With the establishment of Archelaus in power after Herod the aforementioned historian also agrees, recording the manner in which Archelaus succeeded to the kingdom over the Jews by the testaments of his father Herod and by the decision of Caesar Augustus, and how, when he had fallen from power after a period of ten years, his brothers Philip and the younger Herod, together with Lysanias, governed their own tetrarchies.
The same writer, in the eighteenth book of the Antiquities, makes clear that Pontius Pilate was entrusted with Judaea in the twelfth year of the reign of Tiberius (for Tiberius had succeeded to the universal sovereignty after Augustus had held the government for fifty-seven years), and that there Pilate remained in office for a full ten years, almost until the death of Tiberius.
Clearly, then, the fabrication of those who have recently or in former times put forth a series of memoranda against our Saviour is refuted, for in these the very date of the forged record convicts the falsifiers of their lie.
For these memoranda place the crimes that were perpetrated against the Saviour's passion in the fourth consulship of Tiberius, which fell in the seventh year of his reign; yet at that time it is shown that Pilate had not yet even taken up his post in Judaea, if indeed Josephus may be used as a witness, since he plainly indicates in the writing cited above that it was in the twelfth year of the reign of Tiberius that Pilate was appointed procurator of Judaea by Tiberius.