Church History Books 1–9 (trans.) 3 part 1/4

On the undoubted and the suspect divine Scriptures. On Cerinthus, leader of a depraved religion. On those apostles who did not spurn the rights of marriage. How Symeon, bishop of Jerusalem, suffered. How Trajan forbade Christians to be sought out. That Euarestus governed the Roman church fourth. That Justus presided third over Jerusalem. On the evangelists who were eminent at that time. On the epistle of Clement and his other writings. [The account begins:] ...of our Lord and Savior, and the rest of the disciples, are sent out to preach the word of God throughout each and every province of the whole earth.

'Thomas, as has been handed down to us, obtained by lot the Parthians; Matthew, Ethiopia'... [Andrew is found] going about preaching to Galatia, Bithynia, Cappadocia and the rest of the neighboring provinces, at least to the Jews; and [Peter], at the last, having stayed in the city of Rome, where he was also crucified with his head plunged downward, [and John]... completed the gospel of Christ, and at the last underwent martyrdom under Nero. These few things Origen thus left, in order, in the third book of his Expositions of Genesis. For there is one epistle of his [Peter], concerning which no one at all has doubted. But concerning the second, it is uncertain to many; yet among very many it too is received to be read.

But that little book which is called the Acts of Peter, and that which is named the Gospel bearing his name, and likewise what is called his Preaching or his Revelation, are by no means held among the canonical Scriptures; nor indeed has any of the old writers used their testimonies... When we mention the ecclesiastical writers, we shall of necessity also set forth which books of the Scriptures ought to be held authoritative, and whose authority is less to be followed. Meanwhile the first epistle of Peter, as we said, has been received by all the ancients. Of Paul, too, the [fourteen epistles are] manifest... I know that among the Latins there is doubt concerning the epistle written to the Hebrews. But concerning it also, what each of the old writers thought, we shall set forth in due time.

And the little book of Hermas, which is called the Shepherd—of which Paul makes mention in his epistles—is by very many not [received]... [by it beginners] are imbued with instructions unto faith. Whence it is read in some churches, and many of the old writers have made use of its testimonies. Let these things, meanwhile, be premised by us concerning the trustworthiness of the divine books. ...that [Peter] soon preached the gospel to the Gentiles is proved from his own words and from what Luke writes in the Acts. And Peter also designates in his own words in which provinces he preached Christ to those who are of the circumcision, in that letter which he writes to those who are in the dispersion—the Hebrews, without doubt. For they themselves...

...are called the dispersed, as those driven from their own dwellings and set in the dispersion, as he himself says, of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia. Of these, if any, steadfast in the faith and zealous... received [the churches which the apostles] had founded—whose names it is not easy to set forth one by one. Yet from the words of the apostle Paul we can gather that there were very many whom he names now as helpers, now as fellow-soldiers, now even as fellow-captives and fellow-laborers in the gospel and companions. He also had sharers in the preaching, as he mentions Timothy and Titus, of whom the one is set by him as bishop in Ephesus, the other for the ordaining of churches in Crete.

But Luke himself was by race an Antiochene, by art a physician, and was a companion of Paul and an associate and close friend of the other apostles. He therefore... whom he had received... set forth for us two medicinal books, by which not bodies but souls are healed—namely, the gospel, in which he thus prefaces: 'even as they delivered them to us,' he says, 'who from the beginning were themselves eyewitnesses and ministers of the word of God, whom I too followed from the beginning'—and the Acts of the Apostles, which he had perceived not now by hearing, but had beheld with his own eyes. They relate, moreover, that he wrote his gospel from the mouth of Paul, and that it is this which the apostle is wont to call his own gospel, when he says: 'according to my gospel.'

As also... of Paul's companions, Crescens is said to have set out for Gaul, while Linus and Clement presided over the church in the city of Rome, who are attested by Paul himself to have been his companions and helpers. And Dionysius the Areopagite at Athens, whom Luke describes as the first [convert set over the church by Paul], is agreed to have received the priesthood. But now, meanwhile, [let us return] to the order of the history. ...[Vespasian took up] the principate—Galba and Otho having held the principate for a year and six months—at the time when he was in readiness for the war which he had directed against the Jews, where by that very army with which he was assaulting Judaea he was raised to the empire. And, hastening at once to Rome, he lays upon his son Titus the charge of the war and of the siege of Jerusalem.

