copied them, Christians who would not associate with them, and Christians, like Justin, who would. The boundary ran through the church as well as between church and synagogue.

Ignatius in Asia Minor. On the traditional dating, Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, wrote seven letters on his way to martyrdom in Rome under Trajan, between 98 and 117.⁵⁵ To Magnesia he writes: "It is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ and to practise Judaism."⁵⁵ To Philadelphia: "if anyone interpret Judaism to you do not listen to him; for it is better to hear Christianity from the circumcised than Judaism from the uncircumcised."⁵⁵ The second line shows uncircumcised Christians promoting Jewish practice in his churches. These quotations come from the shorter form of the letters that most scholars accept, not the expanded "long recension" of the fourth century.⁵⁵ Ignatius shows a Christian leader drawing a sharp line between "Christianity" and "Judaism" about 110. His warnings suggest that at least some hearers crossed that line; they do not show that every member of his congregations did.

The fourth century. Epiphanius says of the Nazoraeans that they called themselves neither Jews nor Christians, "but they are Jews in every respect and nothing else," and keep both the Old and New Testaments.⁴³ Jerome, describing the same people in 404, says that "while they want to be both Jews and Christians, they are neither Jews nor Christians."⁴⁵ In Antioch, in 386 or 387, John Chrysostom preached against members of his own congregation who were going to synagogue and keeping the Jewish feasts: "There are many in our ranks who say they think as we do. Yet some of these are going to watch the festivals and others will join the Jews in keeping their feasts and observing their fasts."⁵⁶ Three centuries after 70, the bishops were still trying to finish a separation that their people kept crossing.

How Rome saw the difference

Roman sources test the chronology from outside both communities.

AD 64, in Rome. Tacitus, writing about 116, says Nero blamed the fire of Rome on "a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace," named after "Christus," executed under Pontius Pilate.⁵⁷ Suetonius, about 120, lists among Nero's acts: "Punishment was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition."⁵⁸ Both wrote half a century later, Tacitus explicitly places the punishment after the fire of 64; Suetonius records it under Nero without giving a year. Together they attest a named Christian group under Nero. That public distinction does not establish a complete social or legal separation from Judaism.
About 112, in Bithynia. Pliny, governing a province in what is now northern Turkey, asks Trajan whether "the name itself, even without crimes," should be punished.⁵⁹ For a Roman governor "Christian" is its own category.
The Jewish tax. After 70 Vespasian imposed the two-drachma tax "on all Jews, wheresoever resident."⁵ Dio defines the payers as "the Jews who continued to observe their ancestral customs."¹⁶ Under Domitian the tax "was levied with the utmost rigour," and "those were prosecuted who without publicly acknowledging that faith yet lived as Jews, as well as those who concealed their origin." Suetonius remembered a ninety-year-old man stripped in court "to see whether he was circumcised."⁶⁰ Dio says Domitian's cousin Flavius Clemens was condemned for "atheism, a charge on which many others who drifted into Jewish ways were condemned."⁶¹ Later Christian writers claimed some of these victims as Christians, but Suetonius and Dio say nothing of Christians. The Loeb translator's note that the people Suetonius describes were "doubtless Christians" is a modern guess.
Nerva, 96 to 97. Nerva stopped prosecutions: "no persons were permitted to accuse anybody of maiestas or of adopting the Jewish mode of life."⁷ His coins announce FISCI IVDAICI CALVMNIA SVBLATA, "the false accusation of the Jewish treasury removed."⁶² Meshorer's catalogue calls this the "abolishment of the Jewish tax."⁸ The tax receipts say otherwise. Ostraca from Edfu in Egypt record Jews paying "the Jewish tax for the 1st year of our lord Trajan" in June 98, and for later years of Trajan.²⁶ The editors of the papyri put it plainly: "the essential point in the legend lies in the word calumnia."²⁶ The coin announces an end to abuse, not an abolition of the tax, and receipts establish collection under Trajan. Receipts beginning in 98 do not by themselves exclude a brief interruption under Nerva.

The Roman evidence distinguishes a named Christian group under Nero and documents prosecution for the Christian name in Bithynia by about 112. A stronger claim is that Nerva's tax reform changed Christians' legal position. In his 2009 dissertation, Marius Heemstra argues that it replaced an ethnic definition of Jewish taxpayers with a religious one. He contrasts Josephus's and Suetonius's general references to Jews with Dio's narrower wording about those keeping ancestral customs. On his reconstruction, Jewish Christians could lose their standing as Jews, exposing them to the same prosecution as Gentile Christians.⁶³

This is an argument from the sources' different wording and the later treatment of Christians, not a surviving decree naming Christians. Dio describes the tax's creation in 70, not a reform under Nerva; Heemstra infers that Dio projected the later definition backward. That inference deserves consideration, but neither the coin nor the Edfu receipts establishes which Christians paid before or after the reform. Christians' earlier public name does not rule out a later legal change; it also does not prove one.

Part 8: When did the ways part? Five models tested

Each model below has serious defenders, and each fits some evidence. The test is which evidence it needs, and whether that evidence is early and independent.

Model	Key evidence for it	Problems	What would strengthen or weaken it
A decisive break in 70	The Temple, the shared centre, was gone; Christians read its fall as judgment; Jewish believers may have left for Pella	Pella is attested only from about 315; Jewish Christians are still in Jerusalem's church to 135; Christians attend synagogues for centuries	A first-century text showing Jewish Christians shut out of synagogues because of the war would strengthen it
A decree at Yavneh, about 85 to 90	John's aposynagogos; the Talmud's Samuel the Small story; the Genizah wording with notsrim	The story is in a Talmud of about 500 to 600, the wording in medieval manuscripts; no council; rabbinic authority was narrow; the distinctive term for exclusion occurs only in John	A pre-200 text of the benediction naming Christians, or a second first-century Christian witness to exclusion, would revive it
A Roman definition, 96	Domitian's tax prosecutions; Nerva's coin; Dio's "Jewish mode of life"	No surviving decree names Christians; the argument infers a change from different authors' definitions; an earlier public name does not settle later legal status	A document identifying Christians' liability before and after the reform would test it directly
A rupture in Judea, 132 to 135	Justin: the rebel leader punished Christians who would not deny Jesus; Jews barred from Jerusalem; Jewish-Christian bishops replaced by Gentile ones	One Christian witness for the persecution; the bishops' list is late; Jewish Christians persist elsewhere	A letter or papyrus of the war mentioning Christians would test Justin
Many local separations, from the 50s to the 400s	Paul's synagogue conflicts; Christians named in Rome in 64; Ignatius's complaints about 110; Justin's four groups about 155; Epiphanius, Jerome and Chrysostom in the late 300s	Can become too vague to test; can understate real early breaks	Evidence of one coordinated act across regions would weaken it

The local model fits the most evidence with the fewest assumptions. It has support in differing studies: Kimelman's "long process dependent upon local situations,"² the plural "partings" of James Dunn's title,⁴⁹ and Langer's refusal to name an origin for the benediction that the evidence cannot support.⁴⁰

But "the ways never parted" overstates it in the other direction. Some breaks were early and sharp. In Rome the authorities treated Christians as a group of their own by 64. In Judea, if Justin is right, a Jewish rebel government punished Christians during the war of 132 to 135. John portrays confessing Jesus as grounds for synagogue exclusion. By the late fourth century Epiphanius and Jerome report a daily curse on the Nazoraeans. The separation was real. It was not one event, and it was not finished at the same time everywhere.

A geographical sketch, with the evidence it rests on:

Rome: Christians publicly distinguished by 64 (Tacitus, Suetonius).
Judea: a Jewish-Christian church to 135 (Eusebius, late); an open conflict in the Bar Kokhba war (Justin); a Gentile church in Aelia afterward (Eusebius).
Asia Minor: bishops warning against "Judaism" in the churches about 110 (Ignatius).
Syria and Antioch: Jewish Christians "throughout all the synagogues of the East" about 404 (Jerome); Christians at Jewish feasts in 386 or 387 (Chrysostom).
Egypt: the Jewish community devastated in 115 to 117 (papyri, Appian); the evidence read here says nothing about Christians there.

Part 9: What this history does and does not establish for Christian claims

Where Christian claims gain support

The Temple setting has independent support. The New Testament describes a standing Temple that later fell. Josephus, Roman monuments and Jerusalem's destruction layers independently attest the Temple and Rome's victory. The movement's Jewish beginnings are described in the New Testament itself and in later Christian accounts; these archaeological finds do not establish the identity or practices of its earliest members. The Gospels' expectation that the Temple would fall was fulfilled in 70. Whether that expectation was written before or after the event is a separate question, argued in When Were the Gospels Written?, and this article does not settle it.
Christians were a known group very early. Tacitus, a hostile Roman senator writing about 116, names Christ, Pilate and Judea while describing Christians in Rome in AD 64, about thirty years after the crucifixion.⁵⁷ That fits the New Testament's picture of rapid growth, although Tacitus does not identify his source for this passage. A non-Christian author is not by itself proof of an information chain independent of Christians.
The church began as a Jewish movement. The New Testament describes the first followers of Jesus as Jews. Justin's discussion of law-keeping Jewish believers and the later disputes in Ignatius, Epiphanius, Jerome and Chrysostom show continuing ties and contested boundaries. The later practices alone would not prove the movement's origin, but they fit its earliest accounts.
Some Christian traditions place believers apart from the rebels. The late Pella account depicts Jerusalem believers leaving before the first war. Justin reports Christians punished during the Bar Kokhba war for refusing to deny Jesus. Neither account establishes that no Christian ever joined a revolt, and Justin does not explicitly describe refusal to fight.

Where the sources cannot bear the usual apologetic load

Setting accuracy is not proof of events. An accurate Jerusalem, an accurate Temple and accurate customs show that the writers knew the world they described. They do not show that a given miracle or saying happened.
"Josephus confirms the Gospels" needs care. Josephus confirms many people and places the Gospels name. He is also a client historian whose numbers, speeches and treatment of Titus are open to doubt. Using him as a neutral witness when he agrees and dismissing him when he does not is the same mistake skeptics make in reverse.
Masada does not prove Josephus reliable. The siege works match his account. The deaths depend on his account alone. The remains support the siege narrative; extending that support to the reported collective deaths exceeds what the finds establish.
The Pella flight is late. It is first recorded about 315, with no source named. It may be true; it cannot be used as independent confirmation of a Gospel prophecy.
The "expulsion in AD 90" is not a fixed point. Both conservative and critical arguments have used the benediction to date John's Gospel. The evidence does not date the benediction closely enough for either use.
The fall of Jerusalem as divine punishment is a theological reading. Eusebius and Sulpicius Severus read it that way.⁵³¹⁵ Josephus, a Jew, also called it God's sentence.⁵ It is a reading of history, not a finding of history, and an argument built on it has to stand on theology.

Where skeptical claims also overreach

"The Temple's destruction is a Christian invention." Jewish and Roman testimony and physical remains establish the destruction independently of the Gospels. This confirms the historical setting, without deciding when a particular Gospel passage was written.
"Christianity split from Judaism at once over Jesus's divinity." The evidence shows Jewish believers inside synagogues for generations, and a parting that varied by place.
"A late source is worthless." Lateness lowers confidence, but it does not erase content. The Jerusalem Talmud's Akiva saying is unflattering to its own hero and was kept anyway; Eusebius quotes a second-century witness for the ban on Jerusalem. Each late tradition has to be weighed, not dismissed by its date.
"No skeletons, no Masada deaths." Later occupation and possible disposal prevent a simple comparison between the surviving bones and Josephus's death toll. The missing skeletons do not by themselves disprove the deaths; nor does later occupation explain the fate of particular bodies without evidence.

