HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Messianic Claimants of Roman Judaea (4 BC – AD 135)

For a century and a half, from the death of Herod the Great to the fall of Betar, a recurring figure haunts the Roman province of Judaea: a man whom a crowd — or he himself — declared to be Israel’s coming king. Some put a diadem on their own heads; one entered the Temple “in the state of a king” in royal robes; one was hailed by a great rabbi on the strength of a verse and named “Son of the Star.” The Roman historian who lived through the middle of it, Flavius Josephus, catalogues them by the dozen, and the Book of Acts preserves the church’s own short list in the mouth of Gamaliel: “before these days rose up Theudas … after this man rose up Judas of Galilee” (Acts 5:36–37). This page sets these figures out earliest-first, so that Bar Kokhba — the one claimant openly proclaimed on the Star Prophecy of Numbers 24:17 — can be seen for what he was: not an isolated fanatic, but the last and most explicit of a long series.

A word of caution governs the whole list. Josephus reports a great many insurgents, and modern scholarship warns against flattening them into one undifferentiated “messiah movement.” Richard Horsley and John Hanson, in the standard study, sort the popular unrest into distinct social types: royal pretenders (men acclaimed king by their followers, reviving Israel’s old tradition of charismatic, non-dynastic kingship — the young David is the model), sign-prophets (who led crowds into the wilderness promising a miracle of deliverance, a new exodus or conquest), ordinary bandits, and the ideologues of the “fourth philosophy.” Only the first group is “messianic” in a defensible sense, and even there the strict philological label — an anointed Davidic deliverer of the kind the Scrolls and the Targums awaited — is narrower still (John Collins). So each figure below is labelled by type, and the genuinely contested question — who counts as a messianic claimant rather than a mere prophet, bandit, or rebel general — is weighed honestly rather than assumed. What unites them is not one office but one hope turned to action: that God was about to give Israel back her king, and that the man before you might be he.

Timeline

The royal pretenders at Herod’s death (4 BC) — “anyone might make himself king”

The pattern is already full-blown at its first appearance. When Herod the Great died in 4 BC and his kingdom fell into disorder, at least three men reached for the crown. Judas son of Hezekiah broke open the royal armoury at Sepphoris and raised a following “out of an ambitious desire of the royal dignity.” Simon of Peraea, one of Herod’s own slaves, “was so bold as to put a diadem on his head … and by them he was declared to be a king.” And Athronges, a mere shepherd of great stature, “set up for king,” “put a diadem about his head, and assembled a council.” Josephus sums up the whole season in a sentence that is itself the theme of this page: as the rebels “lighted upon any one to head them, he was created a king immediately.” These are the purest royal-pretender cases in the record — men made kings by acclamation, on the ancient popular pattern — and the type they set would recur for the next century.¹ Full detail »

Judas the Galilean and the Fourth Philosophy (AD 6) — the ideologue of revolt

When Judaea became a Roman province and Quirinius held his census, Judas the Galilean (of Gamala) “prevailed with his countrymen to revolt, and said they were cowards if they would endure to pay a tax to the Romans, and would, after God, submit to mortal men as their lords.” Josephus calls him “a teacher of a peculiar sect of his own,” the founder of the “fourth philosophy” whose watchword was that God alone is ruler. He is on this list because Gamaliel put him on it — “after this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the taxing” (Acts 5:37) — but he shows exactly why the list must be sorted, not flattened: Josephus never says Judas wore a diadem or was hailed as king. He is the ideologue of the resistance, not one of its acclaimed kings, and his sons and grandson (Menahem, below) would supply the crowns his teaching only inspired.² Full detail »

Theudas the sign-prophet (c. AD 45) — the parted Jordan

Under the procurator Cuspius Fadus a different type appears. Theudas, whom Josephus calls “a certain magician,” “persuaded a great part of the people to take their effects with them, and follow him to the river Jordan; for he told them he was a prophet, and that he would, by his own command, divide the river.” The gesture is transparent: a new Joshua parting the Jordan to lead Israel in a fresh conquest of the land. Fadus sent cavalry; they “took Theudas alive, and cut off his head, and carried it to Jerusalem.” He is a sign-prophet, not a would-be king — he promised a miracle, not a throne — and Acts names him first in Gamaliel’s pairing, “before these days rose up Theudas, boasting himself to be somebody” (Acts 5:36), though Luke sets him before Judas the Galilean, reversing the historical order — a well-known chronological crux.³ Full detail »

“The Egyptian” and the Mount of Olives (c. AD 56) — the walls that would fall

Under Felix the sign-prophet type returns on a larger scale. An unnamed Egyptian, “a false prophet,” “got together thirty thousand men that were deluded by him; these he led round about from the wilderness to the mount which was called the Mount of Olives,” promising — in the Antiquities version — that “at his command, the walls of Jerusalem would fall down,” a new Joshua before a new Jericho. Felix scattered them; the Egyptian escaped. His fame outlived him in an unexpected place: when Paul is arrested in the Temple, the Roman tribune asks, “Art not thou that Egyptian, which before these days madest an uproar, and leddest out into the wilderness four thousand men that were murderers?” (Acts 21:38) — the sign-prophet had become a byword for insurrection.⁴ Full detail »

Menahem son of Judas (AD 66) — “in the state of a king”

