conduct of Thebuthis, a presbyter of that church, who, irritated at not having been elected bishop in the room of James, brought in strifes and divisions among the people by the introduction of false or questionable doctrines. Of what kind those were, there is no certain tradition; but they probably soon after formed one of that numerous brood of heresies so rife in the East under the general name of Gnosticism. According to the common attestations of the Fathers, it would also appear that Nicolas and Cerinthus, each the leader of a separate division of that corrupt and extravagant school, had once a connexion with the Hierosolymitan communion.
While Simeon administered the discipline of the church, the time arrived when the wrath foredoomed against Jerusalem was to descend upon it. To this awful consummation there had been several intelligible preludes. The growing aversion to the Jewish people, which had become universal in the Roman provinces, had manifested itself in various forms of cruelty, as in the outrages inflicted on them in Egypt, Parthia, and Babylonia; while, at home, the profanation of the temple by Caligula, the disruption of social order and security by the unrestrained violence of the numerous brigands who held the rural districts at their mercy, and the daily increase of intestine strifes and murders in Jerusalem itself; the prophetic cries of Jesus-bar-Anan, and those other preternatural occurrences so clearly narrated by Josephus; the outbreaks of sedition in the city; the massacres of Cæsarea, Ptolemais, Askelon, Tyre, and other places; and, lastly, the arrival of the iron-clad legions of Rome under Cestius,—all portended the same catastrophe, and warned the Hebrew Christians that the days of Jerusalem were numbered, and that the time for escape, of which their Saviour had premonished them, had fully come.