Objections and responses

"Josephus was a turncoat on Rome's payroll. Nothing he says can be trusted." His bias is real and this article names it. But the physical evidence (burned houses, revolt coins, the triumphal arch and coins, the Masada siege works) confirms the main lines of his narrative, and his own editor, while flagging his flattery of Titus, judges "the historian's narrative as a whole" trustworthy.⁴ The right response to bias is to sort his claims by what he could know and what he had reason to shade, not to discard the only eyewitness account.
"Josephus was at the siege and Sulpicius was not. Why give a fourth-century Christian equal weight about Titus?" That is a strong point, and this article does not prefer Sulpicius. It notes that Josephus's version of Titus is exactly the kind of claim his patron would want, that Dio has Titus force his soldiers into the precinct, and that Sulpicius's source may be lost Roman material. The question is left open because the evidence leaves it open.
"Masada is a Zionist myth." Ben-Yehuda's work is about how a modern national story was built from Josephus and selective archaeology.²¹ It does not deny the siege, the camps, the ramp or the Roman capture, which the remains confirm. What is myth in his sense is the heroic modern version, including details Josephus never gave, such as a siege of years.
"Yadin found the lots and the bodies. Archaeology proves the story." Yadin himself said of the lots, "We shall never know for certain."²⁰ His co-author on the final report listed reasons against the identification.²² The bones have been challenged, though the challenge is known here only as reported by others. Archaeology confirms the setting of the story, not its climax.
"Bar Kokhba was hailed as the Messiah by Rabbi Akiva, which shows how easily Jews followed false messiahs." The saying is found first in a compilation of about 400 to 450. Bar Kosiba's own letters and coins use "prince" or "president" and "redemption"; the documents cited here do not call him "messiah." The coins and Justin's use of the star-name make messianic hopes around him likely. Whether that tells anything about Jesus is a comparison this article leaves to its sibling articles on messianic claimants.
"A Council of Jamnia closed the Hebrew canon in AD 90, so the Bible's shape is a late rabbinic decision." No council is attested. The one early text records a debate about two books, and both Lewis, who dates the closing of the canon later, and Beckwith, who dates it earlier, reject the council.³⁸³⁹ When the canon was settled is a real question, but Jamnia is not its answer.
"John 9:22 is too specific to be invented. Something like the benediction must lie behind it." Actual exclusion is plausible, and Dunn's "local equivalent" is one possible explanation.⁴⁹ What does not follow is a single decree, a liturgical curse in John's time, or a date for John.
"Kimelman explains away Justin. Justin says nine times that Jews curse Christ or Christians." Justin's testimony is real, and this article accepts that some Jews cursed Christ and Christians in some synagogues by about 155. Whether that cursing was the benediction recited in the daily prayer is the disputed step. Kimelman's case that it was not, and Horbury's and Schiffman's that it was, both rest on readings of the same few lines.
"The ways never parted." Becker and Reed's title makes a real point about long contact. But the Roman authorities knew Christians as a separate group in 64, Justin reports a Jewish rebel government persecuting Christians during the war of 132 to 135, and by the fourth century there was a daily curse in some synagogues. The ways did part, at different times in different places.
"The Pella flight proves that Jesus's warning in Mark 13 was a real prophecy written before 70." The flight is first reported about 315, without a named source, and later versions disagree about who gave the warning. It is consistent with the Gospel warning, but it cannot independently prove it.
"Rome exempted Christians from the Jewish tax under Nerva, which proves Rome saw them as a different religion by 96." No ancient source says so. Nerva's coin announces an end to false accusations, and Jews in Egypt went on paying the tax under Trajan.²⁶ Rome's separate treatment of Christians is better shown by Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny than by the tax.
"Dio's 580,000 dead and Josephus's 1,100,000 are either census figures or pure invention." Neither. They are ancient estimates. Josephus's own method can be checked and is shaky; Dio's cannot be checked. Both describe very destructive wars, but neither number should be printed as a count.

Issues and unanswered questions

Sources that could not be obtained. Joe Zias's papers on the Masada bones, Dan Gill's 1993 study of the ramp, Gwyn Davies's 2011 study of the siege works and the full text of Gideon Hadas's 2023 paper were not read; their positions are given only as reported by others. William Horbury (1982), Joel Marcus (2009) and Pieter van der Horst (1994) on the benediction, Cohen's 1984 "The Significance of Yavneh," Lewis's 1964 article, Martin Goodman (1989) and Heemstra's revised 2010 book on the Jewish tax (the 2009 dissertation was read directly), Werner Eck (1999) on the Roman view of the Bar Kokhba war, and Peter Schafer's collected studies of that war were also out of reach by open routes.
The year Masada fell. The 73 or 74 debate turns on inscriptions of Flavius Silva and a Masada papyrus that were not examined here.
Titus and the Temple. The evidence leaves his intention unresolved.
Jerusalem's destruction layers. This article used Avigad's Burnt House. The excavations at Robinson's Arch and in the City of David, which report collapsed Temple Mount masonry, arrowheads and coins of the revolt, were not read for it.
The order of events under Hadrian. Whether Aelia Capitolina was founded before the revolt, and whether any ban on circumcision existed, depends on coin finds and legal texts that were read only through Stemberger's review.
The Bar Kokhba documents. The full editions of the Murabba'at and Nahal Hever letters were not read; this article relies on Yadin's popular account and Meshorer's catalogue.
The Pella tradition. No archaeological evidence for or against a first-century Christian presence at Pella was examined.
Chrysostom's text. The English translation used is of unknown origin and was not checked against the Greek.

Verdict

The three Jewish wars against Rome have substantial literary and physical evidence. Josephus, Roman historians, Christian writers, rabbinic tradition, papyri, coins, inscriptions and excavated sites bear on different parts of the history. Together they establish the main sequence: Jerusalem and its Temple were destroyed in 70, resistance ended at Masada three or four years later, the Jews of Egypt and Cyrene rose and were crushed in 115 to 117, and the Judean revolt of Shimeon bar Kosiba was defeated in 135 at great cost, after which Jews were barred from Jerusalem. The details that make the story vivid (Josephus's numbers, Titus's intentions, the death of 960 at Masada, Akiva's acclamation of a messiah) rest on single literary witnesses and must be held more loosely.

The separation of church and synagogue was not decided at Yavneh, by a curse, or by any one war. The evidence shows Christians named as a separate group in Rome in 64, Jewish believers keeping the Law and sometimes attending synagogue into the fourth century, Justin's report of anti-Christian persecution during the Bar Kokhba war, and a long process of boundary-drawing whose pace and reach varied by place. For Christian apologetics this history confirms the Jewish setting and early spread of the faith. It does not confirm any Gospel event or date, and several popular arguments built on Masada, Jamnia, Pella and the benediction against heretics should be retired.

