called Samaria a Jewish nation. In short, since what Tacitus here
says is about countries very remote from Rome, where he lived;
since what he says of two Roman procurators, the one over
Galilee, the other over Samaria at the same time, is without
example elsewhere; and since Josephus, who lived at that very
time in Judea, appears to have known nothing of this
procuratorship of Felix, before the death of Cureanus; I much
suspect the story itself as nothing better than a mistake of
Tacitus, especially when it seems not only omitted, but
contradicted by Josephus; as any one may find that compares their
histories together. Possibly Felix might have been a subordinate
judge among the Jews some time before under Cureanus, but that he
was in earnest a procurator of Samaria before I do not believe.
Bishop Pearson, as well as Bishop Lloyd, quote this account, but
with a doubtful clause: confides Tacito, "If we may believe
Tacitus." Pears. Anhal. Paulin. p. 8; Marshall's Tables, at A.D.
49.

(17) i.e. Herod king of Chalcis.

(18) Not long after this beginning of Florus, the wickedest of
all the Roman procurators of Judea, and the immediate occasion of
the Jewish war, at the twelfth year of Nero, and the seventeenth
of Agrippa, or A.D. 66, the history in the twenty books of
Josephus's Antiquities ends, although Josephus did not finish
these books till the thirteenth of Domitian, or A.D. 93,
twenty-seven years afterward; as he did not finish their
Appendix, containing an account of his own life, till Agrippa was
dead, which happened in the third year of Trajan, or A. D. 100,
as I have several times observed before.