by
Damien F. Mackey
“And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the Cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them by the Cross”.
[Colossians 2:13-15]
Introduction
One of the great contributions that Pope Benedict XVI has made in his book Jesus of Nazareth. Part Two: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, is, in my opinion, in his clear differentiation between the type of Messiah that the majority of the Jews were anticipating, and in the actual type of Messiah that they got in Jesus the Christ. Even amongst the Apostles, one of whom was a Simon the Zealot (Luke 6:15), some at least were sword-bearing. And this included Simon Peter himself, who hacked off the ear of the high priest’s slave (John 18:10) in the Garden of Gethsemane. Was Judas the betrayer, himself, a Sicarii (dagger bearer, Iscariot = Sicarii), as well as being a thief? It was a self-serving type of Messiahship that most were desiring, one to rid themselves of the hated Romans, and perhaps to restore the theocratic world of King David and Solomon (the Lions of Judah), which most would have regarded as a halçyon golden age for Israel.
But this One who now claimed to be the Son of God, this Jesus of Nazareth, came with neither sword nor earthly army. And he was far more inclined to criticize the Jewish leaders than the Romans. Admittedly, the crowds flocked to him because of his personal magnetism and his miracle working. But his doctrine was radically different from that of the Jewish leaders. He proclaimed the Beatitudes, peace and love, and offering no resistance, and service and loving one’s enemies. God the Father he revealed to be a God of otherness. Peter himself, who had become convinced that Jesus was indeed the one who was to come, and who was in awe at the incident of the Transfiguration, still tried to manoeuvre his Lord away from this talk of death on a Cross. Later he drew the sword in defence of the Lord, who of course needed no defending. God the Father would promptly send Jesus, at his bidding, “more than twelve legions of angels” (Matthew 26:53).
But He was like a lamb led to the slaughter, when crucified. Milton Terry has written, regarding Revelation’s emphasis on his crucifixion (as in 1:7), a “lamb”, “slain”, that there is a certain irony in this imagery: “The great trouble with Judaism was that it looked for a mighty lion; and was scandalized to behold, instead, a little lamb” (cf. Luke 24:21, 25-27; John 6:15; 19:15). [Biblical Apologetics, p. 323].
And finally, even after the Resurrection, at the Ascension, the Apostles were still asking him if he were going to “restore the kingdom to Israel” (Acts 1:6). They still had not properly understood Him.
Needed was the Holy Spirit, to enlighten them inwardly, so that they might become other Christs.
So it is not all that surprising, given this prevailing mentality, that the crowds, egged on by the priests and the scribes, would have clamoured for Barabbas rather than for Jesus.
Barabbas
We might be tempted to think of this Barabbas as a dirty witless oaf, somewhat as portrayed for instance in Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ. But he was probably not like that at all. He was, as was Jesus, a leader who apparently drew people through personal magnetism. So he would have been somewhat charismatic. He, though, was a revolutionary (lestes) against Rome. Just what the people wanted. Indeed, Barabbas was popular with the masses. Probably not so much so with the Temple aristocracy, who may have found him rather too brutal and lawless for their liking. But that was not going to stop them from inciting the crowd to call for Barabbas over Jesus.
Ironically, Greek versions give his name as Jesus Barabbas, which mean ‘Jesus son of the father’*; a name most fitting to the real Savior. And it is quite common for writers to proceed from this to make the outlandish suggestion even that Jesus and Barabbas were one and the same person. Anyway, if ever there were a populist type of Messiah, then this Barabbas was the epitome of it.
And, given, that Barabbas did represent some sort of threat to the Roman occupation, whereas it was obvious to Pilate that Jesus of Nazareth did not, it is rather mystifying that the Romans would have let him go?
[*Abba has been found as a personal name in a 1st-century burial at Giv'at ja-Mivtar, and Abba also appears as a personal name frequently in the Gemara section of the Talmud, dating from AD 200–400. These findings support "Barabbas" being used to indicate the son of a person named Abba or Abbas ].
So, who was Barabbas?
Where did He come from?
Where did He go?
These three questions are asked at:
http://turretinfan.blogspot.com/2009/09/who-is-barabbas.html
where the writer then summarises the little that we know of Barabbas in the Gospels:
"[Barabbas] was a robber (John's account), a notable prisoner (Matthew's account), someone who had (with others who were also imprisoned) made an insurrection/sedition and committed murder in the insurrection (Mark's and Luke's accounts). So, this man was a true brigand and a captain of them. His name appears to be taken from "bar abba" meaning "son of the father" (although some have suggested "bar rabbi" meaning "son of the teacher." Supposedly, he participated in the 'insurrection', - what "insurrection"? The "insurrection" wherein fanatically 'religious' Jews sought to overthrow Herod's Roman supported 'secular' governance - in an unsuccessful attempt to re-establish the ancient 'theocratic' form of governance as was instituted by David' (after the Lord rebuked the 'anointed' king Saul and replaced him with David?"
The Church Fathers it seems, according to this source, were unable to add very much to this:
"I scanned through the early church writers to see if there were any interesting legends about him. I mostly came up empty. Tertullian describes him as “the most abandoned criminal” (Tertullian, Against Marcion, Book 4, Chapter 42). Cyril of Alexandria describes him as “a notorious robber” and “a dangerous and brutal criminal, [who was] not free from blood-guiltiness” (Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John, at John 18:40). Augustine calls him “the robber,” “the murderer,” and “the destroyer [of life]” (Augustine, Tractate 116 on John’s Gospel, at John 19:1). Even Faustus (whom Augustine opposed) called him “the notorious robber” (Faustus quoted in Augustine’s Reply to Faustus, Book 14, Section 1). Chrysostom provides a characteristically colorful description:
“For which was right? To let go the acknowledged criminal, or Him about whose guilt there was a question? For, if in the case of acknowledged offenders it was fit there should be a liberation, much more in those of whom there was a doubt. For surely this man did not seem to them worse than acknowledged murderers. For on this account, it is not merely said they had a robber; but one noted, that is, who was infamous in wickedness, who had perpetrated countless murders”.
