The Bar Kokhba Revolt and Aelia Capitolina

Cassius Dio, whose account survives only in a later abridgement, says that the emperor Hadrian founded a city at Jerusalem in place of the one razed in the Jewish Revolt and the Destruction of the Temple, named it Aelia Capitolina, and raised a temple of Jupiter on the site of the temple. This, Dio says, brought on the war: the Jews could not bear to see foreigners settled and foreign rites planted in their city (Cassius Dio, Roman History 69.12). A late Roman biography of Hadrian gives another cause, a ban on circumcision (Historia Augusta, Hadrian 14.2).

By Dio’s account the rebels waited until Hadrian had left the region. They avoided open battle and fought from fortified positions and underground passages (Cassius Dio, Roman History 69.12). Eusebius, in the fourth century, calls their leader Barcocheba and says the name means “star” (Eusebius, Church History 4.6). Letters found in caves near the Dead Sea show that he was Simon bar Kosiba: they are his orders to his officers to send men and take over grain (Bar Kokhba letters) and, in one case, to bring palm branches and citrons, which its excavator, Yigael Yadin, connected with the feast of Sukkot (Bar Kokhba letters letter to Yehudah bar Menashe). A coin of his first year names “Shimon Prince of Israel” and is dated “Year 1 of the Redemption of Israel” (Coin of Bar Kokhba, year 1 (Harvard Art Museums 2008.2.105)).

Dio goes on: Hadrian sent his best generals, among them Julius Severus, brought from Britain. Severus avoided pitched battles, cut off small groups and starved them out. Dio counts fifty strongholds and 985 villages destroyed and 580,000 men killed in the fighting, and says that nearly all Judaea was left desolate. Roman losses were so heavy that Hadrian, writing to the senate, left out the customary words “I and the legions are in health” (Cassius Dio, Roman History 69.13–14). Eusebius says that the war was fiercest at Betar, a strong fortress not far from Jerusalem, where after a long siege the rebels were worn down by hunger and thirst and their leader “suffered his just punishment” (Eusebius, Church History 4.6). The Mishnah lists the capture of Betar among the disasters of the ninth of Av (Mishnah, Ta’anit 4:6).

Afterwards, Eusebius reports from Aristo of Pella, Jews were forbidden by Hadrian’s decree to enter the district of Jerusalem (Eusebius, Church History 4.6). Justin Martyr, writing some twenty years later, says that a Jew caught entering it faced death (Justin, First Apology 47). He also says that during the war Bar Kokhba ordered Christians to be cruelly punished unless they denied Jesus Christ (Justin, First Apology 31).

For the church of Jerusalem, as Eusebius tells it, the war was a break. He reports that its first fifteen bishops, down to this siege, are said to have all been of Hebrew descent, and that the Roman city which then arose, colonised by another people, had a church made up of Gentiles, with Marcus as the first bishop after those “of the circumcision” (Eusebius, Church History 4.5) (Eusebius, Church History 4.6).