Sources

1.
Josephus, Flavius. The Life; Against Apion. Loeb Classical Library 186, Heinemann and Harvard University Press. Translated by H. St. J. Thackeray. c. 95 (edition of 1926). Josephus's autobiography and his defence of the Jewish people, written in Rome in the 90s. Both books answer critics of his war history, so they are where he states his own qualifications: a prisoner in the Roman camp, an interpreter of deserters' reports, and a writer whose book Titus endorsed.
1. 1a.
  Book Against Apion, section 1.55, page 185: “My qualification as historian of the war was that I had been an actor in many, and an eyewitness of most, of the events; in short, nothing whatever was said or done of which I was ignorant.” ↩
2. 1b.
  Book Against Apion, section 1.48-50, page 183: “after my capture I was a prisoner in the Roman camp. Vespasian and Titus, keeping me under surveillance, required my constant attendance upon them, at first in chains; subsequently I was liberated and sent from Alexandria with Titus to the siege of Jerusalem. During that time no incident escaped my knowledge. I kept a careful record of all that went on under my eyes in the Roman camp, and was alone in a position to understand the information brought by deserters. Then, in the leisure which Rome afforded me, with all my materials in readiness, and with the aid of some assistants for the sake of the Greek, at last I committed to writing my narrative of the events.” ↩ ↩
3. 1c.
  Book The Life, section 363-364: “so anxious was the Emperor Titus that my volumes should be the sole authority from which the world should learn the facts, that he affixed his own signature to them and gave orders for their publication; while King Agrippa wrote sixty-two letters testifying to the truth of the record.” Section 358: “neither were you a combatant nor had you perused the Commentaries of Caesar”. The second passage is addressed to Josephus's rival historian Justus of Tiberias. ↩
2.
Kimelman, Reuven. “Birkat Ha-Minim and the Lack of Evidence for an Anti-Christian Jewish Prayer in Late Antiquity.” Sanders, E. P.; Baumgarten, A. I.; Mendelson, Alan (eds.), Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, vol. 2, 226-244. Philadelphia: Fortress. 1981. A study of the rabbinic and patristic evidence for the benediction against heretics by a scholar of Talmud and liturgy. It argues that the benediction targeted Jewish sectarians, that the word for Christians is a later addition, and that the fourth-century Christian reports cannot be read back into the first century.
1. 2a.
  Page 226: “Since the talmudic period birkat ha-minim has constituted the twelfth benediction of the rabbinic Statutory prayer, the so-called 'eighteen benedictions' or 'amidah. The 'amidah is recited thrice daily on weekdays.” ↩
2. 2b.
  Page 244: “1. Birkat ha-minim was not directed against Gentile Christians, but against Jewish sectarians. 2. The Genizah version which reads ha-nosrim ve-ha-minim was primarily directed against Jewish Christians. 3. There is no unambiguous evidence that Jews cursed Christians during the statutory prayers. 4. There is abundant evidence that Christians were welcome in the synagogue. 5. Thus birkat ha-minim does not reflect a watershed in the history of the relationship between Jews and Christians in the first centuries of our era. 6. Apparently, there never was a single edict which caused the so-called irreparable separation between Judaism and Christianity. The separation was rather the result of a long process dependent upon local situations and ultimately upon the political power of the church.” ↩ ↩ ↩
3. 2c.
  Page 234: “Thus internal rabbinic evidence makes it highly unlikely that nosrim was part of the original birkat ha-minim. ... Discussions of this evidence frequently commit the fallacy of filling in the lacunae of first- and second-century sources with fourth-century material”. Page 235: “The connection between the comment of Justin just cited and birkat ha-minim is, to say the least, problematic. First, there is no mention of Christians.” Kimelman's second and third points, on the same page, are that Justin's verb here means to scoff rather than to curse, and that the action happens "after the prayers" while the benediction stands in the middle of them. ↩
4. 2d.
  Page 234: “It is hard to believe that a major rabbinic practice which is supposed to have originated in Yavneh about the turn of the first century is attested to in only one Christian document. If it were aimed against Christians it would have been widespread. Thus it is of no surprise that the term for exclusion from the synagogue, aposynagogos, appears nowhere else in early Christian literature and has no precise parallel in rabbinic terminology.” The scan's Greek for aposynagogos is garbled and is transliterated here. ↩
3.
Roth, Jonathan. “The Length of the Siege of Masada.” Scripta Classica Israelica 14:87-110. 1995. A military historian's reconstruction of the Roman siege from the surviving camps, wall and ramp, using Roman construction rates from other sieges. It concludes that the siege took about seven weeks, not the two or three years once assumed, and gathers the scholarship on the calendar and on whether Masada fell in 73 or 74.
1. 3a.
  Page 88: “While he uses the names of Macedonian months in his works, it has long been recognized that Josephus is using them to represent the months of a different calendar. Scholarly opinion remains divided, however, on whether Josephus meant these Macedonian names to represent the Roman (i.e. Julian) calendar, in which Xanthicus 16 would be the equivalent of April 16, or the Jewish (i.e. Babylonian) calendar, in which Xanthicus 16 would be the 16th of Nisan, a month which falls between March and April.” ↩
2. 3b.
  Page 88: “Whether Masada fell in 73 or 74 AD is a matter of controversy”. Roth's note 5 lists Eck (1969 and 1970), Campbell (1988), Hannah Cotton's 1989 study of the Masada papyri, Cotton and Geiger, and Bowersock (1991). ↩
3. 3c.
  Page 99: “The circumvallation at Masada measures some 4500 meters in length, with a width of between 1.5 and 1.8 meters (an average of 1.65 meters). It was probably originally 3 meters high, and thus contained about 23,000 cubic meters of stone. In addition, eight military camps and one civilian camp (the Bauplatz) were built, some on and some near the circumvallation.” ↩
4. 3d.
  Page 101: “At first glance, the siege ramp at Masada appears enormous. However, the present appearance of the ramp differs considerably from its original size and shape. As noted in 1933 by von Lammerer and confirmed by a recent geologic survey by Dan Gill, the Roman ramp is built on top of a large natural spur. ... In the most thorough analysis to date, von Lammerer calculated that the siege ramp at Masada was originally 150 meters long and 25 meters wide.” Roth's note 107: Josephus's 200 cubits "is probably measured from the bottom of the Wadi Sebbe next to it ... The present distance from the bottom of the Wadi Sebbe to the top of the ramp is 115 meters." ↩
5. 3e.
  Page 102: “Taking the average thickness of the ramp to be 20 meters, the siege ramp at Masada contained approximately 37,500 cubic meters of earth and timber.” Roth's note 111 gives the calculation as 150 by 25 by 20 metres "divided by 2 (as a ramp would be half the" prism. ↩
6. 3f.
  Page 87: “The siege of Masada is generally considered a long and arduous one, lasting at least four to seven months, with estimates of its length ranging as high as three years.” Page 109: “All in all, a nine week siege is the likely maximum, a four week siege the likely minimum, and a siege of seven weeks the most probable length for the siege of Masada.” ↩
4.
Josephus, Flavius. The Jewish War, books 1-3. Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann. Translated by H. St. J. Thackeray. c. 75 (edition of 1928). The first volume of the war history in the standard Greek and English edition. Thackeray's introduction weighs Josephus as a historian, compares him with Thucydides, and prints the conflicting account of Sulpicius Severus beside Josephus's account of Titus's council on the Temple.
1. 4a.
  Book War, section 2.284: “it was now that the war opened, in the twelfth year of the principate of Nero, and the seventeenth of the reign of Agrippa, in the month of Artemisius.” ↩
2. 4b.
  Book War, section 2.555: “of the Romans and their allies they had slain five thousand three hundred infantry and four hundred and eighty of the cavalry. This action took place on the eighth of the month Dius in the twelfth year of Nero's principate.” ↩
3. 4c.
  Book War, section 3.339: “Thus was Jotapata taken in the thirteenth year of the principate of Nero, on the new moon of Panemus.” ↩
4. 4d.
  Book War, section 3.341-342: “But Josephus, when the city was on the point of being taken, aided by some divine providence, had succeeded in stealing away from the midst of the enemy and plunged into a deep pit, giving access on one side to a broad cavern, invisible to those above. There he found forty persons of distinction in hiding”. ↩
5. 4e.
  Book War, section 3.387-391: “Since we are resolved to die, come, let us leave the lot to decide the order in which we are to kill ourselves; let him who draws the first lot fall by the hand of him who comes next; fortune will thus take her course through the whole number, and we shall be spared from taking our lives with our own hands. ... He, however (should one say by fortune or by the providence of God?), was left alone with one other; and, anxious neither to be condemned by the lot nor, should he be left to the last, to stain his hand with the blood of a fellow-countryman, he persuaded this man also, under a pledge, to remain alive.” The proposal is Josephus's own, by his account. The lot was meant to spare each man from killing himself. ↩ ↩
6. 4f.
  Pages xxiii-xxiv: “the historian's narrative as a whole cannot but be accepted as trustworthy. Unfortunately reservations must be made. ... The Commentaries themselves were written from the Roman standpoint, and the pro-Roman bias of this client of the conquerors, who from the first had recognized the hopelessness of resistance to imperial Rome, is frequently evident. His repeated references to the clemency of the Roman generals, his hero Titus in particular, and his representation of them as the saviours of an oppressed people, are specially open to suspicion.” ↩ ↩
7. 4g.
  Pages xxiv-xxv: “In one crucial instance, a statement of Josephus -- that Titus desired to spare the temple -- is directly contradicted by a later historian. The fourth-century Christian writer, Sulpicius Severus, who has been thought to be here dependent on the lost work of Tacitus, states, like Josephus, that a council of war was held on the subject, at which different opinions were expressed, but here the roles are reversed and it is Titus who sanctions the destruction of the building. ... The evidence of Sulpicius is somewhat vitiated by the final allusion to Christianity which can hardly be correct; but the known partiality of Josephus leaves him under the suspicion of having misrepresented the attitude of Titus, in order to clear him of the imputation of cruelty.” Thackeray adds that Weber upheld Sulpicius against Josephus, while Schurer inclined to Valeton's middle view that Josephus, "without actual mendacity, has by the suppression of important facts created a false impression." Thackeray's dash is printed as a double hyphen here. ↩ ↩ ↩
8. 4h.
  Book War, section 2.458-459: “Pella, and Scythopolis. Next they fell upon Gadara, Hippos, and Gaulanitis, destroying or setting fire to all in their path”. Josephus's list of Syrian and Decapolis cities attacked by Jewish bands after the massacre of the Jews of Caesarea in 66. He adds (2.463) that each Syrian city "had its Judaizers," Gentiles drawn to Jewish practice. ↩
5.
Josephus, Flavius. The Jewish War, books IV-VII. Loeb Classical Library 210, Heinemann and Harvard University Press. first printed 1928, reprinted 1957 edition. Translated by H. St. J. Thackeray. c. 75. The only full narrative of the siege of Jerusalem and of Masada, by a former rebel commander who watched the siege from the Roman camp. Books 6 and 7 cover the burning of the Temple, the capture of the city, the triumph in Rome, the last fortresses and the new Jewish tax. Thackeray's notes flag places where Josephus's arithmetic or dating fails.
1. 5a.
  Book War, section 4.83: “Thus on the twenty-third of the month Hyperberetaeus was Gamala taken, after a revolt which began on the twenty-fourth of Gorpiaeus.” ↩
2. 5b.
  Book War, section 5.98-99: “During a temporary lull in the war without the walls, faction renewed its hostilities within. When the day of unleavened bread came round on the fourteenth of the month Xanthicus, the reputed anniversary of the Jews' first liberation from Egypt, Eleazar and his men partly opened the gates”. The siege began at Passover, when the city was full of pilgrims; Josephus (6.421) gives this as the reason so many died. ↩
3. 5c.
  Book War, section 6.250, page 449: “the fated day, the tenth of the month Lous, the day on which of old it had been burnt by the king of Babylon.” Thackeray's footnote: "In 2 Kings xxv. 8, on the other hand, the day is given as the 7th Ab; while, in Jewish tradition, the anniversary of the double burning has always been kept on the 9th Ab. A fictitious symmetry between corresponding events in the two sieges has probably been at work." ↩
4. 5d.
  Book War, section 6.407: “the dawn of the eighth day of the month Gorpiaeus broke upon Jerusalem in flames”. ↩
5. 5e.
  Book War, section 7.148-150: “After these, and last of all the spoils, was carried a copy of the Jewish Law.” ↩ ↩
6. 5f.
  Book War, section 7.163-164: “had reduced the fortress of Herodium with its garrison to surrender. He next concentrated all the numerous scattered detachments of troops, including the tenth legion, having determined to march against Machaerus.” ↩
7. 5g.
  Book War, section 7.401, page 617: “The victims numbered nine hundred and sixty, including women and children; and the tragedy occurred on the fifteenth of the month Xanthicus.” Thackeray's footnote to the margin date: "The day of the month follows the reckoning of Niese, the year that of Schürer ... Niese reckons the year as A.D. 72." Thackeray prints the fifteenth; Roth, discussing the calendar on page 88 of his 1995 study, gives Xanthicus 16. The day differs between these accounts; this article follows the quoted Loeb text. ↩ ↩ ↩
8. 5h.
  Book War, section 6.442: “Thus ended the siege of Jerusalem.” ↩
9. 5i.
