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

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — the label holds firmly in the social sense (the acclaimed “popular kings” are messianic movements), does not fit the sign-prophets, and is unambiguous in the strict philological sense only for Bar Kokhba · advanced by Richard Horsley & John Hanson and Martin Hengel (the royal-messianic reading), against the strict definition of John Collins and the anachronism caution of Jacob Neusner and William Scott Green.

This page weighs the question the messianic-claimants timeline defers to throughout: is it defensible to gather Josephus’s first-century royal pretenders and sign-prophets under the banner “messianic claimants” at all — and, if so, where the line falls.

The claim

— James Tabor, “Messiahs in the Time of Jesus.” The steelman runs on three levels. (1) Socially, the men acclaimed king by their followers — the trio at Herod’s death (Judas, Simon, and Athronges), Menahem, and Simon bar Giora — revive Israel’s old tradition of charismatic, non-dynastic kingship (the young David is the model), and are “messianic” in that defensible, this-worldly sense: peasant risings that raised up their own king. (2) The sign-prophets (Theudas, the Egyptian) are a distinct prophetic type — they promised a miracle of deliverance, not a throne — and should not be folded into the same box. (3) The strict “messiah” — an anointed Davidic eschatological figure bound to specific texts — is narrower still, and unambiguous, of all these figures, only for Bar Kokhba.¹

Who advances it

The pro-typology anchor is Richard Horsley and John Hanson’s Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs (1985), which sorts the popular unrest of Roman Judaea into distinct social forms — social bandits (lēstai), popular kings (their “popular messianic movements”), action or “sign” prophets, oracular prophets, and the Fourth Philosophy. Only the popular kings are “messianic” in their vocabulary, and even there they are careful: they use the word of the movements — a revived tradition of acclaimed kingship — while denying that a fixed, doctrinal “messianism” can be shown among the populace before the time of Jesus. Martin Hengel, in the standard study of the revolt’s ideology, argues the same royal-messianic reading of the individual pretenders (below). N. T. Wright reads the royal pretenders as evidence of a real but non-uniform Davidic hope, so that “royal pretender” sits close to “would-be messiah” — while insisting that “there was no single, monolithic and uniform ‘messianic expectation’ among first-century Jews,” expectation being “focused primarily on the nation, not on any particular individual.” Pressing the other way, John Collins fixes a stricter, eschatological sense: a messiah is “an eschatological figure who sometimes, but not necessarily always, is designated as a mašiaḥ,” and among the would-be kings only those who “claimed to restore the Davidic line or to bring the biblical prophecies to fulfillment” qualify as messianic pretenders — a test by which, he judges, the Josephan claimants’ messianic status is “suggestive, but inconclusive.” And a skeptical camp — the essays gathered by Jacob Neusner, William Scott Green, and Ernest Frerichs in Judaisms and Their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era (1987) — warns that “messiah” is in fact “a term of disparity, used in few texts and in diverse ways,” and that a single, normative “messianism” is largely a modern, Christian-shaped retrojection onto a plural Judaism.²

The evidence for

The popular-kingship reading is well-grounded. Josephus’s own language does the work: the pretenders are made kings by acclamation and marked out by the diadem. Of the 4 BC pair Hengel writes that “both these men — the slave Simon and the shepherd Athronges — placed the diadem on their own heads and in this way revealed their claims to royalty”; Menahem marched on Jerusalem “like a king” and worshipped in the Temple “adorned with royal clothing,” so that “the conclusion suggests itself that Menahem … was regarded as the Messiah who was to come, at least within the circle of the Zealots themselves.” The diadem and the acclamation are exactly the vernacular in which a Second-Temple crowd expressed a claim to God’s promised kingship, and the tradition they revive — the charismatic king raised up by the people, not by dynasty (Saul, David, Jehu) — is a real and ancient one.³

Simon bar Giora is the strongest case, and Rome itself supplies the evidence. He robed himself in the white and purple of royalty at the Temple ruins, and when Jerusalem fell he alone was singled out from every captive for the death a Roman triumph reserved for the enemy’s king. Hengel draws the inference plainly: “It is clear that the Romans regarded him and not John of Gischala … as holding an office of higher dignity because, following the triumph of Vespasian and Titus, he was killed in the prison by the Forum, whereas John’s punishment was simply life imprisonment. In the light of all these circumstances, Simon can also be considered as a messianic pretender.” That the victors staged his death as the death of the enemy’s king is powerful indirect testimony that his own people had already made him one.⁴

