John of Gischala

John of Gischala commanded one of the three factions that held Jerusalem against Titus, and he is the man Josephus hated most. The two had been rivals in Galilee before the Roman army arrived, where Josephus was the appointed commander and John ran the town of Gischala and repeatedly tried to have him removed; nearly everything known about him passes through that quarrel. He was a man of some property who made money selling oil to Jewish communities in Syria, fortified his own town, and escaped to Jerusalem when Titus took Galilee, telling the citizens on the way that Roman power was exaggerated. In Jerusalem he allied with the Zealots and helped bring in the Idumeans, whose arrival was followed by the killing of the former high priests and the effective destruction of the old ruling class. He then fought Eleazar ben Simon for control of the Temple and Simon bar Giora for the rest of the city. Josephus accuses him of melting down Temple vessels and drinking the sacred wine, which is the kind of charge that suits a hostile witness and cannot be checked. When the siege closed he defended the Temple platform until it burned in August 70. He surrendered from the underground passages when starvation left no alternative, was spared execution and sentenced to life imprisonment in Rome, and disappears from the record there. The contrast with Simon bar Giora is the point: Rome executed the man it considered the leader and imprisoned the one it did not. Between them the two factions had spent the year before the siege destroying the grain that might have outlasted it, which Josephus presents as the reason the city fell and which serves his argument a little too neatly to accept without reservation.

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