Reply #12: Another possible candidate...the Mystery Messiah... [View All]

[onager]

...who came along a few years after the alleged Jesus of Nazareth, according to the historian Flavius Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews, 18.85-89).

This Messiah is described as a Samaritan (but not named). It may be helpful to note that Flavius Josephus (a Pharasaic Jew) probably disliked Samaritans about as much as he disliked Herod or Pontius Pilate. And he hated those two.

Though living in the same neighborhood as the Judeans, the Samaritans had their own special god. This caused a lot of grief between the Samaritans and the Jews.

The Samaritans also had their own Sinai-like Holy Mountain, Mt. Gerizim.

The Samaritan Mystery Messiah appeared sometime around 36/37 CE. Unlike that bleeding-heart waffler who went around Jerusalem preaching a few years before, this Messiah was ready to kick Roman ass and take names - he told his followers they should bring weapons to the revolution.

He also used a Joseph Smith/L. Ron Hubbard kind of miracle on the faithful- he promised to show them the "sacred vessels" that Moses had hidden on the mountain. (The good ideas just keep coming back, don't they?)

According to Josephus:

So they came thither armed, and thought the discourse of the man probable; and as they abode at a certain village, which was called Tirathaba, they got the rest together to them, and desired to go up the mountain in a great multitude together.

Unlike his depiction in that bad work of fiction The New Testament, Pontius Pilate didn't waffle, consult with a mob, or get obsessed with washing his hands:

But Pilate prevented their going up, by seizing upon the roads with a great band of horsemen and footmen, who fell upon those that were gotten together in the village; and when they came to an action, some of them they slew, and others of them they put to flight, and took a great many alive, the principal of whom, and also the most potent of those that fled away, Pilate ordered to be slain.

Even Josephus sort-of concedes that in this case Pilate behaved fairly. He executed the Messiah and his ringleaders while letting most of the innocent dupes run away and go home.

The Samaritans actually lodged a complaint about this incident with Vitellius, the Roman legate in Syria. But it's hard to see what else Pilate could have done. This was a full-blown armed religious insurrection against the state.

In fact, reading actual history instead of Xian/Buy-bull history, the Romans often seemed to go out of their way to keep the peace in this fractious, religion-obsessed backwater of their Empire.

(Josephus himself once described Jerusalem as "a golden bowl full of scorpions.")

After the death of Herod The Great, the Jews and Samaritans amazingly managed to put aside their differences and send a delegation to the Romans. They complained about the bad behavior of their new ruler, Herod Archelaus, and wanted him removed from office. The Romans complied and sent Archelaus about as far away from Jerusalem as possible - he was banished to the Roman outpost in "a city of Gaul, Vienna."