Josephus’ indignation and his frequent reference to the “pretended wit” of Apion or of Mnaseas make the tone and intention of the story quite plain. It can have had no other purpose than that of holding the Jews up to ridicule. But just what the point of the jest is, is by no means quite so easy to discover. We cannot reconstruct even approximately the words of Mnaseas. It is, however, at least likely that if he had attributed the adoration of an ass to the Jews, a somewhat less equivocal statement to that effect would appear. Other writers do make that statement plainly enough. The point of Mnaseas’ raillery seems rather to be the easy credulity of the people, a characteristic that was at all times attributed to them in the ancient world, from the earliest references, as they are found in Hecataeus, to the latest. It is curious that this quality, which to Greeks and Romans seemed the most striking trait of the Jews, is the very last that modern observers would ascribe to them. If we follow the story as it appears in later writers, we shall meet it next in the history of the Syrian Posidonius, who lived about 100 B.C.E. Again, we have his statement only in quotation, this time in a fragment of the work of Diodorus, a Sicilian contemporary of Augustus. Posidonius does no more than make the assertion that the innermost shrine of the temple contained the statue of a long-bearded man, assumed to be Moses, riding on an ass (λίθινον ἄγαλμα ἀνδρὸς βαθυπώγωνος καθήμενον [sic] ἐπ’ ὄνου.[175] This is very far from accusing the Jews of worshiping an ass. Indeed it is likely enough that nothing was further from the mind of the writer. Perhaps Mnaseas too told the same or a very similar story, since his anecdote would fit in just as well with the account of Posidonius as with the later version. The story appears again in the writings of Molo, the tutor of Caesar and Cicero; but Molo’s statement is wholly lost. In the next generation we find it in the writings of the Egyptian Apion, and in Damocritus, of whom we know nothing, but who, it is likely enough, was a resident of Alexandria.[176] Here the statements are unmistakable. According to Damocritus, if he is accurately cited by the late Byzantine lexicographer Suidas, the Jews adored the gilded head of an ass (χρυσ ῆ ν ὄνου κεφαλὴν προσεκύνουν). Apion, in the Latin translation of Josephus, asserts that the Jews “adored this ass’ head, and worshiped it with much ceremony” (_id_ [_i.e. asini caput_] _colere ac dignum facere tanta religione_).[177] Probably from Apion it got to Tacitus, 120 C.E., who in his Histories (v. 4) uses the words, _effigiem_ [_asini_] _penetrali sacravere_, “they consecrated the figure of an ass in their inner shrine.” Tacitus expressly avoids the allegation of worshiping this statue. He probably intentionally modified the words of Apion to fit the statement into the then abundantly proven fact that the Jews worshiped an imageless and abstract deity (Hist. v. 5).