And indeed, when the rebellion of the Jews had once more advanced to great and wide proportions, Rufus, governor of Judaea, when military aid had been sent to him by the Emperor, moved out against them, dealing unsparingly with their madness, destroying in heaps tens of thousands of men together with children and women, and by the law of war enslaving their lands.
The Jews at that time were led by one named Bar Chochebas (which means “star”), a man in other respects murderous and given to banditry, but who, on the strength of his name, as though dealing with slaves, posed marvellously as a luminary come down to them from heaven to shed light upon those in misery.
When the war reached its height in the eighteenth year of Hadrian’s reign at the city of Bethther—which was a most strongly fortified place not very far distant from Jerusalem—and when the siege from without had become prolonged, and the revolutionaries had been driven to the utmost destruction by famine and thirst, and the author of their madness had paid the penalty he deserved, the whole nation was thereafter wholly forbidden to set foot even on the land around Jerusalem, by a decree and ordinances of Hadrian, who commanded that they should not so much as look upon their ancestral soil even from afar. So Ariston of Pella relates.
Thus, when the city had come to be bereft of the Jewish nation and to the utter destruction of its ancient inhabitants, and was colonized by people of another race, the Roman city that afterwards arose changed its name and, in honour of the reigning emperor Aelius Hadrian, was called Aelia. And since the church there was now constituted of Gentiles, the first to be entrusted with the ministry of those there after the bishops of the circumcision was Marcus.