After receiving this award from Cæsar,[221] Agrippa gave his sister
Drusilla in marriage to Azizus, king of Emesa,[222] on his consenting to
be circumcised. Epiphanes, son of King Antiochus, had declined the
marriage from reluctance to adopt Jewish practices, although he had
previously promised her father that he would do so....
The marriage of Drusilla and Azizus was, however, not long afterwards
broken off on the following ground. Drusilla was the most beautiful of
women, and Felix, while procurator of Judæa, saw and fell in love with
her. He accordingly sent to her one of his friends named Atomos,[223] a
Jew born in Cyprus, who pretended to be a magician, and tried to
persuade her to desert her husband and marry him, promising to make her
happy[224] if she did not reject him. And she, because she was unhappy
in her life[225] and desired to escape from her sister Berenice’s envy
of her beauty, ...[226] was prevailed upon to transgress the laws of her
race and to marry Felix. By him she bore a son whom she called
Agrippa.—_Ant._ XX. 7. 1 f. (137-143).
Footnote 218:
A freedman and favourite of the Emperor Claudius and a man of great
influence.
Footnote 219:
Cf. § (32) and Luke iii. 1, “Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene.”
Footnote 220:
A petty kingdom in the Lebanon district.
Footnote 221:
_i.e._ Claudius.
Footnote 222:
In northern Syria (mod. Homs).
Footnote 223:
Some MSS read “Simon.”
Footnote 224:
We can hardly miss the Roman’s jest on his name: “make a _Felix_ of
her.”
Footnote 225:
Lit. “faring ill”; Whiston’s rendering, “acted wickedly,” is scarcely
possible.
Footnote 226:
A line of corrupt and unintelligible text follows in Niese’s MSS. The
older editions read “for she was constantly being ill-treated by her
because of her beauty.”
(37) The Death of James, “the Lord’s Brother”
A description of the death by stoning, after a perfunctory trial by
the Sanhedrin, of James “the brother of Jesus who was called
Christ,” the head of the early Church in Jerusalem (Acts xv.; Gal.
i. 19).
An alternative melodramatic account of the martyrdom of James—in
which he is represented as hurled down from the “pinnacle” of the
Temple, stoned, and finally despatched by a fuller’s club—is given
by Hegesippus (quoted by Euseb. _H. E._ II. 23).
The account of Josephus seems much the more trustworthy of the two,
and there appears to be no reason for questioning its authenticity.
As Lightfoot writes, “This notice ... is probable in itself (which
the account of Hegesippus is not), and is such as Josephus might be
expected to write if he alluded to the matter at all.... On the
other hand, if the passage had been a Christian interpolation, the
notice of James would have been more laudatory” (_Galatians_, ed.
10, p. 366, n. 2).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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