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saw him ascending into the height of the heavens, and entering into them;

⁹ And we saw two witnesses, whose bodies Jesus raised from the dead, who told us of many strange things which Jesus did among the dead, of which we have a written account in our hands.

¹⁰ And it is our custom annually to open this holy book before an assembly, and to search there for the counsel of God.

¹¹ And we found in the first of the seventy books, where Michael the archangel is speaking to the third son of Adam the first man, an account that after five thousand five hundred years, Christ the most beloved son of God was to come on earth,

¹² And we further considered, that perhaps he was the very God of Israel who spoke to Moses, Thou shalt make the ark of the testimony; two cubits and a half shall be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half the breadth thereof, and a cubit and a half the height thereof.^[1]

¹³ By these five cubits and a half for the building of the ark of the Old Testament, we perceived and knew that in five thousand years and half (one thousand) years, Jesus Christ was to come in the ark or tabernacle of a body;

¹⁴ And so our Scriptures testify that he is the Son of God, and the Lord and King of Israel.

¹⁵ And because after his suffering, our chief priests were surprised at the signs which were wrought by his means, we opened that book to search all the generations down to the generation of Joseph and Mary the mother of Jesus, supposing him to be of the seed of David;

¹⁶ And we found the account of the creation, and at what time he made the heaven and the earth, and the first man Adam, and that from thence to the flood, were two thousand seven hundred and forty-eight years.

¹⁷ And from the flood to Abraham, nine hundred and twelve. And from Abraham to Moses, four hundred and thirty. And from Moses to David the King, five hundred and ten.

¹⁸ And from David to the Babylonish captivity five hundred years. And from the Babylonish captivity to the incarnation of Christ, four hundred years.

¹⁹ The sum of all which amounts to five thousand and half (a thousand.)

²⁰ And so it appears, that Jesus whom we crucified, is Jesus Christ the Son of God, and true Almighty God. Amen.

In the name of the Holy Trinity, thus end the acts of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which the Emperor Theodosius the Great found at Jerusalem, in the hall of Pontius Pilate, among the public records; the things were acted in the nineteenth year of Tiberius Cæsar, Emperor of the Romans, and in the seventeenth year of the government of Herod, the son of Herod King of Galilee, on the eighth of the calends of April, which is the twenty-third day of the month of March, in the cciid Olympiad, when Joseph and Caiaphas were rulers of the Jews; being a History written in Hebrew by Nicodemus, of what happened after our Saviour's crucifixion.

REFERENCES TO THE GOSPEL OF NICODEMUS, FORMERLY CALLED THE ACTS OF PONTIUS PILATE.

[Although this Gospel is, by some among the learned, supposed to have been really written by Nicodemus, who became a disciple of Jesus Christ, and

1. Exod. xxv. 10.