all the doors of the temple and the sanctuary, and said to Pilate, We have been adjured by thee, O good judge, by the building of this temple, to make truth and reason plain unto thee. After we had crucified Jesus, not knowing him to be the Son of God, thinking he wrought these miracles by some incantation, we held a large assembly in this temple, and when we consulted together concerning the miraculous signs which Jesus had wrought, we found many witnesses of our own nation, who said that they had seen Jesus alive after the suffering of death, and that he entered the height of heaven. And we have seen two witnesses whom Jesus raised from the dead, who made known unto us many miracles which Jesus did among the dead, which we have in our hands in writing. And our custom is, every year to open this holy volume before our assembly and seek the witness of God. And we have found, in the first book of the Seventy, where Michael, the archangel, talked with the third son of the first man Adam, about the 5500 years,[1] after which should come from heaven, Christ, the most beloved Son of God: and, moreover, we have supposed that perhaps he was the God of Israel who said to Moses, Make thee the ark of the covenant, two cubits and a half in length, one cubit and a half in breadth, and a cubit and a half in height. By these five cubits and a half we under-
- ↑ See Chapter iii. (xix.)
