Page:The Apocryphal New Testament (1924).djvu/199

 and he was healed. Vespasian then vowed to go to Tiberius and get forces wherewith to destroy the city and nation of the Jews. And after some years spent in gathering an army he besieged Jerusalem. The Christians, warned by the Holy Ghost, had fled to Pella.

Then there is a meeting between the historian Josephus and Vespasian; the latter’s elevation to the empire is prophesied and takes place. Then we have the story of Titus falling ill from joy at his father's triumph, and being cured by having a slave whom he hated set [sic] next him at table. This was contrived by Josephus. Thereafter the famine in Jerusalem, and the incident of the woman Mary eating her child. Then the city is taken and the Jews are sold thirty for a penny.

Then the discovery of an old man built up in a very massive wall, who is Joseph of Arimathaea. Delivered by Jesus, as the Gospel of Nicodemus tells, he had been imprisoned again by the Jews because he continued to preach the gospel, and had been miraculously sustained ever since with light and food from heaven.



I. 1 I, Joseph of Arimathaea, who begged the body of the Lord Jesus from Pilate, was imprisoned by the Jews on that account. These are the people who provoked their lawgiver Moses, and failing to recognize their God crucified his Son.

Seven days before the passion of Christ, two condemned robbers were sent from Jericho to Pilate, whose crimes were these.

2 The first, Gestas, used to strip and murder wayfarers, hang up women by the feet and cut off their breasts, drink the blood of babes: he knew not God nor obeyed any law, but was violent from the beginning.

The other, Demas, was a Galilaean who kept an inn; he despoiled the rich but did good to the poor, even burying them, like Tobit. He had committed robberies on the Jews, for he stole (plundered) the law itself at Jerusalem, and stripped the daughter of Caiaphas, who was a priestess of the sanctuary, and he took away even the mystic deposit of Solomon which had been deposited in the (holy) place.

3 Jesus also was taken at even on the third day before the passover. But Caiaphas and the multitude of the Jews had no passover but were in great grief because of the robbery of the sanctuary by the thief. And they sent for Judas Iscariot who was brother's son to Caiaphas, and had been persuaded by

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