  Book War, section 7.407-408: “The fortress being thus taken, the general left a garrison on the spot and himself departed with his army to Caesarea. For not an enemy remained throughout the country, the whole having now been subdued by this protracted war”. ↩
10. 5j.
  Book War, section 7.404, page 619: “The shout was heard by the women-folk, who, emerging from the caverns, informed the Romans how matters stood, one of the two lucidly reporting both the speech and how the deed was done.” Thackeray's footnote identifies the speaker as Eleazar's relative, one of the two women of section 399. ↩ ↩
11. 5k.
  Book War, section 6.250, page 447: “That building, however, God, indeed long since, had sentenced to the flames”. ↩ ↩
12. 5l.
  Book War, section 6.420: “The total number of prisoners taken throughout the entire war amounted to ninety-seven thousand, and of those who perished during the siege, from first to last, to one million one hundred thousand.” ↩
13. 5m.
  Book War, section 6.422-425: “on the occasion of the feast called Passover, at which they sacrifice from the ninth to the eleventh hour, and a little fraternity, as it were, gathers round each sacrifice, of not fewer than ten persons (feasting alone not being permitted), while the companies often include as many as twenty, the victims were counted and amounted to two hundred and fifty-five thousand six hundred; allowing an average of ten diners to each victim, we obtain a total of two million seven hundred thousand, all pure and holy.” Thackeray's footnote: "Text or arithmetic is at fault; the total should be" 2,556,000. ↩ ↩
14. 5n.
  Book War, section 6.238-241, page 445: “Some were of opinion that the law of war should be enforced, since the Jews would never cease from rebellion while the temple remained as the focus for concourse from every quarter. ... Titus, however, declared that, even were the Jews to mount it and fight therefrom, he would not wreak vengeance on inanimate objects instead of men, nor under any circumstances burn down so magnificent a work; for the loss would affect the Romans, inasmuch as it would be an ornament to the empire if it stood.” Thackeray's footnote here: "For a conflicting account of the verdict of Titus at this council see Introduction to vol. ii. pp. xxiv f." ↩
15. 5o.
  Book War, section 6.252-256, pages 449-451: “one of the soldiers, awaiting no orders and with no horror of so dread a deed, but moved by some supernatural impulse, snatched a brand from the burning timber and, hoisted up by one of his comrades, flung the fiery missile through a low golden door ... Caesar, both by voice and hand, signalled to the combatants to extinguish the fire; but they neither heard his shouts, drowned in the louder din which filled their ears, nor heeded his beckoning hand”. ↩
16. 5p.
  Book War, section 6.312-313: “But what more than all else incited them to the war was an ambiguous oracle, likewise found in their sacred scriptures, to the effect that at that time one from their country would become ruler of the world. This they understood to mean someone of their own race, and many of their wise men went astray in their interpretation of it. The oracle, however, in reality signified the sovereignty of Vespasian, who was proclaimed Emperor on Jewish soil.” Thackeray's footnote: "Tacitus is not likely to have read Josephus: both are apparently dependent on a common source." ↩ ↩
17. 5q.
  Book War, section 4.402-405: “these assassins, eluding under cover of night those who might have obstructed them, made a raiding descent upon a small town called Engaddi. Those of the inhabitants who were capable of resistance were, before they could seize their arms and assemble, dispersed and driven out of the town; those unable to fly, women and children numbering upwards of seven hundred, were massacred. They then rifled the houses, seized the ripest of the crops, and carried off their spoil to Masada.” ↩
18. 5r.
  Book War, section 7.275-278: “The Roman general advanced at the head of his forces against Eleazar and his band of Sicarii who held Masada, and, promptly making himself master of the whole district, established garrisons at the most suitable points, threw up a wall all round the fortress, to make it difficult for any of the besieged to escape, and posted sentinels to guard it. ... For not only were supplies conveyed from a distance, entailing hard labour for the Jews told off for this duty, but even water had to be brought into the camp, there being no spring in the neighbourhood.” ↩
19. 5s.
  Book War, section 7.304-309: “He had discovered only one spot capable of supporting earthworks. For in rear of the tower which barred the road leading from the west to the palace and the ridge, was a projection of rock, of considerable breadth and jutting far out, but still three hundred cubits below the elevation of Masada; it was called Leuce. ... they raised a solid bank to the height of two hundred cubits. This, however, being still considered of insufficient stability and extent as an emplacement for the engines, on top of it was constructed a platform of great stones fitted closely together, fifty cubits broad and as many high. ... a sixty-cubit tower was constructed entirely cased in iron”. ↩
20. 5t.
  Book War, section 7.395-397, page 617: “then, having chosen by lot ten of their number to dispatch the rest, they laid themselves down each beside his prostrate wife and children, and, flinging their arms around them, offered their throats in readiness for the executants of the melancholy office. These, having unswervingly slaughtered all, ordained the same rule of the lot for one another, that he on whom it fell should slay first the nine and then himself last of all ... set the palace ablaze, and then collecting his strength drove his sword clean through his body and fell beside his family.” ↩
21. 5u.
  Book War, section 7.389-393: “Like men possessed they went their way, each eager to outstrip his neighbour and deeming it a signal proof of courage and sound judgement not to be seen among the last: so ardent the passion that had seized them to slaughter their wives, their little ones and themselves.” ↩
22. 5v.
  Book War, section 7.351-352: “let us look at those Indians who”. Eleazar's second speech holds up Indian sages who burn themselves alive as models of contempt for death. ↩
23. 5w.
  Book War, section 7.297: “All these Eleazar, when he with his Sicarii became through treachery master of the fortress, found in perfect condition”. Thackeray's note refers back to War 2.408, the seizure of Masada at the outbreak of the war in 66. Josephus's invective against the Sicarii is at 7.253-274. ↩
24. 5x.
  Book War, section 7.218: “On all Jews, wheresoever resident, he imposed a poll-tax of two drachms, to be paid annually into the Capitol as formerly contributed by them to the temple at Jerusalem.” ↩ ↩
6.
Eusebius of Caesarea. “Church History, book 4.” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 1. Translated by Arthur Cushman McGiffert. c. 325 (edition of 1890). The first history of the church, by a bishop of Caesarea in Palestine who quotes earlier writers now lost. Book 4 covers the Jewish revolts under Trajan and Hadrian, the list of Jerusalem's fifteen Jewish-Christian bishops, and the founding of Aelia, for which it cites the second-century Christian Aristo of Pella.
1. 6a.
  Book 4, section 2.1-5: “In the eighteenth year of Trajan's reign there was another disturbance of the Jews, through which a great multitude of them perished. For in Alexandria and in the rest of Egypt, and also in Cyrene, as if incited by some terrible and factious spirit, they rushed into seditious measures against their fellow-inhabitants, the Greeks. ... But the Jews of Cyrene ... continued to plunder the land of Egypt and to devastate its districts, under the leadership of Lucuas. ... But the emperor, fearing that the Jews in Mesopotamia would also make an attack upon the inhabitants of that country, commanded Lucius Quintus to clear the province of them.” ↩
2. 6b.
  Book 4, section 6.3: “The war raged most fiercely in the eighteenth year of Adrian, at the city of Bithara, which was a very secure fortress, situated not far from Jerusalem.” “When the siege had lasted a long time, and the rebels had been driven to the last extremity by hunger and thirst, and the instigator of the rebellion had suffered his just punishment”. ↩ ↩
3. 6c.
  Book 4, section 6.2: “The leader of the Jews at this time was a man by the name of Barcocheba (which signifies a star), who possessed the character of a robber and a murderer, but nevertheless, relying upon his name, boasted to them, as if they were slaves, that he possessed wonderful powers; and he pretended that he was a star that had come down to them out of heaven to bring them light in the midst of their misfortunes.” ↩
4. 6d.
  Book 4, section 8.4: “The same writer, speaking of the Jewish war which took place at that time, adds the following: For in the late Jewish war Barcocheba, the leader of the Jewish rebellion, commanded that Christians alone should be visited with terrible punishments unless they would deny and blaspheme Jesus Christ.” ↩
5. 6e.
  Book 4, section 6.3-4: “the whole nation was prohibited from this time on by a decree, and by the commands of Adrian, from ever going up to the country about Jerusalem. For the emperor gave orders that they should not even see from a distance the land of their fathers. Such is the account of Aristo of Pella. And thus, when the city had been emptied of the Jewish nation and had suffered the total destruction of its ancient inhabitants, it was colonized by a different race, and the Roman city which subsequently arose changed its name and was called Ælia, in honor of the emperor Ælius Adrian.” ↩ ↩
6. 6f.
  Book 4, section 5.1-4 and 6.4: “The chronology of the bishops of Jerusalem I have nowhere found preserved in writing; for tradition says that they were all short lived. But I have learned this much from writings, that until the siege of the Jews, which took place under Adrian, there were fifteen bishops in succession there, all of whom are said to have been of Hebrew descent, and to have received the knowledge of Christ in purity ... For their whole church consisted then of believing Hebrews who continued from the days of the apostles until the siege which took place at this time”. “And as the church there was now composed of Gentiles, the first one to assume the government of it after the bishops of the circumcision was Marcus.” ↩
7.
Cassius Dio. “Roman History, book 68.” Loeb Classical Library. Translated by Earnest Cary. c. 229 (edition of 1925). A Roman senator's history of Rome, written in Greek in the early third century. Books 61 onward survive mainly as an eleventh-century summary by the monk Xiphilinus. Book 68 covers Nerva and Trajan, including Nerva's halt to accusations of "adopting the Jewish mode of life" and the Jewish revolts in Cyrene, Egypt and Cyprus.
1. 7a.
  Book 68, section 32.1-3, pages 421-423: “Meanwhile the Jews in the region of Cyrene had put a certain Andreas at their head, and were destroying both the Romans and the Greeks. ... In all two hundred and twenty thousand persons perished. In Egypt, too, they perpetrated many similar outrages, and in Cyprus, under the leadership of a certain Artemion. There, also, two hundred and forty thousand perished, and for this reason no Jew may set foot on that island”. ↩ ↩
2. 7b.
  Book 68, section 1.2: “Nerva also released all who were on trial for maiestas and restored the exiles ... and no persons were permitted to accuse anybody of maiestas or of adopting the Jewish mode of life.” ↩
8.
Meshorer, Ya'akov. A Treasury of Jewish Coins: From the Persian Period to Bar Kokhba. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press; Nyack: Amphora. 2001. The standard catalogue of ancient Jewish coins by the long-time curator of numismatics at the Israel Museum. It reads and dates the coin legends of both revolts, which are the rebels' own public statements of what they were fighting for.
1. 8a.
  Page 140: “The inscription "SNT 'HT LG'LT YSR'L" ("Year one of Israel's redemption") appears on all the coins of the first year (nos. 218-228).” Page 250: “year one of the redemption of Israel = 132 CE”. The transliteration marks for the Hebrew letters aleph and ayin are normalised to apostrophes. ↩
2. 8b.
  Page 140: “the coins of the Jewish War against the Romans where the inscription "HRWT SYWN" ("Freedom of Zion") appeared initially and was replaced by "LG'LT SYWN" ("for the redemption of Zion") only toward the end of that war.” The transliteration mark for the Hebrew letter aleph is normalised to an apostrophe. ↩
3. 8c.
  Page 130: “The amazing fact with regard to the coins of the fifth year is that they were struck then, in the last four months of the Jewish War against the Romans. At that time the striking of bronze coinage came to a complete halt.” ↩
4. 8d.
  Page 185: “The Judaea Capta pieces were minted in a quantity that is surprising for Roman coins in general, and for those celebrating victories over other peoples in particular, as if the victory over Judaea was the most important of them all. No other victory was commemorated by such a large number of coins.” ↩
5. 8e.
  Page 140: “Four different inscriptions appear on the coins of the first year: 1. "SNT 'HT LG'LT YSR'L" (Year one of Israel's redemption); 2. "SM'WN NSY' YSR'L" ("Shimon, prince of Israel")”. “The later Bar Kokhba coins do not feature the expression "redemption of Israel," which is replaced by the inscription "HRWT YSR'L" ("Freedom of Israel") in the second year, and by "HRWT YRWSLM" ("Freedom of Jerusalem") in the following years.” The transliteration marks for aleph and ayin are normalised to apostrophes. ↩
6. 8f.
  Page 149: “Particularly interesting is its appearance on the large bronze coin struck by Emperor Nerva in Rome in 97 C.E., in connection with the abolishment of the Jewish tax. The palm tree here is surrounded by the Latin inscription: FISCI IVDAICI CALVMNIA SVBLATA, meaning "the harassments on account of the Jewish tax have been abolished."” The scan reads "T1VDAICI". ↩
9.
Cassius Dio. “Roman History, book 69.” Loeb Classical Library. Translated by Earnest Cary. c. 229 (edition of 1925). Dio's account of Hadrian, preserved in the Xiphilinus summary. It is the only ancient narrative of the Bar Kokhba war, and it alone gives a cause (the founding of Aelia Capitolina with a temple of Jupiter) and totals (50 outposts, 985 villages, 580,000 killed).
1. 9a.
