The life and work of St. Paul

530 THE LIFE AND WOSK OF ST. PATTL.
induce the Emperor to decide in favour of the Jews, and that Jonathan should
petition him on behalf of the Jews to appoint to the lucrative Procuratorship
his brother Felix. The plot succeeded. The Samaritans were condemned;
their leaders executed; Cumanus banished; Celer sent to Jerusalem to be
beheaded; Ananias and Ananus triumphantly acquitted; and A.D. 52, six
years before St. Paul's last visit to Jerusalem, Felix like his brother, an
Arcadian slave who had taken the name of Antonius in honour of his
first mistress, and the name of Claudius in honour of his patron became
Procurator of Judaea. 1
At first the new Procurator behaved with a little decent reserve, but it
was not long before he began to show himself in his true colours, and with
every sort of cruelty and licentiousness " to wield the power of a king with
the temperament of a slave." After his emancipation he had been entrusted
with a command in ft troop of auxiliaries, and acting with the skill and promptitude
of a soldier, he had performed a really useful task in extirpating the
bandits. Yet even the Jews murmured at the shameless indifference with
which this Borgia of the first century entrapped the chief bandit Eleazar into
a friendly visit, on pretence of admiring his skill and valour, and instantly:
threw him into chains, and sent him as a prisoner to Rome. They were still
more deeply scandalised by his intimacy with Simon Magus, who lived with
him at Csesarea as a guest, and by whose base devices this "husband or
adulterer of three queens" succeeded in seducing Drusilla, the beautiful
sister of Agrippa II. who had now come as a king to Judaea from her
husband Aziz, King of Emesa. A crime of yet deeper and darker dye had
taken place the very year before Paul's arrival. Jonathan, who was often
bitterly reminded of his share in bringing upon his nation the affliction of
a Procurator, who daily grew more infamous from his exactions and his
savagery, thought that his high position and eminent services to Felix himself
entitled him to expostulate. So far from taking warning, Felix so fiercely
resented the interference that he bribed Doras, a friend of Jonathan's, to get
rid of him. Doras hired the services of some bandits, who, armed with sicae,
or short daggers, stabbed the priestly statesman at one of the yearly feasts.
The success and the absolute impunity of the crime put a premium upon
murder; assassinations became as frequent in Jerusalem as they were at Pcome
during the Papacy of Alexander VI. The very Temple was stained with
blood. Any one who wanted to get rid of a public or private enemy found it
a cheap and easy process to hire a murderer. It is now that the Ominous
term stearins occurs for the firs't time in Jewish histo'ry.
This had happened in A.D. 37, and it wfcs probably at the Passover of
A.D. 58 only seven weeks before the time at which we hare now arrived
that the Egyptian Pseudo-Messiah had succeeded in raising 30,000 followers,
with no better pretensions than the promise that he would lead them to the
Mount of Olives, and that the walls of Jerusalem should fall fiat before him.
1 JLD. 52.