12 For he even had the audacity to set up, below the very stronghold, a sports arena, and to place all of the best adolescent boys in brothels.
13 Now this was not the beginning, but a certain increase and progression of heathenism and foreign practices, due to the nefarious and unheard of wickedness of the impious non-priest Jason,
14 so much so that now the priests were not devoted to the concerns of services at the altar, but, despising the temple and neglecting the sacrifices, they hurried to become participants of the wrestling school, and of its prohibited injustices, and of the training of the discus.
15 And, even holding the honors of their fathers to be nothing, they esteemed the glories of the Greeks as best.
16 For the sake of these, they held a dangerous competition, and were imitators of their practices, and so, in all things, they desired to be similar to those who had been their enemies and destroyers.
17 But acting impiously against the divine laws does not go unpunished, as these subsequent events will reveal.
18 But when the competition that was celebrated every fifth year was at Tyre, the king being present,