The best answer to the strongest objection. The sharpest thing said against the label is that Josephus never once calls these men christos. Matthew Novenson’s The Grammar of Messianism (Oxford, 2017) turns that silence around: Josephus is writing about messianic pretenders — he simply renders the Jewish idiom of anointing into a Roman vernacular his gentile readers would grasp, above all the diadem. And Josephus’s own vocabulary preserves the very sorting the typology relies on: he “maintains a rough but consistent distinction between ‘prophets’ (whom he cynically calls goētes, ‘sorcerers’) on the one hand and would-be ‘kings’ (whom he cynically calls lēstai, ‘bandits’) on the other.” On this reading the absence of the Greek title christos is a fact about Josephus’s audience and apologetics, not about the figures — and, crucially, it keeps the case from resting on Josephus’s silence in either direction: the label is earned by what the figures did (acclamation, diadem, royal robing), not by a word he withholds.⁵

Adversarial assessment

What holds. Three things stand. First, the social classification is sound: the acclaimed kings really do form one recognizable type, distinct from prophets and bandits, and calling their movements “messianic” in Horsley’s sociological sense is defensible and now standard. Second, the discipline of sorting is right and load-bearing — and, on Novenson’s reading, Josephus’s own goēs/ lēstēs vocabulary already tracks the prophet-versus-king line: the sign-prophets belong to a different tradition (the miracle-working prophet leading a new exodus or conquest), and flattening Theudas and the Egyptian into “messianic claimants” blurs the very distinction that makes the category useful. Third, Novenson’s translation argument neutralizes the christos-silence objection, so the case does not collapse the moment one notices Josephus never says the word.

What is overstated or imprecise. The label buckles the harder one presses it toward the strict philological sense. (a) Josephus never calls any of these men “messiah” or even, in his own voice, “king”; he brands them lēstēs (“bandit”), goēs (“impostor”), and tyrannos, an apologetic vocabulary meant to blacken the rebels for a Roman readership — so his notices are evidence of what the men did, not a neutral typology one can simply read off. (b) No prophet anoints any of them and no Scripture is quoted over them, as Numbers 24:17 was, sixty years later, over Bar Kokhba: on Collins’s test — Davidic restoration or the fulfilling of prophecy — they are royal insurgents who are “messianic” only in the broad popular-kingship sense, and whose strict messianic status is (in his words) “suggestive, but inconclusive.” Even Hengel, who does call Menahem and Simon bar Giora “messianic pretenders,” grants that this is an inference from their bearing and their followers’ expectation, not from a title in the sources. (c) The Neusner–Green caution is real: there was no single normative “messianic idea” in the period, and to speak of “the messianic expectation” can smuggle a later, Christian-shaped uniformity back onto a plural Judaism. The honest picture is a spectrum, not a set with a sharp boundary. (One caveat about sources: the charge that Josephus deliberately slanders the rebels is Horsley’s and Novenson’s, not Tessa Rajak’s — Rajak argues, against the “Flavian propaganda” reading, that the War is a serious history trustworthy on most points.)⁶

Assessment

Contested. The question is genuinely disputed because it is really three questions wearing one word. By the social-typology lights the label is sound: the popular kings are a real, coherent type, their acclamation-and-diadem is the period’s own idiom for a claim to God’s kingship, and Novenson defuses the objection that Josephus’s missing christos should sink it. By the strict philological lights the label is weak for every figure but one: none is anointed, none has a proof-text read over him, and only Bar Kokhba — hailed “King Messiah” by Rabbi Akiva on Numbers 24:17 — is “messiah” beyond dispute. The sign-prophets are best kept out of the category altogether. So the wiki’s practice is the defensible middle: use “messianic claimants” as an umbrella for the phenomenon, but label each figure by type and grade the strict sense honestly — a spectrum running from the acclaimed kings, through the distinct sign-prophets, to the one man proclaimed Messiah on the Star. What is not defensible is either extreme: neither flattening prophets, bandits, and kings into one “messiah movement,” nor denying — on the bare absence of a Greek title Josephus had every reason to omit — that any pre-Bar-Kokhba royal claimant was messianic at all.⁷

Sources