With the outbreak of the great revolt the royal-pretender type re-emerges from the very family of Judas the Galilean. Menahem, his son (or grandson), “broke open king Herod’s armory” at Masada, armed his followers, and “returned in the state of a king to Jerusalem; he became the leader of the sedition.” There he “went up … to worship in a pompous manner, and adorned with royal garments,” his armed men about him. It was too much for a rival faction: the partisans of Eleazar seized him in the Temple, “tortured him with many sorts of torments, and after all slew him.” Menahem is the clearest royal claimant of the revolt’s opening — the diadem-tradition of 4 BC now worn in the Temple itself — and his death by a jealous rival prefigures how the revolt would devour its own would-be kings.⁵ Full detail »

Simon bar Giora (AD 68–70) — the general Rome executed as Israel’s king

The commander who held Jerusalem to the end, Simon bar Giora, is the revolt’s great royal figure — and Rome treated him as such. When the city fell he vanished, then staged a final theatre: “thinking he might be able to astonish and delude the Romans, [he] put on a white frock, and buttoned upon him a purple cloak, and appeared out of the ground in the place where the temple had formerly been” — the white and purple of royalty, at the Temple’s ruins. He was taken to Rome for the triumph of Vespasian and Titus, and there singled out from all the captives for the death reserved for a conquered king: “This general was Simon, the son of Gioras … a rope had also been put upon his head, and he had been drawn into a proper place in the forum,” and executed while the crowd “sent up a shout for joy.” That the Romans killed him as the enemy’s king is telling evidence that his followers had made him one; many read his self-presentation, and Rome’s answer to it, as a messianic bid — the same white-robed kingship the tradition kept reaching for.⁶ Full detail »

Bar Kokhba, “Son of the Star” (AD 132–135) — the last and most explicit

The series closes with the one claimant proclaimed openly on Scripture. Simon bar Kosiba, leader of the second revolt against Rome, was hailed by the great sage Rabbi Akiva — who read “a Star (kokhav) steps forth out of Jacob” (Numbers 24:17) — as bar Kokhba, “Son of the Star,” and declared, “This is the King Messiah.” Where the royal pretenders before him had been made kings by acclamation and the sign-prophets had promised a miracle, Bar Kokhba is the point at which the whole pattern is welded to the proof-text of Jewish messianism, and the “messianic” label is beyond dispute: a named rabbinic authority called him the Messiah on a specific verse. He too failed — Betar fell, Akiva was martyred, and the same rabbis punned his name to bar Koziba, “Son of the Lie” — and his career, the star-name, the coinage, and the Christian witnesses to it are traced in full on the Star Prophecy timeline and its Bar Kokhba detail page.⁷ That the verse on which he was crowned had already been read messianically for centuries before him — by the Septuagint, the Dead Sea sect, and the synagogue Targums, none of them Christian — is what made his claim intelligible; the antiquity and pre-Christian pedigree of the oracle are weighed on the Balaam timeline’s “how old is the Star out of Jacob?” argument.

Modern scholarship — how to count the claimants

Modern study neither denies the phenomenon nor simplifies it. Horsley and Hanson’s Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs is the standard sorting: the popular kings (the 4 BC trio, Menahem, Simon bar Giora) are the “messianic” movements proper — peasant risings that acclaimed their own charismatic king — while the sign-prophets (Theudas, the Egyptian) revive a distinct prophetic tradition and should not be folded into the same box, and the “fourth philosophy” of Judas the Galilean is a further, ideological strand. N. T. Wright reads the royal pretenders as evidence of a live, if not uniform, Davidic hope — for him “royal pretender” sits close to “would-be messiah” — while cautioning that most surviving Jewish writing of the age names no Messiah at all, so the expectation was real but crystallized chiefly around crisis. John Collins presses the tightest definition: “messiah” properly denotes an anointed eschatological figure tied to specific texts, so a self-crowned rebel is a royal insurgent who is only loosely “messianic” unless the sources bind him to Davidic anointing — which, of all the figures here, is unambiguously true only of Bar Kokhba. The honest result is a spectrum, not a set: from the acclaimed kings, through the sign-prophets, to the one man hailed as Messiah on the Star.⁸

Arguments

Who counts as a “messianic” claimant? (the royal-pretender typology) — contested

Is it defensible to gather these royal pretenders and sign-prophets under one banner, “messianic claimants” — and where does the line fall? The answer is contested, because the word carries three senses at once. By the social-typology lights it is sound: the acclaimed “popular kings” (the 4 BC trio, Menahem, Simon bar Giora) revive Israel’s tradition of charismatic kingship, the diadem and acclamation are the period’s own idiom of a claim to God’s kingship, and Matthew Novenson answers the strongest objection — that Josephus never says christos — by showing that Josephus simply translates the Jewish idiom of anointing into a Roman vernacular (the diadem). By the strict philological lights it is weak for every figure but one: none is anointed or has a proof-text read over him, and John Collins, applying his own test, rates these claimants’ messianic status “suggestive, but inconclusive.” The sign-prophets (Theudas, the Egyptian) are best kept out of the category altogether, and the Neusner–Green camp warns against retrojecting a single “messianism” onto a plural Judaism. Only Bar Kokhba, hailed “King Messiah” on Numbers 24:17, is messianic beyond dispute — so the honest picture is a spectrum, not a set.⁹

Sources