His first step, as we have seen, was to march with such forces as he could raise to Jerusalem; where he put a stop to the sacrilegious work which had been already commenced by Adrian’s order. He then proceeded to the strong city of Bithor, or Bethor, which lay at no great distance from Jerusalem. Here he was publicly acknowledged by Akiba as the Messiah, and large numbers of Jews, not from Judæa only, but from other neighbouring countries, flocked in to his standard. The levies at his command are said to have amounted at one time to 200,000 men; a force with which the Roman troops in Judæa were wholly unable to cope. The whole country fell under his dominion, and the utmost zeal and loyalty were displayed in his service. The only persons throughout the whole of Palestine who stood aloof were the Christians; who, knowing that Jesus Christ was the true Deliverer of the Jewish people, could not acknowledge any other to be such. Barchochebas is said to have punished their defection, as he considered it, with the most savage cruelty, regarding them as rebels and traitors, more criminal than the Romans themselves. Adrian, who could not for a long time be induced to believe that the Jews, after the terrible lesson which their fathers had learned of the consequences of rebellion against Rome, would again provoke a mortal quarrel, treated the outbreak as a matter of but small importance. But the tales that reached him, of large military stores being in the possession of the Jews, who had for a long time past been secretly collecting them; of their countrymen from Egypt and the East thronging to their standard; and even of multitudes of strangers to their faith and nation nevertheless joining them, in the hope of obtaining plunder, roused him at length to vigorous action. He sent a reinforcement of troops to Ticinius, or Tinnius, by some called Turnus Rufus,[31] who commanded in Judæa, and recalled from Britain Julius Severus, the ablest officer of his time, to put down, what—it was now impossible to disguise—had become a dangerous rebellion.