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Ancient source · Josephus

Josephus, Jewish War 2.117–118

Judas the Galilean in the Jewish War

¶1 AND now Archelaus's part of Judea was reduced into a province, and Coponius, one of the equestrian order among the Romans, was sent as a procurator, having the power of [life and] death put into his hands by Caesar. Under his administration it was that a certain Galilean, whose name was Judas, prevailed with his countrymen to revolt, and said they were cowards if they would endure to pay a tax to the Romans and would after God submit to mortal men as their lords. This man was a teacher of a peculiar sect of his own, and was not at all like the rest of those their leaders.

The Greek text (Niese), sections 117–118

117 Τῆς δὲ Ἀρχελάου χώρας εἰς ἐπαρχίαν περιγραφείσης ἐπίτροπος τῆς ἱππικῆς παρὰ Ῥωμαίοις τάξεως Κωπώνιος πέμπεται μέχρι τοῦ κτείνειν λαβὼν παρὰ Καίσαρος ἐξουσίαν.

118 ἐπὶ τούτου τις ἀνὴρ Γαλιλαῖος Ἰούδας ὄνομα εἰς ἀπόστασιν ἐνῆγε τοὺς ἐπιχωρίους κακίζων, εἰ φόρον τε Ῥωμαίοις τελεῖν ὑπομενοῦσιν καὶ μετὰ τὸν θεὸν οἴσουσι θνητοὺς δεσπότας. ἦν δʼ οὗτος σοφιστὴς ἰδίας αἱρέσεως οὐδὲν τοῖς ἄλλοις προσεοικώς.

Square brackets in the Greek mark words the editor judged not to be original.

Where this text comes from

  • English: William Whiston's translation (1737), as printed in 1856. Whiston translated an earlier Greek text (Sigebert Havercamp's edition, 1726), not the Niese text shown here, so the two can differ in places. Words in square brackets in the English are Whiston's own additions, not in the Greek. Whiston grouped sections, so this extract covers 2.117–118.
  • Greek: Benedikt Niese's critical edition (Berlin, 1885–1895), with Niese's section numbers.
  • Digital text: Perseus Digital Library, urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0526.tlg004.perseus-eng2:2.117, fixed at commit a6eb0cc3e6f6. Open the source file.
  • Rights: Niese Greek text and Whiston translation public domain; Perseus digital encoding CC BY-SA 4.0 (Trustees of Tufts University). Attribution and share-alike apply to the extracted text.
  • Checked: the files were verified against their SHA-256 checksums before extraction (data/ask/sources.json). Fingerprint of this English text: 875761f5c8fefc7e.
  • Why this passage is in the Atlas: 23 passages of Josephus that bear on people, groups and events of the New Testament are included, not his whole works.