  Book 69, section 12.3-13.3, page 449: “they occupied the advantageous positions in the country and strengthened them with mines and walls, in order that they might have places of refuge whenever they should be hard pressed, and might meet together unobserved under ground ... Then, indeed, Hadrian sent against them his best generals. First of these was Julius Severus, who was dispatched from Britain, where he was governor, against the Jews.” ↩
2. 9b.
  Book 69, section 12.1-2, page 447: “At Jerusalem he founded a city in place of the one which had been razed to the ground, naming it Aelia Capitolina, and on the site of the temple of the god he raised a new temple to Jupiter. This brought on a war of no slight importance nor of brief duration, for the Jews deemed it intolerable that foreign races should be settled in their city and foreign religious rites planted there.” ↩
3. 9c.
  Book 69, section 14.1, pages 449-451: “Fifty of their most important outposts and nine hundred and eighty-five of their most famous villages were razed to the ground. Five hundred and eighty thousand men were slain in the various raids and battles, and the number of those that perished by famine, disease and fire was past finding out.” ↩
4. 9d.
  Book 69, section 14.3, page 451: “Many Romans, moreover, perished in this war. Therefore Hadrian in writing to the senate did not employ the opening phrase commonly affected by the emperors, "If you and our children are in health, it is well; I and the legions are in health."” ↩
10.
Avigad, Nahman. Discovering Jerusalem. Nashville: Thomas Nelson; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society. 1983. The excavator's own account of the digs in Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter. It describes the Burnt House, a first-century house destroyed by fire with revolt coins on its floors, and is the source for the much-repeated skeletal arm. Avigad mixes measured description with his own reconstructions of scenes, and says so.
1. 10a.
  Page 122: “There was only one phase of occupation, and its composition was unambiguous: the building had been destroyed by fire, and the walls and ceiling had collapsed along with the burning beams, sealing over the various objects in the rooms.” ↩
2. 10b.
  Page 123: “But the many coins strewn over the floors -- partly of the Roman Procurators of Judea and mostly from the First Jewish Revolt against Rome permitted a more precise dating. The coins of the revolt bear the legends "Year Two/The Freedom of Zion," "Year Three/The Freedom of Zion," and "Year Four/Of the Redemption of Zion." The latest of them, of the fourth year of the revolt, are from A.D. 69.” The dash after "floors" is printed as a double hyphen here. ↩
3. 10c.
  Page 137: “Leaning against the preserved fragment of the wall were the skeletal remains of the lower arm and hand of a human being, with the fingers still attached. The hand was spread out, grasping at a step. Dr. B. Ahrensburg, who examined these remains, determined that they were of a woman in her early twenties. The associations conjured up by this spectacle were rather frightful. We could visualize a young woman working in the kitchen when the Roman soldiers burst into the house and put it to the torch.” ↩ ↩
11.
Dessau, Hermann. Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae, vol. 1. Berlin: Weidmann. 1892. The standard selection of Latin inscriptions. Numbers 264 and 265 give the texts of the two Flavian arches for the Jewish victory, with notes on where each text survives: the Arch of Titus on the stone, the Circus Maximus arch only in a manuscript copy.
1. 11a.
  Section ILS 265 (CIL VI 945): “senatus / populusque Romanus / divo Tito divi Vespasiani f. / Vespasiano Augusto.” Slashes mark Dessau's line divisions; the scan's "Tilo" is read as Tito. Dessau's note: "Romae in arcu, qui extat in summa sacra via, ornato anaglyphis spectantibus ad pompam triumphi Iudaici," on the arch that stands at the top of the Sacred Way, decorated with reliefs of the Jewish triumph. ↩
2. 11b.
  Section ILS 264 (CIL VI 944): “senatus populusq. Romanus imp. Tito Caesari divi Vespasiani f. Vespasian[o] Augusto pontif. max., trib. pot. X, imp. XVII, [c]os. VIII, p. p., principi suo, quod praeceptis patr[is] consiliisq. et auspiciis gentem Iudaeorum domuit et urbem Hierusolymam, omnibus ante se ducibus regibus gentibus aut frustra petitam aut omnino intem[p]tatam, delevit.” Dessau's note says the arch stood in the Circus Maximus and its text was copied once before the ninth century, surviving in the ninth-century Einsiedeln manuscript and through Poggio. Brackets are Dessau's restorations; the scan's "ludaeorum" is read as Iudaeorum. Translation in the article is this article's own. ↩
12.
Hulsen, Christian. The Roman Forum: Its History and Its Monuments. Rome: Loescher. Translated by Jesse Benedict Carter. 1909. A guide to the Forum by a leading German topographer of ancient Rome. Its entry on the Arch of Titus describes the reliefs of the triumph and notes that no ancient writer mentions the arch.
1. 12a.
  Pages 248-249: “the treasures of the temple at Jerusalem are being carried on litters (fercula), on the first the table for the show-bread and the trumpets of the year of jubilee, on the second the seven-branched candlestick.” Pages 247-248: “The arch is not mentioned by ancient writers”. ↩
13.
Tacitus. “Histories, book 5.” Loeb Classical Library. Harvard University Press. Translated by Clifford H. Moore. c. 105 (edition of 1931). The Roman senator Tacitus's history of the years 69 to 96, of which only books 1 to 5 survive. Book 5 opens with an ethnography of the Jews and the start of Titus's siege, and breaks off before the city falls, so it gives the siege's setting and a population figure but no account of the Temple's burning.
1. 13a.
  Book 5, section 9.1, page 191: “The first Roman to subdue the Jews and set foot in their temple by right of conquest was Gnaeus Pompey”. ↩
2. 13b.
  Book 5, section 13: “We have heard that the total number of the besieged of every age and both sexes was six hundred thousand; there were arms for all who could use them, and the number ready to fight was larger than could have been anticipated from the total population.” ↩
3. 13c.
  Book 5, section 13: “the majority firmly believed that their ancient priestly writings contained the prophecy that this was the very time when the East should grow strong and that men starting from Judea should possess the world. This mysterious prophecy had in reality pointed to Vespasian and Titus”. ↩
14.
Arithmetic for this article, rerunnable with research/numbers.ts (output in research/numbers-results.md). Josephus's own inputs give 255,600 x 10 = 2,556,000, which is 144,000 below his stated 2,700,000; at his upper company size of 20 the same count gives 5,112,000. His 1,100,000 dead is 1.8 times Tacitus's 600,000 besieged. Sulpicius Severus's 100,000 captives closely resembles Josephus's 97,000 rounded. ↩
15.
Sulpicius Severus. “Sacred History, book 2.” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 11. Translated by Alexander Roberts. c. 400 (edition of 1894). A Latin Christian chronicle of world history from creation to about AD 400, by a Gallic lawyer and disciple of Martin of Tours. Its short account of the fall of Jerusalem gives Josephus's casualty figure but reverses Josephus on Titus's decision about the Temple. The Latin text is Halm's edition (Vienna, 1866), page 85.
1. 15a.
  Book 2, section 30.5: “The number of those who suffered death is related to have been eleven hundred thousand, and one hundred thousand were taken captive and sold.” Halm's Latin, page 85: "numerus peremptorum ad undecies centena milia refertur, capta vero C milia ac venundata." ↩
2. 15b.
  Book 2, section 30.6-7: “Titus is said, after calling a council, to have first deliberated whether he should destroy the temple, a structure of such extraordinary work. For it seemed good to some that a sacred edifice, distinguished above all human achievements, ought not to be destroyed, inasmuch as, if preserved, it would furnish an evidence of Roman moderation, but, if destroyed, would serve for a perpetual proof of Roman cruelty. But on the opposite side, others and Titus himself thought that the temple ought specially to be overthrown, in order that the religion of the Jews and of the Christians might more thoroughly be subverted”. Halm's Latin, page 85: "at contra alii et Titus ipse evertendum in primis templum censebant, quo plenius Iudaeorum et Christianorum religio tolleretur". ↩
3. 15c.
  Book 2, section 30.8: “And this last overthrow of the temple, and final captivity of the Jews, by which, being exiles from their native land, they are beheld scattered through the whole world, furnish a daily demonstration to the world, that they have been punished on no other account than for the impious hands which they laid upon Christ.” ↩
16.
Cassius Dio. “Roman History, book 65 (66 in Boissevain's numbering).” Loeb Classical Library, vol. 8. Translated by Earnest Cary. c. 229 (edition of 1925). Dio's account of Vespasian's reign, preserved in the Xiphilinus summary. It gives a short independent narrative of the siege and defines the new Jewish tax as payable by "the Jews who continued to observe their ancestral customs."
1. 16a.
  Book 65, section 6.1-3, page 269: “Nevertheless, the soldiers because of their superstition did not immediately rush in; but at last, under compulsion from Titus, they made their way inside. ... they were not conquered until a part of the temple was set on fire.” ↩
2. 16b.
  Book 65, section 7.2, page 271: “From that time forth it was ordered that the Jews who continued to observe their ancestral customs should pay an annual tribute of two denarii to Jupiter Capitolinus.” ↩
17.
Suetonius. “Vespasian.” Loeb Classical Library. Translated by J. C. Rolfe. c. 120 (edition of 1914). The imperial secretary Suetonius's life of Vespasian, written about fifty years after the war. It records the eastern oracle about a ruler from Judea and applies it to Vespasian, as Josephus and Tacitus do.
1. 17a.
  Section Vespasian 4.5: “There had spread over all the Orient an old and established belief, that it was fated at that time for men coming from Judaea to rule the world. This prediction, referring to the emperor of Rome, as afterwards appeared from the event, the people of Judaea took to themselves; accordingly they revolted”. ↩
18.
Arithmetic from research/numbers.ts. At Roth's 0.45 metres to the cubit (his note 107 converts 200 cubits to 90 metres), Josephus's 300-cubit gap is 135 m, the bank and platform 250 cubits or 112.5 m, and the tower 27 m, so the tower would overtop the gap by about 4.5 m. Roth's volumes: ramp 150 x 25 x 20 / 2 = 37,500 cubic metres; circumvallation 4,500 x 1.65 x 3 = 22,275 (his "about 23,000"); camp walls 2,500 x 2 x 3 = 15,000. Remains of 3 + 25 = 28 people against 960 is 2.9 percent. ↩ ↩ ↩
19.
Magness, Jodi. Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2019. A full archaeological and historical study of Masada by a specialist in the archaeology of Roman Palestine. Its final chapters weigh the evidence for and against Josephus's account of the end, report the critiques of Cohen, Zias and Geva, and decline to give a verdict on the mass suicide.
1. 19a.
  Page 192: “According to Josephus, after a pair of lengthy speeches, Eleazar ben Yair, the leader of the Jewish rebels at Masada, persuaded the men to commit mass suicide as the fortress was about to fall to the Romans. First, each man put his wife and children to death. Then the men drew lots, and ten of them killed the others.” Magness summarises the same sequence and uses the standard label. ↩
2. 19b.
  Page 194: “Joe Zias claims that the remains on the lower terrace of the northern palace do not belong to one family but instead are random bones brought to this spot by hyenas.” Page 195: “However, Zias claims that there is documentary evidence of only five skeletons, and their association with pig bones found in the cave suggests they are Romans (or perhaps Byzantine monks), not Jewish rebels.” ↩
3. 19c.
  Page 196: “On the other hand, Hillel Geva has put forward an interpretation of one feature at Masada which, if true, would disprove the mass suicide story. ... Geva points to difficulties with these explanations and instead interprets the debris as a Roman assault ramp.” ↩
4. 19d.
  Page 196: “I am often asked if I believe there was a mass suicide at Masada, to which I respond that this is not a question archaeology is equipped to answer. The archaeological remains can be interpreted differently as supporting or disproving Josephus's account.” ↩
5. 19e.
  Page 194: “some scholars have noted that mass suicides are a common literary motif in stories told by ancient historians including Josephus, who reports similar episodes at the sieges of Gamla in the Golan and Jotapata (Yodefat) in Galilee.” ↩
20.
Yadin, Yigael. Masada: Herod's Fortress and the Zealots' Last Stand. London: Abacus. paperback reprint of the 1966 first edition. 1978. The excavation director's popular account of the 1963-1965 dig. It reports the siege camps, the palaces, the human remains and the inscribed sherds, and reads them throughout in the light of Josephus's story, which Yadin openly admired.
1. 20a.
  Page 218: “Thus, the built camps alone could house almost 9,000 troops, including the legion. But there is no doubt that the entire besieging force was very much larger, probably reaching 15,000 men if we add to the fighting units the thousands of Jewish prisoners who, according to Josephus, were used to bring water and food and apparently also to work on construction.” ↩
2. 20b.
  Page 195: “I think that on the whole our excavations confirmed our earlier view that the Roman garrison which occupied Masada for several decades after the dramatic event cleared the area of all such human remains.” ↩
3. 20c.
  Page 54: “Upon the steps leading to the cold-water pool and on the ground nearby were the remains of three skeletons. One was that of a man of about twenty - perhaps one of the commanders of Masada. ... Not far off, also on the steps, was the skeleton of a young woman, with her scalp preserved intact because of the extreme dryness of the atmosphere. Her dark hair, beautifully plaited, looked as if it had just been freshly coiffeured. ... The third skeleton was that of a child.” ↩
4. 20d.
  Page 193: “And it was in one of the smaller of these caves that we came upon the stark sight of skulls and other parts of skeletons scattered in disorder about the floor. Among the bones were fragments of linen and pieces of clothing. A brief examination showed that there were altogether about twenty-five skeletons.” ↩
5. 20e.
  Page 195: “Thus, apart from the twenty-five skeletons found in the cave and possibly the three found in the palace-villa, no physical remains of the last defenders of Masada were left.” ↩
