The fourth-century church fathers Eusebius and Epiphanius of Salamis cite a tradition that before the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 the Jerusalem Christians had been miraculously warned to flee to Pella (Tabaquat Fahil) in the region of the Decapolis across the Jordan River.
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 provided strong arguments against it, arguing that the Jewish Christians would have been allied to their compatriots, the Zealots; only after the destruction of the Jewish Christian community would Christianity have emerged as a universalist religion. The Christian-Zealot alliance has hardly been taken seriously in theology, but the historicity of the flight to Pella has been controversial ever since.