History is comparatively silent as to the return of the Christians from Pella. Many of the first followers of Christ were strangers in Jerusalem, who had come to the Holy City from distant countries to celebrate the annual festivals of their nation. Such must have been most of the three thousand converted on the day of Pentecost, who, returning to their far-off homes, spread the glad tidings of a risen Savior as they went.[236] And although all who “believed were together and had all things common, and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men as every man had need, and continued daily with one accord in the Temple, and breaking bread from house to house,”[237] yet in a brief time thereafter St. Stephen was martyred, “and at that time there was a great persecution against the church which was in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles.”[238] The number who fled to Pella, which was but a small town on the eastern bank of the Jordan, must have been exceedingly small. Those who found refuge there remained for seventy years, during which time Jerusalem was a desolation; and, excepting the military towers on Mount Zion, “the rest of the wall was so entirely thrown down even with the ground by those who digged it up to the very foundation, that there was left nothing to make those who came thither believe it had ever been inhabited.”[239] By some this account is regarded as exaggerated, and at most it can only refer to the walls of the city. Granting the correctness of such a supposition, and that some of the poorer inhabitants clung to the ruins of the capital, yet historians agree that the Christians did not return to Jerusalem till about the year 130 A.D., which was after the town had been rebuilt by the Emperor Adrian, and by him called _Ælia Capitolina_. And, at best, only the descendants of those who had fled returned, as during the lapse of seventy years most of the fugitives had ascended to their reward. It is also difficult to conceive how those who had never visited Jerusalem before, and especially after it had been rebuilt by the Romans, could have identified an obscure tomb which had remained unmarked by any enduring monument.