Jesus ben Ananias ("the son of Ananias" [rendered as the "son of Ananus" in the Whiston translation])[1] was a plebeian farmer, who, according to Flavius Josephus' The Wars of the Jews, four years before the First Jewish-Roman War, begun in 66 AD went around Jerusalem prophesying the city's destruction.
Thereupon, the magistrates, supposing, as was indeed the case, that the man was under some supernatural impulse, brought him before the Roman governor; there, although flayed to the bone with scourges, he neither sued for mercy nor shed a tear, but, merely introducing the most mournful of variations into his utterances, responded to each lashing with "Woe to Jerusalem!"
During the whole period up to the outbreak of war he neither approached nor was seen talking to any of the citizens, but daily, like a prayer that he had conned, repeated his lament, "Woe to Jerusalem!"
So for seven years and five months he continued his wail, his voice never flagging nor his strength exhausted, until in the siege, having seen his presage verified, he found his rest.
– Book 6, Chapter 5, Section 3 of the historian Flavius Josephus' The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem [2]