The gospels say the Romans recognised Jesus as a false king (Mk 15.16-20; Mt. 27.28-31; Jn 19.2-5), similar to at least one of the Sign Prophets known as the ‘Egyptian’. The ‘Egyptian’ may have called himself “king Messiah”, because Josephus uses the Greek verb τυραννεῖν (to be sole ruler)(Josephus, War 2.262). Our earliest witness to the Jesus movement, Paul has references to Jesus’ kingdom, βασιλείαν, which indicates that he was somehow considered a king:[1]
Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom (βασιλείαν) to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. (1 Cor. 15.24-25, cf. 6.9-10, 15.50, 4.20; Rom. 14:17)
Like the Egyptian Sign Prophet the gospels see Jesus as a prophet proclaiming the imminent arrival of the kingdom of Yahweh. This was a banner call that was used by many messianic figures, that the ‘Kingdom of Yahweh’ was at hand. Josephus reports that this is also the banner call of Judas the Galilean, he told his followers ‘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’ (War 2.118) and his movement would only accept ‘that God is to be their only Ruler and Lord.’ (Josephus, Ant. 18.23). ‘Jesus’ own expectation that the Kingdom of the Lord was near had apparently led his followers to expect a divine intervention in history and the establishment of God’s rule in the world, not just in the hearts and minds of a few.’[2] The gospel of Mark shows that this new kingdom was imminent.
Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power. (Mark 9:1),
This was the saying of a typical apocalyptic prophet, many downtrodden peasants whose hopes were exhausted would rally around such a figure. This Kingdom of god as understood by the first century Jews and used as a banner call by many of the charismatic figures draws on the kingship that is ascribed to Yahweh in the Tanakh.
Of all my sons—and Yahweh has given me many—he has chosen my son Solomon to sit on the throne of the kingdom of Yahweh over Israel. He said to me: “Solomon your son is the one who will build my house and my courts, for I have chosen him to be my son, and I will be his father. I will establish his kingdom forever if he is unswerving in carrying out my commands and laws, as is being done at this time.” (1 Chron. 28:5-7)
In previous studies of Jesus’ comparative figures both the messianic figures (as found in Josephus’ works) or the exorcists/faith healers (as described in rabbinic literature and Josephus) have all been used. Morton Smith observed that Acts 5:33-39 gets its history wrong putting Theudas before Judas and also takes liberties with history giving Paul the great Pharisaic teacher Gamaliel, yet this pales in comparison to realizing that Acts “shows that the Christians themselves expected Jesus to be seen as the same social type as Judas and Theudas.” (Emphasis is Morton Smiths).[3]
Let us now examine both sets of figures, firstly we will start with the messianic figures. ‘Jesus is called christos, anointed, the Greek equivalent of messiah, 270 times in Paul’s epistles.’[4] As understood from the letters of Paul a ‘messianic consciousness’ must have also played its part.[5] After Jesus was crucified there is no way he would have been known as the messiah unless he was recognised as such during his lifetime. If God did not intervene before Jesus was caught and executed- well he was not the messiah. The gospels saw Jesus as a ‘King Messiah’ (Luke 23.2) and ‘King of the Jews’ was the charge nailed to his execution cross. The movement of Jesus were a sect of Jewish messianists. As Horsley said, ‘For just at the time of Herod and Jesus, several significant movements emerged among the Judean and Galilean people that were headed by figures acclaimed by their followers as kings or by figures who promised to reenact the deliverance of Israel from foreign rule in Egypt.’[6] Many messianic figures were seen as a king figure. Bar Kockba in his letters referred to himself as a prince.[7] Judas son of Ezekiel had ‘ambitious desire of the royal dignity’ (Ant.17.272). Simon of Peraea, a slave of Herod the Great ‘dared to put a crown on his head’ (Ant. 17.273) and Athronges the shepherd ‘dared to aspire to be king’ (Ant. 17.278). And as already discussed the Egyptian prophet saw himself as a ‘tyrant’ (War 2.262). The Slavonic passage on Jesus tried to deny that Jesus was ‘desirous of kingship’ which may have preserved that that phrase was original to the Testimonium Flavianum. [See here to show how the Slavonic used a primitive pre Eusebian source]. As seen above many messianic figures were declared a βασιλεὺς (King) by their supporters at a drop of a hat. ‘And now Judea was full of robberies; and as the several companies of the seditious lighted upon any one to head them, he was created a king immediately, in order to do mischief to the public.’ (Ant. 17.285). This meshes very well with a verse in John:
Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself. (Jn. 6.15).