6. 20f.
  Page 197: “Had we indeed found the very ostraca which had been used in the casting of the lots? We shall never know for certain. But the probability is strengthened by the fact that among these eleven inscribed pieces of pottery was one bearing the name 'Ben Ya'ir'.” ↩ ↩
21.
Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. Sacrificing Truth: Archaeology and the Myth of Masada. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. 2002. A sociologist's study of how the Masada excavation was presented to the public. It compares Yadin's published claims with the excavation's field records and reports the later challenges to the identification of the human remains, chiefly by Joe Zias.
1. 21a.
  Pages 124-125: “In his 1998 publication he claimed that the skeletal remains were actually of different ages than those originally attributed to them. The skeleton identified as a "child" was actually that of a man aged about forty another skeleton was that of a twenty-two-year-old man, and the third skeleton was of a female some sixteen years old.” Page 125: “never buried an individual with his or her sandals, nor with armor and arrows which certainly suggests that if this was a cemetery, the three individuals interred here may not have been Jewish . . . but Roman. . . . Being buried with one's weapons is definitely not a Jewish custom.” The second passage is Ben-Yehuda quoting Zias 1998, page 12. The missing comma after "forty" is in Ben-Yehuda's text. ↩
2. 21b.
  Page 33: “While several of these findings support some of Josephus's statements (e.g., the Roman siege and storming Masada, the architectural findings), they do not support all of them (e.g., the mass suicide, the riddle of the 960 missing skeletons, the burning of Masada).” ↩ ↩
22.
Yadin, Yigael, and Joseph Naveh. Masada I: The Aramaic and Hebrew Ostraca and Jar Inscriptions. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society and the Hebrew University. 1989. The first volume of the excavation's final reports, completed after Yadin's death by the epigrapher Joseph Naveh. It publishes every inscribed sherd from Masada, including the group Yadin called the lots, and Naveh sets out the problems with that identification.
1. 22a.
  Page 30: “There are, however, some difficulties in assuming that these tags were the actual lots cast by Eleazar ben Yair and his comrades before their suicide. First, there are not ten but twelve tags in the group. ... Even so, there are eleven ostraca, whereas according to Josephus ten men were chosen. Yadin solved this problem by speaking of Eleazar ben Yair and his ten commanders.” Page 31: “I have not dealt with the problem of Josephus' credibility, and I do not intend to do so. I would like, however, to balance Yadin's unquestioning acceptance by quoting S.J.D. Cohen”. On page 30 Naveh also notes that other tags with the same name formula, and most of the tags of the same size, were found in the same room. ↩ ↩
23.
Hadas, Gideon. “From Where Did the Romans Breach into Masada?” Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology 4:137-154. 2023. An archaeologist's argument, from the site's remains, that the Romans entered Masada through the Southern Gate rather than through the breach Josephus describes. Only the abstract was available for this article.
1. 23a.
  Section abstract: “He reports that the Roman soldiers breached the site's western wall with a battering ram installed on a siege tower and positioned at the top of a siege ramp. In this paper, I challenge this narrative and argue that the Romans entered Masada from the south through the Southern Gate.” ↩
24.
Cohen, Shaye J. D. “Masada: Literary Tradition, Archaeological Remains, and the Credibility of Josephus.” Journal of Jewish Studies 33(1-2):385-405. 1982. A comparison of Josephus's story with sixteen ancient collective-death accounts and Yadin's finds. It argues for a literary reconstruction of a less orderly fall, while accepting that some defenders killed themselves and their families.
1. 24a.
  Pages 394-395: Cohen contrasts Josephus's single pile of possessions and spared provisions with fires in several buildings and burned stores. He interprets the southern-cave skeletons as people hiding rather than corpses carried from the palace, and explicitly assumes their identification as Jews. ↩
2. 24b.
  Pages 403-404: “That some of the Sicarii sought death through battle with the Romans is a suggestion based merely on plausibility.” On page 403 Cohen calls his reconstruction conjectural. On page 404 he argues that Josephus turned deaths of some Sicarii into deaths of all, drawing on collective-death stories and Jotapata. ↩ ↩
25.
Appian. “The Civil Wars, book 2.” Loeb Classical Library, Appian vol. 3. Translated by Horace White. c. 150 (edition of 1913). A history of Rome's civil wars by a Greek official from Alexandria. In passing it records, as something from the author's own lifetime, the destruction of a shrine near Alexandria during Trajan's war against the Jews of Egypt.
1. 25a.
  Book Civil Wars, section 2.90, pages 393-395: “in my time, while the Roman emperor Trajan was exterminating the Jewish race in Egypt, it was devastated by them in the exigencies of the war.” ↩
26.
Tcherikover, Victor A., and Alexander Fuks. Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, for the Magnes Press. 1960. The standard edition, with translation and commentary, of Greek papyri and ostraca from Roman Egypt that concern Jews. It includes the archive of a district governor during the revolt of 115 to 117, a later petition recalling that war, and the tax receipts that show who paid the Jewish tax and when.
1. 26a.
  Section no. 450, page 260: “but they also possess the goodwill, faithfulness, and friendship to the Romans which they exhibited in the war against the Jews, giving aid then and even now keeping the day of victory as a festival every year.” Petition of Aurelius Horion to Septimius Severus and Caracalla, with their favourable reply. ↩
2. 26b.
  Page 260: “The pros Ioudaious polemos referred to here can be, I think, only the great rebellion of A.D. 115-17 ... It seems, however, to make very good sense if we suppose that the victory of about eighty years ago is still celebrated in Oxyrhynchos.” The editors' Greek phrase is transliterated here. ↩
3. 26c.
  Section no. 194, page 128: “28th June, A.D. 98. ... Dosarion son of Jesous, in respect of the Jewish tax for the 1st year of our lord Trajan, 9 drachmai 2 obols.” Section nos. 195-196: “Mariamos son of Simon, in respect of the Jewish tax for the 3rd year of our lord Trajan ... Bokchoris son of Josepos, in respect of the Jewish tax for the 6th year of our lord Trajan”. The editors say the Edfu ostraca run from 70 to 116 (page 109). ↩ ↩
4. 26d.
  Pages 86-87: “Yet the essential point in the legend lies in the word calumnia. The striking of the coin was one of the means of showing the hatred of the senate for the reign of calumnia under the 'tyrant' Domitian and the senate's allegiance to the new régime of law and freedom”. ↩
27.
Yadin, Yigael. Bar-Kokhba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome. New York: Random House. 1971. The excavator's account of the 1960-1961 Cave of Letters expeditions, with translations of Shimeon bar Kosiba's letters and the documents found with them. It is a popular book, but its readings of the letters are the excavator's own.
1. 27a.
  Page 124: “Only the 'wooden' letter, mentioned earlier, has the title: 'President over Israel'; the other letters begin simply: 'from Shimeon ben/bar Kosiba', once more a confirmation that Bar-Kokhba's real name was Ben Kosiba, a fact already ascertained from the Murabba'at letters (see Chapter 2). Actually his name was written ksba, without the vowels, as is the custom in Aramaic and Hebrew. It was only from one of the Greek letters that we learned that his name was pronounced Kosiba. ... no two letters bear the same handwriting, so they must have been dictated in an over-staffed office. ... Not one letter is signed by Shimeon bar Kosiba personally.” ↩ ↩
2. 27b.
  Page 129: “The letter of the 'four kinds' in which Bar Kokhba requests palm branches, citrons, myrtles and willows - the 'four kinds' needed for the feast of Succoth - to be sent to him”. “Bar-Kokhba wants to receive the donkeys' load of citrons after tithing 'since the army is big'”. ↩
28.
Justin Martyr. First Apology. c. 155. An appeal to the emperor Antoninus Pius by a Christian philosopher from Flavia Neapolis in Palestine, written within about twenty years of the Bar Kokhba war. It is the earliest datable source to name the rebel leader and the only one to say how he treated Christians. The Greek is the First1KGreek text; translations are from the Ante-Nicene Fathers.
1. 28a.
  Book First Apology, section 31.6: “Καὶ γὰρ ἐν τῷ νῦν γεγενημένῳ ἰουδαϊκῷ πολέμῳ Βαρχωχέβας, ὁ τῆς Ἰουδαίων ἀποστάσεως ἀρχηγέτης, Χριστιανοὺς μόνους εἰς τιμωρίας δεινάς, εἰ μὴ ἀρνοῖντο Ἰησοῦν τὸν Χριστὸν καὶ βλασφημοῖεν, ἐκέλευεν ἀπάγεσθαι.” The Ante-Nicene Fathers translation: "For in the Jewish war which lately raged, Barchochebas, the leader of the revolt of the Jews, gave orders that Christians alone should be led to cruel punishments, unless they would deny Jesus Christ and utter blasphemy." ↩ ↩
29.
Sefaria. “Jerusalem Talmud, Ta'anit 4:5.” Talmud Yerushalmi, ed. Heinrich W. Guggenheimer. c. 425 (edition of 2026). The Jerusalem Talmud's discussion of the fast for the destruction of Betar. It preserves the tradition that Rabbi Akiva called Bar Koziba the King Messiah, a rival rabbi's rebuke, and legendary numbers for the fall of Betar. The translation in this article is its own.
1. 29a.
  Section 4:5 (68d): “תַּנֵּי רִבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן בֶּן יוֹחַי. עֲקִיבָה רִבִּי הָיָה דוֹרֵשׁ דָּרַךְ כּוֹכָב מִיַּעֲקֹב. דָּרַךְ כּוֹזִבָּא מִיַּעֲקֹב. רִבִּי עֲקִיבָה כַּד הֲוָה חֲמִי בַּר כּוֹזִבָּה הֲוָה אֲמַר. דֵּין הוּא מַלְכָּא מְשִׁיחָא. אָמַר לֵיהּ רִבִּי יוֹחָנָן בֵּן תּוֹרְתָא. עֲקִיבָה. יַעֲלוּ עֲשָׂבִים בִּלְחָיֵיךָ (וְאַדַּיִין) [וְעַדַּיִין] בֶּן דָּוִד [לֹא] יָבֹא.” Translation: "Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai taught: Akiva my master used to expound 'A star shall step forth from Jacob': 'Koziba steps forth from Jacob.' Rabbi Akiva, when he saw Bar Koziba, used to say, 'This is the King Messiah.' Rabbi Yohanan ben Torta said to him, 'Akiva, grass will grow in your cheeks and the son of David will still not have come.'" Brackets and parentheses are the editor's corrections. ↩
30.
Strack, Hermann L., and Gunter Stemberger. Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash. Edinburgh: T and T Clark. Translated by Markus Bockmuehl. 1991. The standard handbook on the dates, manuscripts and editions of rabbinic literature, revised by Gunter Stemberger of the University of Vienna.
1. 30a.
  Page 189: “Based on these facts, the redaction of PT probably occurred in the first half of the fifth century; Epstein (IAL, 274) attempts to give a more precise date around 410-20, but a slightly later time must be assumed.” Page 199: “MS Leiden, Scaliger 3 (University Library Leiden) is the only complete MS of PT (of equal extent as the printed editions). 672 leaves in two folio volumes, completed in 1289.” PT is the Palestinian, or Jerusalem, Talmud. ↩
31.
Sefaria. “Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 93b.” William Davidson Talmud. c. 550 (edition of 2026). A Babylonian Talmud discussion of the messiah's signs, which includes a short legend of Bar Koziba claiming to be the Messiah and being killed by the rabbis. The translation in this article is its own, from the Aramaic.
1. 31a.
  Section 93b: “בר כוזיבא מלך תרתין שנין ופלגא. אמר להו לרבנן: אנא משיח. אמרו ליה: במשיח כתיב דמורח ודאין, נחזי אנן אי מורח ודאין. כיון דחזיוה דלא מורח ודאין, קטלוה.” Vowel points removed. Translation: "Bar Koziba reigned two and a half years. He said to the rabbis, 'I am the Messiah.' They said to him, 'Of the Messiah it is written that he smells and judges; let us see whether he smells and judges.' When they saw that he did not smell and judge, they killed him." The Sefaria English supplies "the gentiles" as the subject of the last verb, which the Aramaic does not name. ↩
32.
Justin Martyr. “First Apology.” Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Translated by Marcus Dods. Edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. c. 155 (edition of 1885). The standard English translation of Justin's appeal to Antoninus Pius. Besides the Bar Kokhba passage, it records the ban that kept Jews out of Jerusalem in Justin's own time.
1. 32a.
  Book First Apology, section 1: “Justin, the son of Priscus and grandson of Bacchius, natives of Flavia Neapolis in Palestine, present this address and petition”. ↩
2. 32b.
  Book First Apology, section 47.6: “And that it is guarded by you lest any one dwell in it, and that death is decreed against a Jew apprehended entering it, you know very well.” ↩
33.
Historia Augusta. “Hadrian.” Loeb Classical Library, Scriptores Historiae Augustae vol. 1. Translated by David Magie. c. 395 (edition of 1921). A late fourth-century collection of imperial biographies written under the names of six invented authors, and often unreliable. Its life of Hadrian is the only ancient source that blames the Bar Kokhba war on a ban on circumcision.
1. 33a.
  Section Hadrian 14.2, page 45: “At this time also the Jews began war, because they were forbidden to practice circumcision.” Magie's footnote: "According to Dio, LXIX.12-14, probably a more correct account, the outbreak of the war was due to the anger of the Jews at the dedication of a temple to Jupiter Capitolinus on the site of the Temple of Jehovah. This was done in connection with the 'founding' of the new colony in 130; accordingly, this sentence is not in chronological order." ↩ ↩
34.
Stemberger, Gunter. “Die Verfolgung der judischen Religion unter Hadrian: Zwischen Wirklichkeit und Martyrologie.” Scripta Classica Israelica 33:255-268. 2014. A review, by a leading historian of rabbinic literature, of the evidence for Hadrian's persecution of Judaism. It separates what Roman and rabbinic sources actually attest from later martyr stories, and concludes that the circumcision ban is less well attested than usually assumed.
1. 34a.
  Page 262: “Die nicht sehr zuverlässige Historia Augusta legt das Verbot der Beschneidung als Ursache des Bar Kokhba-Aufstandes nahe, auch wenn sie nicht ausdrücklich die Beschneidung nennt, sondern die Verstümmelung der Genitalien: Moverunt ea tempestate et Iudaei bellum quod vetabantur mutilare genitalia (Had. 14:2).” Translation: "The not very reliable Historia Augusta suggests the ban on circumcision as the cause of the Bar Kokhba revolt, though it does not name circumcision explicitly but the mutilation of the genitals." ↩
