This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
[271]
There was also Judas, 1
the son of that Ezekias who had been head of the robbers; which Ezekias
was a very strong man, and had with great dificulty been caught by Herod.
This Judas, having gotten together a multitude of men of a profligate character
about Sepphoris in Galilee, made an assault upon the palace [there,] and
seized upon all the weapons that were laid up in it, and with them armed
every one of those that were with him, and carried away what money was
left there; and he became terrible to all men, by tearing and rending those
that came near him; and all this in order to raise himself, and out of
an ambitious desire of the royal dignity; and he hoped to obtain that as
the reward not of his virtuous skill in war, but of his extravagance in
doing injuries.
1 Unless this Judas, the son of Ezekias, be the same with that Theudas, mentioned Acts 5:36, Josephus must have omitted him; for that other Thoualas, whom he afterward mentions, under Fadus the Roman governor, B. XX. ch. 5. sect. 1, is much too late to correspond to him that is mentioned in the Acts. The names Theudas, Thaddeus, and Judas differ but little. See Archbishop Usher's Annals at A.M. 4001. However, since Josephus does not pretend to reckon up the heads of all those ten thousand disorders in Judea, which he tells us were then abroad, see sect. 4 and 8, the Theudas of the Acts might be at the head of one of those seditions, though not particularly named by him. Thus he informs us here, sect. 6, and Of the War, B. II. ch. 4. Sect. 2, that certain of the seditious came and burnt the royal palace at Amsthus, or Betharamphta, upon the river Jordan. Perhaps their leader, who is not named by Josephus, might be this Theudas.
Flavius Josephus. The Works of Flavius Josephus. Translated by. William Whiston, A.M. Auburn and Buffalo. John E. Beardsley. 1895.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.