Jesus’ Prediction of
False Prophets
Matthew 24:11 (NKJV)
records the prediction by Jesus of False Prophets after they hear of “wars and
rumors of war” (See also Mark 13):
“Then many false
prophets will rise up and deceive many.”
Josephus’s Confirmation
Prior to the War:
Before the Jewish-Roman War
began, Josephus reports, “another body of wicked men . . . deceived and
deluded the people under pretense of divine inspiration . . . prevailed
with the multitude to act like mad men . . . pretending that God would” help
them defeat the Romans. An “Egyptian false
prophet . . . got together thirty thousand men . . . [and] led [them]
. . . to the . . . Mount of Olives, and
was ready to break into Jerusalem by force” (Wars II.XIII.4-5).
Josephus’s Confirmation
During the War: Why did the Jews not, at
some point, surrender and cut their losses? Jesus
had prophesied this horrible end, but they believed, instead, the False
Prophets. After the Romans had taken
the temple, during which 6000 Jews were being slaughtered and burned in
Jerusalem, Josephus tells us:
A false prophet was the
occasion of these people’s destruction, who had made a public proclamation in
the city, that very day, that God commanded them to get up upon the temple, and
that there they should receive miraculous signs of their deliverance. Now, there was then a great number of false
prophets suborned by the tyrants [Simon and John] to impose upon the people
. . . that they should wait for deliverance from God . . . Thus were the
miserable people persuaded by these deceivers (Wars VI.V.2-3).
Bridle-High Blood Like from a Winepress
After describing
sharp sickles that would be used by angels to “harvest” the “land” (do not
translate as “earth,” rather: as the “land”
of Israel), Revelation 14:20 (NKJV) states: “Then the [wine]press was trampled outside the city,
and blood flowed out of the press up to the horses’ bridles for
about 180 miles.” These 180 miles
would extend outside of the city (of Jerusalem). While the state of Israel, today, is
approximately 290 miles long from north to south, at the time Revelation was
written, it was roughly 180 miles long from north to south; John is writing
about the blood that flowed throughout all of the “land” of Israel. By contrast, Alexandria, Egypt is roughly 300
miles from Jerusalem and Ephesus in Asia Minor (the closest of the seven
churches) is at least 600 miles from Jerusalem.
We know that Jewish blood flowed exceedingly as far away as Alexandria
at the first of the war and that Christians were slain in Asia Minor, as well
as Rome (over 1400 miles from Jerusalem), after Nero blamed the Christians for the Roman Fire, so the extent of flowing blood was well beyond the 180 miles
described by John. The depth of the
river of blood (bridle-high) is hyperbolic, but it is also described
hyperbolically by Josephus when he describes places “overflowing with blood,” “bloody
seas,” “bloody lakes,” “blood standing in lakes,” and burning houses being “quenched
with blood.” Certainly, houses full of
dead bodies would be higher than horses’ bridles, as would thousands of bodies
being dumped at the city gates and bodies floating in bloody rivers that couldn’t
be crossed.
Alexandria just after the war started: “[T]he Jews . . . were destroyed unmercifully . . . some being caught in the open field and others forced into their houses . . . which houses were . . . set on fire by the Romans; wherein no mercy was shown to the infants, and no regard had to the aged; but they went on in the slaughter of persons of every age, till all the place was overflowed with blood, and fifty thousand of them lay dead upon heaps” (Wars II.XVIII.8).
Joppa just after Vespasian entered the war: “[T]he sea was bloody a long way, and the maritime parts were full of dead bodies; for the Romans . . . destroyed them; and the number of the bodies that were thus thrown out of the sea was four thousand and two hundred” (Wars III.IX.3).
Taricheae on the
Sea of Galilee vs. Vespasian: “[O]ne might then
see the lake ALL BLOODY, and full of dead bodies, for not one of them
escaped. . . . This was the
upshot of the sea-fight. The number of
the slain, including those that were killed in the city before, was six
thousand and five hundred (Wars III.X.9).
The Civil War in Jerusalem: In the civil war battle for the temple in which Ananus the High Priest was killed, Josephus writes: “And now the outer temple was all of it overflowed with blood, and that day as it came on, saw eight thousand five hundred dead bodies there” (Wars IV.V.1). “[T]he dead bodies of strangers were mingled together with those of those of their own country, and those of profane persons with those of the priests, and the blood of all sorts of dead carcases stood in lakes in the holy courts themselves” (Wars V.I.3).
The Roman Attack on
the Temple in Jerusalem: “While
the [temple] was on fire . . . ten thousand of those that were caught were
slain . . . any age . . . children . . . old men . . . the blood was
larger in quantity than the fire . . . the ground did nowhere appear visible,
for the dead bodies that lay on it . . . heaps of these bodies” (Wars VI.V.1).