2. 34b.
  Page 262: “Es ist seit Langem umstritten, ob das Verbot der Beschneidung die Ursache des Aufstands oder nicht eher eine seiner Folgen war, an deren Anfang vielleicht eher der Beschluss zur Gründung der Aelia Capitolina an Stelle der Tempelstadt Jerusalem stand.” Page 263: “no Hadrianic prohibition of circumcision ever existed … neither before the outbreak of the war nor in its wake”. The first passage, translated: "It has long been disputed whether the ban on circumcision was the cause of the revolt or rather one of its consequences, at whose start stood perhaps rather the decision to found Aelia Capitolina in place of the Temple city Jerusalem." The second is Stemberger quoting Ra'anan Abusch (2003) in English. Stemberger reads the rescript of Antoninus Pius in Digest 48.8.11 with Abusch as a law protecting slaves. ↩
35.
Arithmetic from research/numbers.ts. 580,000 dead / 985 villages = 588.8. Eusebius's fifteen bishops: if James died in 62, the next fourteen average 5.2 years each to 135; if Symeon died about 107 under Trajan, the remaining thirteen average 2.2 years. ↩ ↩
36.
Sefaria. “Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 4:1-4 and Yadayim 3:5.” Mishnah, Torat Emet text. c. 200 (edition of 2026). The Mishnah, the first compilation of rabbinic law, edited about AD 200 under Judah the Prince. These passages record enactments of Yohanan ben Zakkai after the Temple's destruction and the Yavneh-era discussion of whether the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes are scripture. Translations in this article are its own.
1. 36a.
  Section Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 4:1: “משחרב בית המקדש, התקין רבן יוחנן בן זכאי, שיהו תוקעין בכל מקום שיש בו בית דין. אמר רבי אלעזר, לא התקין רבן יוחנן בן זכאי אלא ביבנה בלבד.” Translation: "When the Temple was destroyed, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai enacted that they should blow [the ram's horn] in every place that has a court. Rabbi Eleazar said: Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai enacted it only for Yavneh." ↩
2. 36b.
  Section Mishnah Yadayim 3:5: “ביום שהושיבו את רבי אלעזר בן עזריה בישיבה, ששיר השירים וקהלת מטמאים את הידים. אמר רבי עקיבא, חס ושלום, לא נחלק אדם מישראל על שיר השירים שלא תטמא את הידים ... ואם נחלקו, לא נחלקו אלא על קהלת.” Translation: "on the day they seated Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah in the session, that the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes defile the hands. Rabbi Akiva said: God forbid! No one in Israel ever disputed that the Song of Songs defiles the hands ... and if they disputed, they disputed only about Ecclesiastes." The words are Simeon ben Azzai's report of what he received from seventy-two elders. ↩
37.
Sefaria. “Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 56a-b.” William Davidson Talmud. c. 550 (edition of 2026). The Babylonian Talmud's long legend of the siege of Jerusalem, including Yohanan ben Zakkai's escape and his request to Vespasian. It was compiled about five centuries after the events.
1. 37a.
  Section Gittin 56b: “תן לי יבנה וחכמיה, ושושילתא דרבן גמליאל, ואסוותא דמסיין ליה לרבי צדוק.” Translation: "Give me Yavneh and its sages, and the dynasty of Rabban Gamaliel, and physicians to heal Rabbi Zadok." ↩
38.
Beckwith, Roger T. The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and Its Background in Early Judaism. London: SPCK; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. 1985. A conservative Anglican scholar's full-length argument that the Hebrew canon was closed well before the first century. He nonetheless rejects the Council of Jamnia theory and traces it to Heinrich Graetz.
1. 38a.
  Page 276: “The theory that an open canon was closed at the Synod of Jamnia about AD 90 goes back to Heinrich Graetz in 1871, who proposed (rather more cautiously than has since been the custom) that the Synod of Jamnia led to the closing of the canon. Though others have lately expressed hesitations about the theory, its complete refutation has been the work of J. P. Lewis and S. Z. Leiman.” The scan reads "/ed" for "led". ↩
2. 38b.
  Page 276: “(a) The term 'synod' or 'council' is inappropriate. The academy at Jamnia, established by Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai shortly before the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, was both a college and a legislative body, and the occasion in question was a session of the elders there.” Page 277: “The session at Jamnia was not a council, and the decision it made was not regarded as authoritative”. ↩ ↩
39.
Lewis, Jack P. “Jamnia Revisited.” McDonald, Lee Martin; Sanders, James A. (eds.), The Canon Debate, 146-162. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson. 2002. A review of the evidence for a "Council of Jamnia" by the scholar whose 1964 article first took the theory apart. It surveys the rabbinic texts and the history of the idea and concludes that the conciliar picture reads too much into thin evidence.
1. 39a.
  Page 161: “It is prudent to be careful in speaking of the assemblies at Jamnia between 70 and 100 C.E. since a recent review of the literary evidence concerning those meetings indicates that the early biblical critics since Johannes Salomo Semler had gone beyond what the evidence indicates. We especially should not speak of a Council of Jamnia as introductions and handbooks on the O.T still do. The early critics apparently read into the rabbinic evidence there is about Jamnia too much, in thinking of it in conciliar terms.” ↩ ↩
2. 39b.
  Page 160: “M. Yadayim 3:5 remains the only text dating within a hundred years of Jamnia which speaks of discussion of biblical books. The Talmud texts preserve traditions, but date more than three centuries after the events.” ↩
40.
Langer, Ruth. Cursing the Christians? A History of the Birkat HaMinim. New York: Oxford University Press. 2012. The standard history of the benediction against heretics, from its uncertain origins through the Cairo Genizah manuscripts to modern prayer books, by a scholar of Jewish liturgy. Its first chapter weighs every ancient witness and the main modern reconstructions, Martyn's included, and declines to name an origin the evidence cannot support.
1. 40a.
  Page 7: “In addition, evidence that the rabbis succeeded in spreading their liturgical system beyond their own narrow circles is lacking for several centuries after the destruction of the Temple”. ↩
2. 40b.
  Page 28: “In 1977, Gunther Stemberger addressed this question directly, refuting almost every element of Martyn's argument. He concludes that the gatherings of rabbis at Yavneh cannot properly be categorized as a "synod" with an authority recognized broadly in the Jewish world. It is not clear at what point the Jews recognized the rabbis as their religious and political leaders, but that certainly required a long time, and took even longer to spread beyond the Land of Israel to the diaspora.” ↩
3. 40c.
  Page 19: “Its earliest redaction appears in the third-century Tosefta Berakhot 3:25. ... The eighteen blessings that the sages decreed correspond to the eighteen mentions of God's name in Psalm 29. One includes that about the minim in the blessing about the separatists, and that about the converts in the blessing of the elders, and that about David in the blessing for building Jerusalem.” The Hebrew of Tosefta Berakhot 3:25 (Sefaria): "וכולל של מינים בשל פרושין". ↩
4. 40d.
  Page 29: “Some, like William Horbury and Yaakov Teppler, read every mention of Jews' cursing of Christians (or Jesus) as a reference to the rabbinic, synagogue-based birkat haminim. Others, like Johann Maier and Reuven Kimelman, take a more cautious stance and suggest that Jews might have been cursing Christians in other contexts, or even that these reports might be more polemical than factual.” ↩
5. 40e.
  Page 10: “We simply cannot say with any certainty that the birkat haminim became part of Jewish liturgy as a specific response to Christianity. All we can say is that Jerome and Epiphanius understood it to have that role in their time”. ↩ ↩
6. 40f.
  Page 20: “If this text is coherent with the institution narrative related in B. Berakhot 28b, then Shmuel HaQaton's task was one of "fixing" (tiqqun) rather than of creation de novo or legal enactment (taqqanah).” ↩
7. 40g.
  Page 29: “Beginning in the mid-1990s, some prominent New Testament scholars who had previously advocated Martyn's theory backed away from it, lessening its influence in scholarly circles.” ↩
41.
MorphGNT. SBL Greek New Testament, morphologically tagged. 2010 (edition of 2026). The Society of Biblical Literature's critical Greek text of the New Testament in the MorphGNT project's tagged form. It is used here for exact Greek wording and for word counts across the New Testament.
1. 41a.
  Book John, verse 9:22: “ἤδη γὰρ συνετέθειντο οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι ἵνα ἐάν τις αὐτὸν ὁμολογήσῃ χριστόν, ἀποσυνάγωγος γένηται.” Verse 12:42: “ἀλλὰ διὰ τοὺς Φαρισαίους οὐχ ὡμολόγουν ἵνα μὴ ἀποσυνάγωγοι γένωνται”. Verse 16:2: “ἀποσυναγώγους ποιήσουσιν ὑμᾶς”. In the whole SBL Greek New Testament the word occurs only in these three verses. ↩
2. 41b.
  Book Acts, verse 21:20: “Θεωρεῖς, ἀδελφέ, πόσαι μυριάδες εἰσὶν ἐν τοῖς Ἰουδαίοις τῶν πεπιστευκότων, καὶ πάντες ζηλωταὶ τοῦ νόμου ὑπάρχουσιν”. Text-critical marks removed. Translation: "You see, brother, how many tens of thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed, and they are all zealous for the law." ↩
42.
Justin Martyr. “Dialogue with Trypho.” Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Translated by Marcus Dods and George Reith. Edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. c. 155 (edition of 1885). A Christian philosopher's account of a debate with a Jew named Trypho, set just after the Bar Kokhba war. It is the earliest Christian work to discuss Jewish believers who kept the Law, and the earliest to say that Jews cursed Christians in synagogues.
1. 42a.
  Section Dialogue 16.4: “cursing in your synagogues those that believe on Christ”. Section Dialogue 96.2: “For you curse in your synagogues all those who are called from Him Christians”. Section Dialogue 137.2: “obey not the Pharisaic teachers, and scoff not at the King of Israel, as the rulers of your synagogues teach you to do after your prayers”. ↩
2. 42b.
  Section Dialogue 47.1-4: “In my opinion, Trypho, such an one will be saved, if he does not strive in every way to persuade other men ... There are such people, Trypho ... and these do not venture to have any intercourse with or to extend hospitality to such persons; but I do not agree with them. ... But I believe that even those, who have been persuaded by them to observe the legal dispensation along with their confession of God in Christ, shall probably be saved. And I hold, further, that such as have confessed and known this man to be Christ, yet who have gone back from some cause to the legal dispensation, and have denied that this man is Christ, and have repented not before death, shall by no means be saved.” ↩
43.
Epiphanius of Salamis. “Panarion.” Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller 25. Hinrichs. Edited by Karl Holl. c. 375 (edition of 1915). A bishop of Cyprus's catalogue of eighty heresies, written about 375. Its chapters on the Nazoraeans and Ebionites are the fullest ancient description of law-keeping Jewish Christians, drawn partly from report and partly from Epiphanius's own polemic. Translations in this article are its own.
1. 43a.
  Book Panarion, section 29.9.2: “ἀλλὰ καὶ ἀνιστάμενοι ἕωθεν καὶ μέσης ἡμέρας καὶ περὶ τὴν ἑσπέραν, τρὶς τῆς ἡμέρας ὅτε εὐχὰς ἐπιτελοῦσιν ἑαυτοῖς ἐν ταῖς συναγωγαῖς ἐπαρῶνται αὐτοῖς καὶ ἀναθεματίζουσι, τρὶς τῆς ἡμέρας φάσκοντες ὅτι »ἐπικαταράσαι ὁ θεὸς τοὺς Ναζωραίους«.” Epiphanius's next sentence gives the reason: "because, being from the Jews, they proclaim Jesus to be the Christ." ↩
2. 43b.
  Book Panarion, section 29.7.8: “ἐκεῖθεν γὰρ ἡ ἀρχὴ γέγονε, μετὰ τὴν ἀπὸ τῶν Ἱεροσολύμων μετάστασιν πάντων τῶν μαθητῶν ἐν Πέλλῃ ᾠκηκότων, Χριστοῦ φήσαντος καταλεῖψαι τὰ Ἱεροσόλυμα καὶ ἀναχωρῆσαι δι’ ἥν ἤμελλε πάσχειν πολιορκίαν.” Section 30.2.7: “ἐπειδὴ γὰρ πάντες οἱ εἰς Χριστὸν πεπιστευκότες τὴν Περαίαν κατ’ ἐκεῖνο καιροῦ κατᾠκησαν τὸ πλεῖστον, ἐν Πέλλῃ τινὶ πόλει”. Translation of 29.7.8: "For that is where it began, after all the disciples had moved from Jerusalem and lived in Pella, Christ having told them to leave Jerusalem and withdraw because of the siege it was about to suffer." The digital text repeats a syllable at a line break ("ἀναχωρῆσαι χωρῆσαι"), removed here. ↩
3. 43c.
  Book Panarion, section 29.7.1: “τὰ πάντα δέ εἰσιν Ἰουδαῖοι καὶ οὐδὲν ἕτερον. χρῶνται δὲ οὗτοι οὐ μόνον νέᾳ διαθήκῃ, ἀλλὰ καὶ παλαιᾷ διαθήκῃ, καθάπερ καὶ οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι.” Translation: "but they are Jews in every respect and nothing else. They use not only the New Testament but also the Old, as the Jews do." The digital text reads "διαθκῃ" for the first διαθήκῃ, corrected here. ↩
44.
Jerome. “Commentaries on Isaiah.” Patrologia Latina, vol. 24. Edited by J.-P. Migne. c. 408 (edition of 1845). Jerome's long commentary on Isaiah, written in Bethlehem after years of study with Jewish teachers. Twice it reports a thrice-daily synagogue curse on the Nazarenes. Translations in this article are its own.
1. 44a.
  Book Commentary on Isaiah 2, on Isaiah 5:18-19, column 85-86: “usque hodie perseverent in blasphemiis, et ter per singulos dies in omnibus synagogis sub nomine Nazarenorum anathematizent vocabulum Christianum.” Translation: "to this day they persist in blasphemies, and three times every day in all their synagogues they anathematize the Christian name under the name of Nazarenes." The scan reads "Yocabulum". Jerome says the same at Isaiah 52:5 (PL 24, col. 499). ↩
45.
Jerome. “Letters 71-120.” Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 55. Edited by Isidor Hilberg. c. 404 (edition of 1912). The critical Latin edition of Jerome's letters. Letter 112, to Augustine, argues against Jewish Christians keeping the Law and describes a sect of Minaei or Nazaraei in the synagogues of the East. Translations in this article are its own.
1. 45a.
  Book Letter 112, section 13, page 381: “usque hodie per totas orientis synagogas inter Iudaeos heresis est, quae dicitur Minaeorum et a pharisaeis huc usque damnatur, quos uulgo Nazaraeos nuncupant, qui credunt in Christum, filium dei natum de Maria uirgine”. ↩
2. 45b.
  Book Letter 112, section 13, page 382: “sed, dum uolunt et Iudaei esse et Christiani, nec Iudaei sunt nec Christiani.” ↩
