 According to the 1st century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, Manetho, a Hellenistic Egyptian chronicler and priest, in his books on Egyptian history, alleges that in the 3rd century BCE, Moses was not a Jew, but an Egyptian renegade priest called Osarseph, and portrays the Exodus as the expulsion of a leper colony.Josephus argues that Manetho's claims are inconsistent.In 629 the Roman emperor Heraclius I. had driven the Jews from Jerusalem.