Under Hadrian
In the beginning of Hadrian's rule Joshua appears as a leader of the Jewish people. When the permission to rebuild the Temple was again refused, he turned the excited people from thoughts of revolt against Rome by a speech in which he skilfully made use of a fable of Æsop's concerning the lion and the crane (Gen. R. lxiv., end). About the same time Joshua by his eloquence prevented the whole area of the Temple from being pronounced unclean because one human bone had been found in it (Tosef., 'Eduy. iii. 13; Zeb. 113a). Joshua lived to witness Hadrian's visit to Palestine, and he followed the emperor to Alexandria (130). The conversations between Joshua and Hadrian, as they have been preserved in the Babylonian Talmud and the Palestinian Midrash, have been greatly modified and exaggerated by tradition, but they nevertheless present in general a just picture of the intercourse between the witty Jewish scholar and the active, inquisitive emperor, the "curiositatum omnium explorator," as Tertullian calls him.
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