PRELIMINARY REMARKS.

...was born; his father was Titus Flavius Vespasianus, his grandfather Titus Flavius Sabinus, and his great-grandfather Titus Flavius Petronius. Compare Suetonius, Life of the Caesars, chapter 10.2. And how shameful is this lack of logical sequence original Greek: ἀνακολουθία (anakolouthia), meaning a failure to follow logically: "A certain Roman Emperor was an Idumean. Therefore, the Roman Empire is Idumean. Therefore, Christians are Idumeans?" By this logic, Septimius Severus was an African. Are we therefore Africans? Likewise, Maximinus was a Thracian, Philip an Arab, Decius a Pannonian, and Flavius Claudius and Diocletian were Dalmatians. Shall all Christians then become Thracians, Arabs, Dalmatians, and what else might they not become?

Let this Jewish fable pass away then, along with that other one found in the trifles of the Talmud (Gittin, folio 56.2), the Pirke Eliezer (chapter 49), and Bereshit Rabbah (Section 10): the story that a fly entered through the nostrils into the brain of the Emperor Titus and most miserably tortured him for seven years, and indeed killed him; and that it finally grew to the size of a dove. Rabbi Eliezer reports that he himself saw this fly, weighed at two pounds, in Rome. Who would learn the origin of Titus from those who lie so shamelessly about his death?

VII. The Jews argue that we are Idumeans not only because of origin and governance, but also because of religion, though they do not use a single consistent reason. First, they assert that the Idumeans were the first to embrace the Christian faith; hence, they claim Christians are not wrongly called Idumeans. The former point is asserted by Rabbi Nachmanides Moses ben Nahman (1194–1270), a prominent Spanish Sephardic rabbi and scholar, whose opinion Abarbanel approves with his own reckoning, adding: “Without doubt Nachmanides did not invent this himself, but received it so from others. Perhaps he found it in certain annals of those times.”

And Rabbi Aben Ezra Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1167), a prolific scholar of the Golden Age of Spain writes on Genesis 27:40: “There were men, not very many, who believed in a certain man whom they treated with divine worship. When Rome received that faith under Constantine—who reformed the whole religion and placed the image of that man on his banner—there were none in the world who received that new religion except for a few from the Idumeans. Therefore the Roman Empire is called the Empire of Edom. Likewise, at this time Egyptians, Sabaeans, and Elamites are called Ishmaelites, although few among them are truly of the seed of Ishmael.”

Response: 1. It is false that the Idumeans were the first to embrace the Christian religion. "The law went out from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem" (Isaiah 2:3, John 4:23). Therefore, the Jews were the first who received the new law of the true Messiah—let them burst with envy at our words original Latin: "nostris rumpantur ut ilia verbis," a classical idiom for bursting with jealousy. And if, as Abarbanel says, the Apostles of Jesus first led the Idumeans astray, certainly the Apostles (who were Jews) had already embraced the Christian religion before the Idumeans. Furthermore, it is manifest from Mark 3:8 that afterwards, among others, even Idumeans adhered to Christ. Now, if we are to be named after the people who first received the faith