But after the ascension of our Lord and Savior, the Jews—whether for the guilt committed against him, or for the persecution against the apostles and the slaying of Stephen, and also the beheading of the apostle James, and no less against James the brother of the Lord, called the Just, and for the crime committed, and for all the rest whom, on account of the faith of Christ, they had encompassed with snares, deceits, and every fraud of wickedness—for all these evils, I say, punishments were divinely demanded back of them. And the apostles indeed, first put to flight by them and scattered through every place, as we said above, went forth in the power of Christ, who had commanded them, saying: 'Go, baptize all nations in my name.'

But the church which had been gathered together at Jerusalem, having received an answer from God, is bidden to migrate and to cross over to a certain town called Pella, beyond the Jordan; so that, the holy and just men being taken away from the city, there might be room for the heavenly vengeance to be taken both upon the sacrilegious city and upon the impious people, through the destruction of the fatherland and its overthrow.

With how great evils, therefore, the whole nation was then punished; and how the very land of Judaea was laid waste by war, famine, fire, and slaughter; how many thousands of the people, fathers together with wives and little children, were butchered without number and without distinction; what sieges too there were of the various cities, and especially how great a devastation and how great a slaughter of divers deaths there was of the magnificent and most renowned city of Jerusalem itself; what was the manner of the wars in each particular; and how, according to what the prophets had foretold, the abomination of desolation was set up in that once most famous temple of God; and how at last fire ravaged and flame consumed all things—if anyone wishes to know these things more fully, let him read again the histories of Josephus.

But we [take] from these only what pertains to the explanation... [the multitudes] which a certain deadly hand, compelling them, had brought together, whom he says to have been three million men—by the just judgment of God, that is, this time being chosen for vengeance, so that those who in the days of the Passover [had crucified] their Savior and saving Christ... [were shut up], the whole multitude enclosed as if in a single prison for a deadly punishment. I will pass over recounting what was inflicted upon them either by slaughter of the sword or by other engines of war; only those things which came about through the destruction of dire famine [will I tell], that they may understand how great a guilt it is to dare anything against Christ, and how... let the book of the histories be set forth in the midst, from which all their sorrowful tragedy [may be known].

For if they had remained in the city, they were put to death on the pretext of their property—a charge being brought against them, as though they were plotting to desert. But the necessity of famine heightened the arrogance of the factious, and both grew together at once, starvation with recklessness. Publicly, indeed, grain was nowhere at all to be had; but the city's plunderers, rushing in, ransacked the houses, and if they found any, they exacted punishment as from men who had deceived them; but if they found none, they nonetheless tortured them as men who had hidden it too secretly and carefully.

They took it as a sure sign that people had hidden food from the very fact that they still seemed to live and subsist in body, as though such folk must certainly already have perished, unless they were somewhere concealing hidden provisions. If, indeed, they saw any wasting away with leanness, these they passed by with pardon, thinking it superfluous to kill men whom famine would shortly consume. Many, however, secretly bought with their whole fortune a single measure — of wheat, if they were rich; of barley, if they were of lower means — and, shutting themselves in whatever innermost recesses of the house they could, some ate the grain not even made into loaves, while others cooked it only so far as either necessity or fear allowed.

No one waited for a table to be laid; instead, snatching their food half-burnt from the very fire, they devoured what was their own as though it were stolen. Pitiable was the sight of that wretched food, when all the stronger seized whatever was found, while for the weaker nothing remained but grief and tears. And although famine surpasses all the bitterness of misfortune, yet nothing so undermines and overturns a man as it does his sense of shame. For whatever, when circumstances are secure, is held worthy of modesty, in such extremity is despised. In short, wives snatched food from the hands of their husbands, children from their parents, and — what is more wretched still — mothers from the very hands and mouths of their own little ones.

And while their dearest children, held in their arms and set before their faces, wasted away, no one refrained from tearing the scanty supports of life from their very teeth. Nor indeed were even these wretched ones spared. Anyone, as soon as he saw a man's doors shut, took it for a sign that those within were eating; and at once, breaking down the despised doors, he rushed in headlong and, wringing the food, so to speak, from their very throats, reclaimed whatever had perhaps already been swallowed. Old men were beaten if they tried to defend their food; women too were dragged by their disheveled hair as they strove to hide whatever had chanced to be caught in their hands.