Social conditions ensured ‘why so many hundreds, even thousands of Jewish peasants, were prepared to abandon their homes to pursue some prophet into the wilderness, or to rise in rebellion against their Jewish and Roman overlords when the signal was given by some charismatic “King” or to flee to the hills to join some brigand band. Peasants generally do not take such drastic action unless conditions have become such that they can no longer pursue traditional ways of life.’[8] Novenson shows Josephus interprets Judaism for non-Jews in the Greco- Roman world and reasons why Josephus calls the Jewish insurgents ‘diadem-wearers’ and not ‘messiahs’. Josephus was aware of messianism as seen when he recounts the ‘ambiguous oracle’ (War 6.12-13) that drove them to war.[9] ‘Christianity was not alone in the production of messiahs; indeed, its Christ competed for converts with the christs of other apocalyptic sects, including the formidable cult of John the Baptist.’[10]
These messianic figures were similar to Jesus but it is also important to examine another set of Galilean charismatic figures. Geza Vermes saw Jesus as one in a long line of charismatic prophets. We will examine a few Galilean charismatic figures who interceded Yahweh for miraculous events such as bringing on rain in the case of Honi and some thaumaturgic actions of Ben Dosa.[11]. As Vermes says, ‘To understand the figure of Honi it is necessary to remember that from the time of the prophet Elijah. Jews believed that holy men were able to exert their will on natural phenomena’[12].An exorcist/healer would explain the initial exaltation of Jesus among his own people, given Jesus the confidence that god was working with him. Much of the rise of these figures had to do with healing and exorcisms as people had thought the devil was the cause of sickness – ‘in the final period of the Second Temple era (second century BC to the first century AD) prophets were still expected, as the first Book of the Maccabees (1 Mac. 4.46; 14.41), the Qumran Community Rule (1QS 9:11) and the New Testament (Mt. 11.9; 13.57; 21.11; Mk. 6.4; Lk. 4.24; 7.16, 26; 24.19) demonstrate roles, that is to say, as healer of the physically ill, exorciser of the possessed, and dispenser of forgiveness to sinners, must be seen in the context to which they belong, namely charismatic Judaism.’[13]
Jesus making his way to Jerusalem and ending up crucified better aligns him with a subset of these two groups examined, namely the messianic ‘king’ figures and the Galilean charismatic figures.
In the ‘Gospels, Jesus entered Jerusalem riding on a donkey, to shouts of Hosanna to the Son of David. For the biblically illiterate, Matthew 21:4–5 supplies the quotation from Zechariah 9:9, even providing Jesus with two animals rather than one, missing the Hebraic parallelism. It is certainly tempting to understand this incident in light of the sign prophets in Josephus.’[14]
That subset is the various sign prophets mentioned by Josephus.
Horsley says, “in the ordinary Palestinian Jewish context, [these described imposters were] prophets filled with the Spirit. Thus fired by the Spirit, these prophets and their followers thought they were about to participate in the divine transformation of a world…”[15] That is how the ordinary people viewed them, but seen from all the passages Josephus has on the sign prophets, this is how he described them:
Now, we know what he [Josephus] thought of those who harboured or encouraged messianic pretensions, namely, that they were nothing but a band of fanatics who broke riots and the seeds of war. In fact, Josephus went so far as to affirm (in War 6.313) that the Messianic oracles contained in the prophetic books of Israel referred to Emperor Vespasian.[16]
By recognising that Jesus was fulfilling a leadership role recognised by first century Jewish crowds helps explain why Jesus became the head of a movement and eventually remembered and exalted. Horsley shows that his followers played just as an important role in this rise to fame:
We are not searching for Jesus the individual in himself, but for Jesus-in-relationship, Jesus-in- interactive-role(s).
A focally important aspect of a relational and contextual approach to Jesus is attempting to discern what interactive roles he was playing or in which he was being placed by his followers/movement(s).
