The actual result was the constant increase of the new Maccabees. It has been customary to put the outbreak of the war in the year 66; with equal and perhaps better warrant we might name for it the year 44. Since the death of Agrippa warfare in Judaea had never ceased, and alongside of the local feuds, which Jews fought out with Jews, there went on constantly the war of the Roman troops against the seceders in the mountains, the Zealots, as the Jews named them, or according to Roman designation, the Robbers. Both names were appropriate; here too alongside of the fanatics the decayed or decaying elements of society played their part--at any rate after the victory one of the first steps of the Zealots was to burn the bonds for debt that were kept in the temple. Every one of the abler procurators, onward from the first Cuspius Fadus, swept the land of them, and still the hydra appeared afresh in greater strength. The successor of Fadus, Tiberius Julius Alexander, himself sprung from a Jewish family, a nephew of the above-mentioned Alexandrian scholar Philo, caused two sons of Judas the Galilean, Jacob and Simon, to be crucified; this was the seed of the new Mattathias. In the streets of the towns the patriots preached aloud the war, and not a few followed to the desert; these bands set on fire the houses of the peaceful and rational people who refused to take part with them. If the soldiers seized bandits of this sort, they carried off in turn respectable people as hostages to the mountains; and very often the authorities agreed to release the former in order to liberate the latter. At the same time the “men of the knife” began in the capital their dismal trade; they murdered, doubtless also for money--as their first victim the priest Jonathan is named, as commissioning them in that case, the Roman procurator Felix--but, if possible, at the same time as patriots, Roman soldiers or countrymen of their own friendly to the Romans. How, with such dispositions, should wonders and signs have failed to appear, and persons who, deceived or deceiving, roused thereby the fanaticism of the masses? Under Cuspius Fadus the miracle-monger Theudas led his faithful adherents to the Jordan, assuring them that the waters would divide before them and swallow up the pursuing Roman horsemen, as in the times of king Pharaoh. Under Felix another worker of wonders, named from his native country the Egyptian, promised that the walls of Jerusalem would collapse like those of Jericho at the trumpet blast of Joshua; and thereupon four thousand knife-men followed him to the Mount of Olives. In the very absurdity lay the danger. The great mass of the Jewish population were small farmers, who ploughed their fields and pressed their oil in the sweat of their brow--more villagers than townsmen, of little culture and powerful faith, closely linked to the free bands in the mountains, and full of reverence for Jehovah and his priests in Jerusalem as