There was no reverence for the aged on account of their grey hairs, no pity toward little children; but the little ones who clung to a scanty fragment of bread they dashed to the ground, still hanging from the very morsel to which they had clung. But against any who by consuming his food had forestalled the plunderers they raged still more cruelly, and devised dreadful tortures, stopping up in the wretched the natural passages of digestion. Others drove very sharp stakes through their private parts — I shudder to relate what was done — and by such means forced the wretched to confess where a single loaf or a cupful of flour lay hidden. For the torturers themselves suffered no hunger;

for it would in some way be more tolerable had they seemed to do these things driven by hunger; but they did it either to lay up food for themselves for the future, or that their cruelty might grow strong through practice. In these matters too, if any had crept out stealthily through the enemy's outposts to gather herbs, these robbers would meet them — men rejoicing that they had escaped the enemy's hands — and plunder whatever they had brought. And to those who begged, and invoked the name of God, once terrible to them, that they might grant even some small part of what they had sought at the peril of their lives, they gave absolutely nothing. Indeed, it counted as a favor if one who had been seized was allowed to escape alive. After some further passages he adds, saying:

For the Jews, once escape from the city was likewise cut off, every hope of deliverance was excluded, and the mounting bitterness of famine laid waste at once their houses and households and the whole nation, so that in the inner rooms lay strewn the corpses of women and children, while through the streets lay the bodies of wretched old men, consumed more by hunger than by age. The young men, and all the more robust in age, wandered like phantoms in the streets and thoroughfares, collapsing wherever starvation had undermined their step. And to bury the corpses of their neighbors neither the multitude of the dead nor their own bodily weakness permitted, and each man besides was uncertain of his own life.

In the end some breathed out their lives over the very ones they were burying; many too, while following a funeral, expired before they reached the tomb. Yet no customary lamentation nor mourning was rendered to the dead, because famine had claimed all this for itself; nor had the parching of starvation left anyone the moisture of tears. Deep silences besieged the city, and a night full of death had shrouded all things. Graver than all these evils, the robbers alone flourished, who counted it no crime even to rifle the tombs and strip the corpses — not so much seeking booty as heaping up wickedness with mockery, and testing the edge of their swords upon the mangling of the dead.

At times the sword to be tested was driven even into some who still breathed. When others, half-dead, saw this, they stretched out suppliant hands, that the robbers might turn their crime into a favor upon them too, whereby they might be released the more swiftly from the torments of hunger. But by a new kind of cruelty they refused, when asked, the death they inflicted of their own accord; yet each of the dying, with a groan, would turn his eyes back toward the temple, grieving not for his own death, but for the impunity of the robbers whom he was leaving behind alive. At first, from the intolerable stench, they had ordered the dead to be buried at public expense; but when the multitude of the dying began to exceed all outlay, they cast the corpses down from the wall.

But when Titus, going his rounds, saw the trenches filled with the corpses of the dead and the native soil soaked with the gore of human bodies, with a mighty groan he raised his hands to heaven and called God to witness that this was not his own doing. And after some further passages he again pursues such matters: I will not hesitate, he says, to declare what I feel. For I judge that, even if the arms of the Romans against those impious citizens had ceased but a little while, the city would have paid its penalty either through a chasm of the earth, or through a deluge of water, or through fires like Sodom's and thunderbolts hurled from heaven; for it had brought forth this present generation of men far more ill-omened, and more wicked, than those who endured these very things — men for whose sake the whole nation alike deserved to be destroyed.

But in his sixth book too he writes such things concerning the same events: And of those, he says, who throughout the whole city were being destroyed by the starvation of famine, the multitude was numberless, whose misery cannot be unfolded in words. For in every single house, wherever any food had been found, wars at once and slaughters arose among dear ones, even among parents and their children, as they strove to snatch the food from one another not only from the hands but even from the very throats. And there was no faith kept even toward the dead; but these too, as they were breathing out their last spirit, were searched by the robbers, lest perchance some scrap of food had lodged within anyone's bosom.

Others, gaping with starvation, were driven this way and that like rabid dogs and, as if goaded by a kind of madness, rushed again and again within a moment into the same houses. Necessity turned everything into food, even things which it was not the custom to give even to dumb beasts. At last they did not even abstain from straps or belts, or even from their very shoes. They also stripped off the leather coverings of the gates and thrust them in to be worked over by their teeth. Some ate even the stalks of old hay; and of refuse gathered from wherever they could, they would sell a tiny portion for four drachmas.

But what need is there to set forth by these examples the full weight of that famine, when there was done in that place a deed such as no ear among Greeks or barbarians has ever received — horrible indeed to tell, and to the hearing incredible? For my part I would gladly have kept silent about so monstrous a deed, lest anyone should think I was narrating prodigies, had I not had many men of our own generation as witnesses of the crime that was committed. Moreover, I judge that I render my country no service if I withhold the account of those evils whose deeds it endured.

