After Nero had held the sovereignty for thirteen years, and the affairs of Galba and Otho had occupied a year and six months, Vespasian, who had distinguished himself in the campaigns against the Jews, was proclaimed emperor in Judaea itself, being acclaimed imperator by the armies there. He at once set out for Rome and entrusted the war against the Jews to his son Titus.
Now after the ascension of our Saviour, the Jews, in addition to their outrage against him, had already contrived very many plots against his apostles. First Stephen was put to death by them with stones; then after him James, the son of Zebedee and brother of John, was beheaded; and to crown all, James, who was the first after the ascension of our Saviour to be allotted the throne of the bishopric there, departed in the manner described above. The remaining apostles, against whom countless plots of death were laid, were driven from the land of Judaea, and journeyed to all the nations for the teaching of the message, in the power of Christ, who had said to them, “Go and make disciples of all the nations in my name.”
Moreover, the people of the church in Jerusalem, in accordance with a certain oracle given by revelation before the war to the approved men there, were commanded to depart from the city and to dwell in a certain city of Perea which they call Pella. To it those who believed on Christ migrated from Jerusalem, so that, when the holy men had entirely abandoned both the royal metropolis of the Jews and the whole land of Judaea, the judgement of God might then at last overtake them — men who had so lawlessly dealt with Christ and his apostles — utterly blotting out that whole generation of the impious from among men.
Now how many evils at that time poured in upon the whole nation in every place; how especially the inhabitants of Judaea were driven to the utmost of calamities; how many myriads of youths, together with women and children, fell by the sword, by famine, and by countless other forms of death; how many and what kind of sieges of Jewish cities there were; and what dreadful things, and worse than dreadful, were seen by those who fled to Jerusalem itself as to a most strongly fortified metropolis; the manner of the whole war, and each of the things that happened in it in turn; and how at last the abomination of desolation proclaimed by the prophets was set up in that very temple of God, once renowned, which endured complete destruction and a final annihilation by fire — all this anyone who wishes may gather accurately from the history written by Josephus.
But it is necessary to point out how this same writer relates that those who had gathered from all Judaea in the days of the feast of the Passover, as though shut up in a prison — to use his very words — amounted to a multitude of about three million within Jerusalem.
It was indeed fitting that, in the very days in which they had brought about the passion against Christ, the Saviour and Benefactor of all men and the Anointed of God, they should be shut up as in a prison and receive the destruction that pursued them from the divine justice.
Passing over, then, the particulars of what befell them — all that was wrought against them by the sword and in other ways — I think it necessary to set forth only their sufferings from the famine, so that those who read this work may know in part how the punishment from God overtook them not long after their lawless deed against the Christ of God.