Come now, after the necessary preliminaries to the ecclesiastical history we have set before us, let us at length set out, as upon some journey, from the appearing in the flesh of our Saviour—having called upon God the Father of the Logos, and upon him who is here set forth, Jesus Christ himself, our Saviour and Lord, the heavenly Logos of God, to be our helper and fellow-worker in the truth of the narrative.
It was, then, the forty-second year of the reign of Augustus, and the twenty-eighth year after the subjugation of Egypt and the death of Antony and Cleopatra—in whom the dynasty of the Ptolemies in Egypt came to its last end—when our Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ, at the time of the first census then held, while Quirinius was governor of Syria, was born in Bethlehem of Judaea, in accordance with the prophecies concerning him.
Of this census under Quirinius, Flavius Josephus also, the most notable historian among the Hebrews, makes mention; and he subjoins another account concerning the heresy of the Galileans which sprang up at those same times, of which our own Luke too has made mention in the Acts, speaking somewhat thus: 「After this man rose up Judas the Galilean in the days of the census, and drew away people after him; and he perished, and all, as many as were persuaded by him, were scattered abroad.」
With these statements the aforesaid writer, in agreement, sets forth the following, word for word, in the eighteenth book of the Antiquities: 「Now Quirinius, a man of senatorial rank, who had passed through the other magistracies and proceeded through them all to become consul, and was in other respects great in dignity, arrived in Syria with a few attendants, having been sent by Caesar as a dispenser of justice to the nation, and to be assessor of their properties.」
And a little further on he says: 「But Judas, a Gaulanite, a man from a city named Gamala, having taken to himself Sadduk a Pharisee, pressed on toward revolt; saying that the assessment brought nothing other than outright slavery, and exhorting the nation to lay hold of their freedom.」
And in the second book of the Histories of the Jewish War he writes thus concerning the same man: 「At this time a certain Galilean named Judas urged the inhabitants to revolt, declaring that they would be cowards if they submitted to pay tribute to the Romans and, after God, endured mortal masters.」 Thus far Josephus.