A certain woman of those who dwelt beyond the channel of the Jordan, Mary by name, daughter of Eleazar, from the village of Bethezob — which is interpreted 'house of hyssop' — noble in birth and in possessions, having been caught at Jerusalem with the rest of the multitude that had streamed together there, was bearing along with all the common lot of the siege. Her remaining possessions, which she had conveyed from her home into the city, the tyrants seized; and if any remnants of her great wealth survived, by which she might draw out a very meager daily sustenance, the henchmen of the robbers, bursting in from moment to moment, snatched them away. On account of these things a great frenzy, as it were, of indignation wore the woman down, so that at times she provoked the robbers with curses, calling for her own death and hurling reproaches.

But when no one, whether provoked or moved to pity, would kill her, and when any food she chanced to seek was being sought only for others and no means of finding it anywhere remained, while dreadful hunger pressed upon her very vitals and marrow and starvation now goaded her to frenzy, then, taking hunger and wrath as her worst counselors, she armed herself against the very laws of nature. For she had a little son at her breast; and carrying him before her eyes she said: 'O son more wretched than your wretched mother, in war, in famine, and in the plundering of robbers, for what shall I keep you? For even if life could be hoped for, we are pressed beneath the yoke of Roman bondage. Yet now famine forestalls even bondage itself, while the robbers, harsher than both violences, bear down upon us.'

'Come, then, now, O my child: be food for your mother, fury for the robbers, and a byword for the ages — the one thing that was still lacking to the calamities of the Jews.' And when she had said this, she cut her son's throat at once, then roasted him set over the fire, and consumed one half, but kept the other half hidden. And behold, the robbers at once rushed in, having caught the smell of the roasted flesh, and threatened death unless she showed without delay the food they had perceived to be prepared. Then she said: 'Indeed, I have kept the best part for you.' And at once she uncovered the infant's remaining limbs. But a great horror suddenly seized them, and, fierce though their spirits were, they stiffened with dread, and their voice was choked in their throats. But she, with grim countenance and now more savage than the robbers themselves, said:

'This,' she said, 'is my son; mine is the offspring, and mine is the deed. Eat, for I too first ate what I bore. Do not be softer than a woman, nor more compassionate than a mother. But if pious scruple overcomes you and you abhor my food, then I, who have already fed upon such fare, will feed upon it again.' After this they departed terrified and trembling, they who had left this alone as food to the wretched mother out of all her possessions. And at once the whole city was filled with the report of the abominable crime, and each man, setting the deed before his eyes, shuddered as though he himself had committed it. And all whom the necessity of famine pressed hastened the more toward death, and called blessed those whom such a punishment had overtaken. And it is fitting to apply to this history the words of the Lord, in which the Savior himself foretold that such things would follow:

'But woe,' he says, 'to those who are with child and to those who nurse or give suck in those days. And pray that your flight be not in winter or on the sabbath. For there will then be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, nor ever shall be.' Now the aforesaid historian, gathering the total number of the slain, declares that both the assassins and the robbers perished after the destruction of the city by wounds inflicted upon one another. He says, moreover, that the choicest of the young men, whom the comeliness and tallness of their bodies recommended, were kept back for the triumph, but the rest, who were over seventeen years of age, were bound and consigned to the works of Egypt in the mines, or were scattered through the other provinces — some to be handed over to the gladiatorial games, others to the beasts.

But those who were found to be within their seventeenth year were ordered to be sold into slavery throughout the various provinces, and their number was brought up to ninety thousand. Now all these things were done in the second year of the reign of Vespasian, in accordance with what our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ himself had foretold, inasmuch as he beheld as already present the things that were to be done, at that time when, according to the testimony of the gospels, seeing the city, he wept over it and, as if speaking into its very ears, uttered these words:

'If you too had known, even in this your day, the things that are for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes; for the days will come upon you when your enemies will encircle you with a rampart, and surround you, and press you hard on every side, and level you to the ground, together with your children within you.' And again, as speaking of the people, he says: 'There will be great distress upon the land, and wrath against this people; and they will fall by the edge of the sword and be led captive into all the nations, and Jerusalem will be trodden down by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.' And again: 'But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by an army, then know that its desolation has drawn near.'