46.
Sefaria. Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 28b-29a; Jerusalem Talmud Berakhot 4:3; Tosefta Berakhot 3:25. c. 550 (edition of 2026). The three rabbinic passages on the origin of the benediction against the minim, from the third-century Tosefta to the sixth-century Babylonian Talmud. Translations in this article are its own.
1. 46a.
  Section Jerusalem Talmud Berakhot 4:3: “של מינין כבר קבעו חכמים ביבנה”. Translation: "[the blessing] of the minim the sages already established at Yavneh." Rabbi Huna's answer to someone who counts only seventeen benedictions. ↩
2. 46b.
  Section Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 28b-29a: “שמעון הפקולי הסדיר שמונה עשרה ברכות לפני רבן גמליאל על הסדר ביבנה. אמר להם רבן גמליאל לחכמים: כלום יש אדם שיודע לתקן ברכת המינים? עמד שמואל הקטן ותקנה. לשנה אחרת שכחה,”. Vowel points removed. The story ends that Samuel searched his memory for two or three hours, "and they did not remove him." ↩
47.
Schechter, Solomon. “Genizah Specimens: Liturgy.” Jewish Quarterly Review 10:654-659. 1898. The first publication of liturgical texts from the Cairo Genizah, by the Cambridge scholar who brought the Genizah to light. It printed the first known wording of the benediction against heretics to name the notsrim.
1. 47a.
  Page 657: “למשומדים אל תהי תקוה ומלכות זדון מהרה תעקר בימינו והנצרים והמינים כרגע יאבדו ימחו מספר החיים ועם צדיקים אל יכתבו ברוך אתה יי מכניע זדים”. Read from the page image. Translation: "For the apostates let there be no hope, and may the arrogant kingdom be speedily uprooted in our days, and may the notsrim and the minim perish in a moment; may they be blotted out of the book of life and not be written with the righteous. Blessed are you, Lord, who humbles the arrogant." Langer dates the Genizah deposits mainly between 1000 and 1300 (Cursing the Christians?, p. 42). ↩
48.
Schiffman, Lawrence H. “At the Crossroads: Tannaitic Perspectives on the Jewish-Christian Schism.” Sanders, E. P.; Baumgarten, A. I.; Mendelson, Alan (eds.), Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, vol. 2, 115-156. Philadelphia: Fortress. 1981. A study of how the early rabbis defined who was a Jew and how they treated Jewish Christians, by a specialist in Jewish law and the Dead Sea Scrolls, published in the same volume as Kimelman's chapter. It reads the benediction as a real measure that pushed Jewish Christians out of synagogue leadership, while denying it expelled them from the Jewish people.
1. 48a.
  Page 150: “The birkat ha-minim, the benediction against the heretics, was directed at excluding such people from serving as precentor in the synagogue. Indeed, this restriction probably went a long way toward making the Jewish Christians feel unwelcome in the synagogues and causing them to worship separately.” ↩
2. 48b.
  Page 150: “Despite some ingenious claims to the contrary, the Gamaliel of our baraita is Rabban Gamaliel II of Yavneh in the post-destruction period.” Page 151: “This expulsion may have been the result of the institution of the benediction against minim.” Page 152: “At some later date, perhaps by 150 CE but definitely by 350 CE, as the fate of Christianity as a Gentile religion was sealed, the mention of Gentile Christians was added as well to the prayer. ... It cannot be overemphasized that while the benediction against the minim sought to exclude Jewish Christians from active participation in the synagogue service, it in no way implied expulsion from the Jewish people.” ↩
49.
Dunn, James D. G. The Partings of the Ways between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity. London: SCM; Philadelphia: Trinity Press International. 1991. A New Testament scholar's account of how Christianity separated from Judaism over the first two centuries, organised around the "four pillars" of Second Temple Judaism. Its title uses the plural "partings" to describe the process.
1. 49a.
  Page 222: “In fact, the best explanation of John 9.22 is that it refers directly to something like the birkat ha-minim, if only a local equivalent.” ↩ ↩ ↩
50.
Boyarin, Daniel. Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2004. A Talmud scholar's argument that the border between Judaism and Christianity was drawn late, largely by heresiologists on both sides, and that the Yavneh story is a later rabbinic construction.
1. 50a.
  Page 68: “However, there is every reason to doubt that the so-called curse of the heretics was formulated under Gamaliel II at Yavneh or that it existed at all before the end of the second century. The only source we have for this "Yavnean" institution is a Babylonian talmudic story from the fourth or fifth century ... This hardly constitutes reliable evidence, or indeed evidence at all.” ↩
51.
Martyn, J. Louis. History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel. New York: Harper and Row. 1st edition. 1968. The book that proposed reading John 9 as a "two-level drama" reflecting a Johannine community expelled from the synagogue by the benediction against heretics, dated to about AD 85. For decades it shaped how the Fourth Gospel was read.
1. 51a.
  Page 31: “The formal separation between church and synagogue has been accomplished in John's milieu by means of the Jewish Benediction Against Heretics.” ↩
2. 51b.
  Page 36: “the wording of the Benediction Against Heretics was a Takkanah, published by the Jamnia academy about A.D. 85.” ↩
3. 51c.
  Page 34: “Presumably it was equally concerned to publish this order via an official enactment (Takkanah) binding on the order of worship in all synagogues.” Page 35: “Such an important measure would naturally have constituted an official enactment by the Jamnia academy.” ↩
4. 51d.
  Page 30: “Second, the separation does not at all appear to have been the formal separation of two rivals. When Paul comes to Ephesus, even after the events in Corinth, he begins his work anew in the synagogue”. ↩
52.
Becker, Adam H., and Annette Yoshiko (eds.) Reed. The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck. 2003. A collection of essays arguing that Jews and Christians remained entangled well into late antiquity. Its introduction sets out the older "master narrative" of a parting at Yavneh and explains why the contributors reject it.
1. 52a.
  Page 5: “However, Peter Schafer, Daniel Boyarin, and others have convincingly established that the "Council of Yavneh" was a much later construct, rather than an historical event. As such, scholars can no longer point to 90 CE as the end of all early intra-Jewish diversity nor appeal to the birkat ha-minim as a Jewish counterpart to (and cause for) Christian anti-Judaism.” ↩
53.
Eusebius of Caesarea. “Church History, book 3.” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 1. Christian Literature Company. Translated by Arthur Cushman McGiffert. c. 325 (edition of 1890). Book 3 of Eusebius's history covers the Jewish war of 66 to 70 from a Christian standpoint, quoting Josephus at length. It contains the earliest surviving account of the Jerusalem church's flight to Pella.
1. 53a.
  Book 3, section 5.3: “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.” ↩
2. 53b.
  Book 3, section 5.3: “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.” ↩
54.
Epiphanius of Salamis. Epiphanius' Treatise on Weights and Measures: The Syriac Version. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edited by James Elmer Dean. c. 392 (edition of 1935). An English translation of the Syriac version of Epiphanius's handbook on biblical measures, which digresses into the history of Aquila and of the Jerusalem Christians who had returned from Pella.
1. 54a.
  Section De mensuris 15: “For when the city was about to be taken and destroyed by the Romans, it was revealed in advance to all the disciples by an angel of God that they should remove from the city, as it was going to be completely destroyed. They sojourned as emigrants in Pella, the city above mentioned, in Transjordania.” Dean's translation of the Syriac version. ↩
55.
Lake, Kirsopp (ed. and tr.) The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 1. London: Heinemann; Loeb Classical Library 24. reprint of the 1912 first edition. 1919. The standard older Greek and English edition of the earliest Christian writings after the New Testament. Its introduction to Ignatius explains the long and short recensions of his letters and why the short form of the seven letters Eusebius knew is preferred.
1. 55a.
  Page 166: “In his chronicon Eusebius fixes the date of his martyrdom in Rome in the tenth year of Trajan, i.e. 108 A.D. Modern critics are by no means unanimous as to the correctness of this date, but, though each has his own special preferences, there is a general tendency to think that Ignatius was really a martyr in Rome in the time of Trajan (98-117 A.D.” The scan garbles "i.e." and "A.D."; they are restored here. ↩
2. 55b.
  Section Magnesians 10.3, page 207: “It is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ and to practise Judaism. For Christianity did not base its faith on Judaism, but Judaism on Christianity”. ↩
3. 55c.
  Section Philadelphians 6.1, page 245: “But if anyone interpret Judaism to you do not listen to him; for it is better to hear Christianity from the circumcised than Judaism from the uncircumcised.” ↩
4. 55d.
  Page 167: “It was early seen that the long recension contained several letters which were clearly not genuine, and that those which had the most claim to acceptance, as having been mentioned by Eusebius, were greatly corrupted by interpolations. Fortunately the remnants of an early collection have been found which originally contained only the seven Eusebian letters.” ↩
56.
John Chrysostom. Against the Jews, Homily 1. c. 386. A sermon preached at Antioch against members of the congregation who attended synagogue and kept Jewish feasts and fasts. It is fierce polemic, and the polemic is itself the evidence: the preacher would not have attacked a practice no one followed. The English translation is of unknown origin.
1. 56a.
  Section Homily 1, 1.5: “The festivals of the pitiful and miserable Jews are soon to march upon us one after the other and in quick succession: the feast of Trumpets, the feast of Tabernacles, the fasts. There are many in our ranks who say they think as we do. Yet some of these are going to watch the festivals and others will join the Jews in keeping their feasts and observing their fasts.” Section Homily 1, 5.2: “Since there are some who think of the synagogue as a holy place, I must say a few words to them.” ↩
57.
Tacitus. Annals. Translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb. c. 116 (edition of 1876). Tacitus's history of the Julio-Claudian emperors. Book 15 chapter 44, on the fire of Rome in 64, is the earliest non-Christian account of Christians as a group in Rome, written by a senator who had governed the province of Asia.
1. 57a.
  Book 15, section 44: “Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus”. ↩ ↩
58.
Suetonius. “Nero.” Loeb Classical Library, Suetonius vol. 2. Translated by J. C. Rolfe. c. 120 (edition of 1914). The imperial secretary Suetonius's life of Nero. In a list of Nero's police measures it records the punishment of Christians as a separate group.
1. 58a.
  Section Nero 16.2: “Punishment was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition.” ↩
59.
Pliny the Younger. Letters, book 10. c. 112. The official correspondence of Pliny as governor of Bithynia and Pontus with the emperor Trajan. Letter 96 asks how to try people accused of being Christians.
1. 59a.
  Section 10.96.2: “nomen ipsum, si flagitiis careat, an flagitia cohaerentia nomini puniantur”. Translation: "whether the name itself is punished, if it is free of crimes, or the crimes attached to the name." ↩
60.
Suetonius. “Domitian.” Loeb Classical Library, Suetonius vol. 2. Translated by J. C. Rolfe. c. 120 (edition of 1914). Suetonius's life of Domitian, including his eyewitness memory of the harsh collection of the Jewish tax.
1. 60a.
  Section Domitian 12.2, pages 365-367: “Besides other taxes, that on the Jews was levied with the utmost rigour, and those were prosecuted who without publicly acknowledging that faith yet lived as Jews, as well as those who concealed their origin and did not pay the tribute levied upon their people. I recall being present in my youth when the person of a man ninety years old was examined before the procurator and a very crowded court, to see whether he was circumcised.” Rolfe's footnote 48 adds, "These were doubtless Christians, whom the Romans commonly confounded with the Jews." That is the translator's inference; Suetonius does not mention Christians. ↩
61.
Cassius Dio. “Roman History, book 67.” Loeb Classical Library, vol. 8. Translated by Earnest Cary. c. 229 (edition of 1925). Dio's account of Domitian, preserved in the Xiphilinus summary. It records the condemnation of members of the imperial family on charges of atheism and Jewish practice in 95.
1. 61a.
  Book 67, section 14.1-2, page 349: “And the same year Domitian slew, along with many others, Flavius Clemens the consul, although he was a cousin and had to wife Flavia Domitilla, who was also a relative of the emperor's. The charge brought against them both was that of atheism, a charge on which many others who drifted into Jewish ways were condemned.” ↩
62.
American Numismatic Society. Online Coins of the Roman Empire: RIC II Nerva 58 and 82. 2026. The standard online catalogue of Roman imperial coin types. These two entries describe Nerva's sestertii of 96 and 97 with the palm tree and the legend about the Jewish treasury.
1. 62a.
  Section RIC II Nerva 58 (96) and 82 (97), reverse: “FISCI IVDAICI CALVMNIA SVBLATA S C”. Translation: "the false accusation of the Jewish treasury removed; by decree of the Senate." ↩
63.
Heemstra, Marius. How Rome's Administration of the Fiscus Judaicus Accelerated the Parting of the Ways between Judaism and Christianity. University of Groningen. 2009. A reconstruction of Roman tax administration from literary sources, coins and receipts, tested against early Christian writings. It argues that Nerva's reform narrowed Jewish status to religious observance and exposed Jewish Christians to prosecution as Christians.
1. 63a.
  Pages 86-91: Heemstra contrasts Josephus and Suetonius with Dio's wording about ancestral customs on pages 86-87, inferring an ethnic-to-religious change in taxable status under Nerva. Pages 89-91 connect this with the treatment of Jewish Christians and distinguish legal Judaism from illegal Christianity. His note 237 on page 87 explicitly treats Dio's wording as a later definition projected back to AD 70. ↩