To Felix belongs the crime of introducing the Sicarii into the city of Jerusalem. Wearied with the importunities of the high priest, Jonathan, who exhorted him continually to govern better, or at all events to govern differently, and reproached him with the fact that it was through his own influence that Felix obtained his office, he resolved to rid himself of a friend so troublesome, by the speediest and surest method, that of assassination. The Sicarii were not, like the hired bravoes of the middle ages, men who would commit any murder for which they were paid. It appears, on the contrary, that they held it a cardinal point of faith to murder those, and only those, who seemed to stand in the way of their cause. Now their cause was that of the sect which had grown out of Judas’s teaching, the zealots. These Sicarii mingling with the crowd of those who went up to worship, carrying daggers concealed under their garments, fell upon Jonathan the High Priest, and murdered him.[2] This done they went on slaying all those who were obnoxious to them, even in the Temple itself. “And this,” says the historian, “seems to me the reason why God, out of his hatred to the wickedness of these men, rejected our city: and as for the Temple, he no longer esteemed it sufficiently pure for him to inhabit therein, but brought the Romans upon us, and threw a fire upon the city to purge it: and brought upon us, our wives, and children, slavery,—as desirous to make us wiser by our calamities.” And now the voice of discord was heard even among the priests themselves, who had hitherto preserved a certain sobriety. Between the chief priests and “the principal men of the multitude of Jerusalem,” a feud broke out. Each side had its followers: they cast, we are told, not only reproachful words, but also stones at each other. And the chief priests, robbing the threshingfloors and appropriating all the tithes to themselves, caused many of the poorer priests to die of want. Footnote 2: Milman says, in the Temple itself, which does not appear from the account of Josephus, who expressly says that, after this, they had the boldness to murder men in the Temple itself.