So great were his subtlety and cunning in deceiving that, just as he was himself driven on, he mocked even the wretched Jews, enticing them with vain hopes. First of all he summoned them to himself and asked why they did not sacrifice, when their own law commanded them concerning sacrifices. But they, thinking they had found an opportune occasion, said: 'We cannot, except in the one temple of Jerusalem; for so the law commands.' And having received from him permission to rebuild the temple, they reached such a pitch of insolence that one might have thought some prophet had been restored to them. Therefore from all places and provinces the Jews assembled and began to set to work on the site of the temple that had once been consumed by fire, a count being granted by the Emperor to hasten the work:
The work was pressed forward with all urgency at both public and private expense. Meanwhile they insulted our people and, as though the times of their kingdom had been restored to them, threatened the more fiercely and flaunted their savagery, conducting themselves utterly in great swelling pride and arrogance. Cyril, after Maximus the Confessor, was reckoned bishop at Jerusalem. When therefore the foundations had been laid open, the lime and mortar applied, nothing at all was lacking but that on the next day, with the old foundations cleared away, they should lay the new ones; yet the bishop, after careful consideration—whether from what he had read in the prophecy of Daniel concerning the times, or from what the Lord had foretold in the Gospels—persisted that it could by no means come to pass that there a stone should be laid by the Jews upon a stone. The matter hung in expectation.