… [we can] detect a few roles that were very much alive in popular circles. Josephus’s accounts of the prophets Theudas and “the Egyptian” are evidence of prophets like Moses and/or Joshua who led movements of renewal of Israel at the popular level. The credibility of this role is enhanced by parallel evidence from the scribal level, in the “prophet like Moses” in Deuteronomy and the Moses-like portrayals of the Righteous Teacher in Qumran literature. Josephus’s accounts of Jesus ben Hananiah (and perhaps of John the Baptist) provide evidence of oracular prophets among Judean (and Galilean) peasants. Moreover, the accounts in Josephus and rabbinic literature of popularly acclaimed “kings” or “messiahs” such as Judas son of Hezekiah, Simeon, and Athronges in 4 BCE, Simon bar Giora during the great revolt, and Simon bar Kokhba, leader of the Bar Kokhba revolt, provide convincing evidence for the role of popular messiahs leading movements of independence and renewal. More of a stretch is to move from textual references to Elijah to a confident positing of a role such as a new Elijah. The most convincing evidence for such a role, since Elijah’s memory must have been derived originally from northern popular tradition, would be the gospels themselves, which understand both John the Baptist and Jesus in terms of Elijah. It is difficult to judge how to use references to the future role of Elijah, such as that by Malachi, a Judean prophet closely attached to the Temple, and Ben Sira, the Judean scribe who lavishes praise on the Oniad high priests. The combination of these elite and popular indications of the memory of Elijah and his role in gospel tradi- tions may be sufficient to project a role of a prophet like Elijah, one very much like that of Moses and Joshua.
That Mark, Q speeches, Matthew and John all represent Jesus so promi- nently as resembling or imitating Moses and Elijah in both his actions and his speeches makes it all the more inviting to reason back toward Jesus’ adaptation of such roles. His prophetic pronouncements against the Temple and high priestly rulers are reminiscent of that other, later peasant prophet Jesus son of Hananiah; and several of his prophetic pronouncements clearly take traditional Israelite prophetic forms.
Richard Horsley [17]
[1] Fernando Bermejo-Rubio, La invención de Jesús de Nazaret, (Siglo XXI de España Editores, S. A., 2018),Kindle, ch 1.
[2] E. P. Sanders, Paul: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford, 2001), p.43.
[3] Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician, (Barnes &Noble, 1978), p.20.
[4] John J. Collins, The Scepter and the Star, Messianism in light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 2nd Ed., (Cambridge: Erdmans, 2010), p.2.
[5] Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew, A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), p.15.
[6] Richard A. Horsley, ‘Messiah, Magi, and Model Imperial King’, in Christmas Unwrapped Consumerism , Christ, and Culture, ed. Richard Horsley and James Tracy, ( Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001), pp. 139-61, (141).
[7] ‘Bar Koziba, Prince of Israel’, this is how Bar Kokbha referred to himself taken from the letter from Wadi Murabba, see Józef Tadeusz Milik, Papyrus No. 24.
[8] Richard A.Horsley and John S. Hanson, Bandits, Prophets and Messiahs, Popular Movements in the time of Jesus, (Winston Press, 1985), p.50
[9] Matthew V. Novenson, The Grammar of Messianism: An Ancient Jewish Political Idiom and Its Users (Oxford, 2017), p.147-8
[10] R. Joseph Hoffman, Celsus, On The True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians, Translation and Introduction, (Oxford, 1987), p.7.
[11] Honi the Circle-Drawer by the rabbis (y. Taanit 16a–b; b. Taanit 19a; 23a) and Onias the Righteous by Josephus. (Antiquities 14.2.1-21). Hanina Ben Dosa (example Ta’anit. 24b–25a; Berakhot 34b)
[12] Vermes, Jesus the Jew, p.69.
[13] Vermes, Jesus the Jew, chapter 3, (58).
[14] John J. Collins. 2021. “Millenarianism in Ancient Judaism.” In James Crossley and Alastair Lockhart (eds.) Critical Dictionary of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements. 15 January 2021. Retrieved from http://www.cdamm.org/articles/ancient-judaism.
[15] Horsley and Hansen, Bandits, Prophets and Messiahs, pp. 161-2.
[16] Fernando Bermejo-Rubio, La naturaleza del texto original del Testimonium Flavianum. Una crítica de la propuesta de John P. Meier, E STUDIOS BÍBLICOS LXXII (2014) p.273.
[17] Richard Horsley, “Jesus-in-Context, A Relational Approach” in Holmén and Porter (editors), Handbook for the study of the Historical Jesus, (2011), p.227-228.
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