Let each man now compare the discourses of our Lord and Savior with the historian's account of the war that was waged and of the destruction of the city; and, beholding the marvelous power of the divine foreknowledge, he cannot but confess that these sufferings came upon the Jews by a just retribution, in return for this: that the whole nation cried out with one voice that the Author of life be taken away from among them. Nevertheless nothing prevents us from adding also those things through which the loving-kindness and clemency of God is seen to have been offered, even to the ungrateful.

For during forty continuous years after the guilt had been incurred, the apostles — and above all James, called the brother of the Lord, appointed bishop in Jerusalem — unceasingly admonished the people concerning the crime of the impiety they had committed and of the deadly deed they had dared, in the hope that they might perhaps do penance for what they had committed, if they could weep over the crime and escape the avenging flames of punishment; for God sought their repentance, since God does not so much will the death of a sinner as that he should be converted and live. With signs and prodigies given from heaven, displaying at once terrors and a threatening hand, God showed his warning; and in this matter, as in others, our faith will be sufficient testimony.

'But the unhappy people,' he says, 'certain most wicked men and deceivers had so beset that they would not believe the signs of divine warning and indignation, by which the destruction of both the city and the nation was openly foretold. But, as though stricken and out of their minds, having neither eyes nor soul within them, they spurned all that was announced from heaven. For a star, gleaming brightly and in every respect like a sword, was seen to hang above over the city, and moreover a comet was seen to burn with deadly flames throughout the whole year. And also before the time of the destruction and of the war, in the month Xanthicus — which is April — at the ninth hour of the night, so great a brightness of light surrounded the altar and the temple that all thought the clearest day had dawned; and it lasted for the space of half an hour.'

This to the unskilled indeed seemed of good omen, but by the skilled it was interpreted the other way. At the same feast, a heifer brought forward for the sacrifices and standing at the altars gave birth to a lamb amid the very hands of the ministers. Moreover the gate of the inner sanctuary that faced east — though it was overlaid with solid bronze and was consequently of immense weight, so that it was scarcely closed by twenty men pushing with the utmost effort, and though it was fortified with iron bars and bolts and held fast by locks sunk deep down — was suddenly, at the sixth hour of the night, seen to have opened of its own accord. And in the month Artemisius — which among us is called May — a portentous sight appeared, almost beyond belief, and which would truly be reckoned false, had not the ruin of evils that followed confirmed the trustworthiness of eyes.

For near sunset there were seen chariots and four-horse teams borne through the air in every region, and cohorts of armed men mingling with the clouds and cities encircled by unseen battle-lines. And the priests who had entered the temple to perform the ministries according to custom first perceived certain movements and noises, and then heard sudden voices saying: 'Let us depart hence.' To these things is added yet another, more terrible still. A certain rustic, before the fourth year of the war, when the city was at peace and in abundance, suddenly began to cry aloud: 'A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice over Jerusalem and over the temple, a voice over bridegrooms and brides, a voice over the people.'

This he kept doing until certain leading men among the people, stirred as if by indignation at the ill-omened prophecy, seized the man and afflicted him with many blows. But he, saying nothing whatever on his own behalf, nor even entreating those who stood around him, repeated the same words with equal obstinacy and outcry. The people, therefore, all the more incensed against the man, led him to the Roman magistrate, before whom, though torn by scourges to the very bones, he poured out neither prayers nor tears, but, uttering the same cry piteously and with a kind of wail, brought it forth at almost every single lash, adding also this: 'Woe, woe to Jerusalem!'

The same historian pursues yet another matter, wrought with a greater marvel, saying that a certain oracle was found in the sacred writings, that at that same time someone from their region would gain possession of the empire of the world. The presage of this oracle the same historian supposes to point to Vespasian. But Vespasian ruled over none but those nations alone which appeared subject to the Roman empire; whence these responses are more justly referred to Christ, to whom the Father had said, 'Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and for your possession the ends of the earth' — and whose sound at that same time went out through his apostles into all the earth, and whose words reached the ends of the world, imparting to them the knowledge of the things that had been done.

These things, then, Josephus also sets forth — Josephus, son of Matthias, a priest of Jerusalem, who himself both fought against the Romans in the earlier part of the war and no less took part in the later events. It is agreed, then, that this man was at that same time held to be most noble not only among the Jews, his own fellow citizens, but also among the Romans, so that on account of the merit of his writings a statue too was granted him in the city of Rome, and his books were deposited in the library. For he composed a history of the whole war waged against the Romans, comprising it in seven volumes, which he affirms he published not only in Greek eloquence but also in his ancestral, that is, the Hebrew tongue, for his own countrymen as well — a man worthy to be believed above all others.