* History has been recorded with the use of many calendars, but the one that is most widely used today is based on a Christian calculation (probably several years off) of the birth of Jesus. The method of dating in relation to that event now uses the terms Common Era, or CE, for the time after Jesus’s birth and BCE for the years before the Common Era.
1 Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 123.
2 Philo, Against Flaccus, 66–68, quoted in Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt from Ramses II to Emperor Hadrian, trans. Robert Cornman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 148.
3 Contra Apionem, trans. H. St. J. Thackeray, LCL, 2: 91–96 in Schäfer, Judeophobia, 63–4.
4 London Papyrus VI 1912, CP Jud., 2:153, lines 73–104, quoted in Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt from Ramses II to Emperor Hadrian, 182.
5 William Whiston, trans., “The Wars of the Jews,” in Flavius Josephus, The Complete Works of Josephus (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 1960), 581.