Flight to Pella

The fourth-century Church Father Eusebius of Caesarea and Epiphanius of Salamis cite a tradition that before the Siege of [Jerusalem (70 CE)|destruction of Jerusalem] in AD 70 the early Christians had been warned to flee to Pella in the region of the Decapolis across the Jordan River. The flight to Pella probably did not include the Ebionites.
The authenticity of this tradition has been a much debated question since 1951 when S. G. F. Brandon in his work The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church argued that the Christians would have been allied to their compatriots, the Zealots; only after the destruction of the Jewish community would Christianity have emerged as a universalist religion. The existence of a Christian–Zealot alliance has hardly been taken seriously, but the historicity of the flight to Pella has been controversial ever since.