The Roman Attack on the Rest of Jerusalem: “[The Romans] went in numbers into the
lanes of the city with their swords drawn, they slew whom they overtook without
mercy, and set fire to the houses . . . and burnt every soul in them . . . for
those that were still alive . . . they ran everyone through whom they met with,
and obstructed the very lanes with their dead bodies and made the whole city
run down with blood, to such a degree indeed that the fire of many of
the houses was quenched with these men’s blood” (Wars
VI.VIII.5).
Jerusalem Burning
Revelation 17:16 (NKJV)
promises: “And the ten
horns [the ten kings of the land] which you saw on the beast [Rome], these will
hate the harlot [Jerusalem], make her desolate and naked, eat her flesh and burn
her with fire.” Revelation
18:8 (NKJV) confirms: “Therefore
her plagues will come in one day—death and mourning and famine. And she will be
utterly burned with fire, for strong is the Lord God who judges her.”
Titus began his taking of Jerusalem by
giving “his soldiers leave to set the suburbs on fire, and . . . bring
timber . . . and raise banks against the city . . . So the trees were now cut
down immediately, and the suburbs left naked” (Wars V.VI.2).
When Titus had eventually reached the
temple, his first inclination was to leave the temple standing, but since the
Jews continued to fight from inside the temple, killing “his soldiers . . . he
gave orders to set the gates on fire” (Wars VI.IV.1). Then, due to the conductivity of silver, with
which the gates were adorned, “the soldiers had already put fire to the gates,
and the silver that was over them quickly carried the flames to the wood
that was within it, whence it spread itself all on the sudden, and caught hold
of the cloisters.” The Jews inside made
no “haste . . . to quench the fire . . . they did not grieve at the loss
of what was now burning . . . .
This fire prevailed during that day and the next also” (Wars VI.IV.2). Titus ordered his soldiers to quench the
fire, but in the process, one soldier disobeyed orders. “[He] snatched . . . out of the materials
that were on fire, and . . . set fire to a golden window . . . to
the rooms that were round about, on the north side” (Wars VI.IV.4). With Titus still ordering that the fires be
quenched, other soldiers approaching the temple “made as if they did not hear
Caesar’s orders . . . but they encouraged those that were before them to set
it on fire” (Wars VI.IV.6).
Josephus continues:
And now the
Romans, judging that it was in vain to spare what was round about the holy
house, burnt all those places, as also the remains of the cloisters and
the gates . . . . They also burnt
down the treasury chambers . . . the cloisters that were in the outer [court of
the temple] . . . whither the women and children [and others] fled . . . about
six thousand . . . the soldiers . . . set the cloister on fire . . .
some of these were destroyed by throwing themselves down headlong, and some
were burnt in the cloisters themselves.
Nor did any one of these escape with his life (Wars
VI.V.2).
After burning down the temple and its associated buildings, Titus turned his attention to the rest of the city:
[H]e gave orders
to the soldiers, both to burn and to plunder the city . . . on the next
day they set fire to the repository of the archives, to Acra, to the
council-house, and to the place called Ophlas [Ophel]; at which time the fire
proceeded as far as the palace of Queen Helena . . . the lanes also were burnt
down as were also those houses that were full of the dead bodies of such as
were destroyed by famine (Wars VI.VI.3).
Josephus
concludes: “Accordingly, as the people were now slain, the holy house was burnt
down, and the city was on fire, there was nothing further left for the
enemy to do. [M]any . . . deserters were
caught . . . and were all slain” (Wars VI.VII.2). After the Romans finally caught John of
Gischala and Simon son of Giora hiding in underground caverns, “the Romans set
fire to the extreme parts of the city, and burnt them down, and entirely
demolished its walls” (Wars VI.IX.4).
The End of the Battle of Armageddon
With this post, I
conclude my discussion of the Battle of Armageddon. In popular parlance, many believe that the
end of this battle signifies the end of the world. Not so.
There is still the Parousia (a.k.a., the Second Coming or Rapture of the
Church), the Millennium with the Binding of the Dragon for 1000 years, the Release of the
Dragon from the Abyss at least 1000 years later, the Gathering of Gog and Magog
from the four corners of the land, the Final Battle, the End of the old Heavens
and Earth, the Creation of the New Heavens and Earth, populated by the New
Jerusalem, etc. The end of the Battle of
Armageddon is not even the end of the Jewish Roman War. It is only the end of the first half of
Daniel’s final Week of Years. It took 3 ½
years for Rome to desolate Jerusalem, but there remains another 3 ½ years before
the end of the war. John has less to say
about this period, so our progress should be considerably faster. We turn in the next post to “After
Armageddon.”
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