- Chrysostom, Homily 86 on Matthew, Section 2, at Matthew 27:11-12"
On the whole, though, the early church basically leaves Barabbas alone. A couple (Origen and Rabanius) describe him as figuring the Devil, while Pseudo-Jerome goes so far as to associate him with the scapegoat which was freed. I’m told the “Gospel According to the Hebrews” is an apocryphal work that takes the “son of the teacher” interpretation as opposed to “son of the father,” but generally the apocryphal works also pretty much leave him alone or simply parrot the canonical accounts.
Gill provides similar comments, and adds:
“The Ethiopic version adds, “the prince”, or “chief of robbers, and all knew him”; and the Arabic, instead of a “prisoner”, reads, a “thief”, as he was”.
He also points out that this name was a common name among the Jews, providing various citations to folks by that name. There does not seem to be much more out there on him.
[End of quotes]
So, did this well-known bandit and insurrectionist, Barabbas, simply fade away after he was released by Pilate? Or did he continue to act as according to form, becoming even more notorious with the passing of time? Or was he eventually converted to Christianity, after Pentecost, when many Jews embraced Baptism and chose to follow the resurrected One?
I am going to be suggesting that Barabbas did not fade away at all, and that he went on to become a most significant character in the New Testament and in Jewish history, and that he did even, for a time, embrace the true Baptism. And that it was only then that he acquired the name of “Jesus”, and not before. But that he was an insincere convert, continuing to be self-seeking (very much like Judas himself), and that he would go on to become the epitome of those ‘false christs’ about whom Jesus had warned (Matthew 24:23-24; Mark13:21-22), ‘a figure of the devil’ (Origen and Rabanius), whose fame would spread even to Rome. And that he would finally end in disaster: the ultimate fate of any false messiah.
I am going to be laying down a profile of Barabbas - of who I think that he may have been both historically and biblically. Admittedly, what follows will be sometimes linked by rather tenuous threads, given the little that we know about Barabbas. My starting point towards further reconstruction of Barabbas will be a tradition (admittedly lacking any sort of detail) that has been expressed in the following words: “Some sources also say that [Barabbas] was later killed [he having fallen again into the hands of the Romans] while taking part in another revolt against the Romans”. (http://www.gospel-mysteries.net/barabbas.html)
Barabbas as a Leader of Jewish Revolt Against Rome
Our accumulated data so far would suggest strongly that Barabbas was notable or notorious, an insurrectionist/murderer, a leader or captain, a fanatically religious Jew, who resisted the Romans and the Herods, and who wished to return to a theocratic state as of old. He was imprisoned by the Romans, but set free by Pontius Pilate. Later he fell into the hands of the Romans again. He was also designated a prince and a type of false messiah figuring the Devil.
Whether or not Barabbas actually regarded himself as a Messiah figure remains to be seen. Certainly the temptation for this must have been there, he having seemingly triumphed over the notable Jesus of Nazareth, who many had thought (prior to his death on the Cross) was the Messiah.
I am going to propose that (based on the tradition that Barabbas later got involved in further insurrection against Rome) this Barabbas was none other than the famous Jewish figure Simon Bar Giora, who was the primary military leader of the so-called First Jewish Revolt against Rome from 66-70 AD (conventional dates). Though the connection would be very hard to prove, there is nothing I think that would seriously militate against it. And, just as Barabbas is supposed later to have tried his hand again at the Romans, and died in the process, so was his proposed alter ego, Bar Giora, “already apparently known as a partisan leader” (see below). So that might serve to tie up both ends of the brigand’s career book-ended by being a captive of the Romans: already ... known as a partisan leader and later ... taking part in a revolt against the Romans. Simon Bar Giora I have in previous articles tentatively identified with the even more famous Simon Bar Kochba (‘Son of the Star’), a Jewish revolutionary against Rome, a truly messianic figure. This connection will take some explaining because Bar Giora and Bar Kochba are historically separated by about 60 years. {See Appendix for possible ‘folding’ of early Roman imperial history}.
Finally, I am going to suggest further that Barabbas was the pernicious magician Simon Magus encountered by Peter and John, and the magician, Bar Jesus, encountered by Paul (and possibly also “Alexander the Coppersmith”, 2 Timothy 4:14). Admittedly, it is a very big step, seemingly, from Barabbas to Simon Magus, with very little apparent connection between the two; whereas a more plausible case can be mounted for Barabbas as Bar Giora. But from the quasi-messianic Simon Bar Giora (as Barabbas) back to the quasi-messianic Simon Magus is probably a more promising scenario.
Anyway, here is my proposed profile of the life of Barabbas overall, with explanations to follow afterwards. I think that it is quite a reasonable human profile:
Barabbas was born Simon (or Simeon) Bar Abbas. He was the son of a Samaritan convert to Judaism, whose Greco-Roman name, we are going to find, may have been Antonius. Simon Barabbas was thus known as ‘Simon Son of the Proselyte’, or Simon Bar Giora (Bar Piora). The family was therefore somewhat eclectic: Samaritan, Jew. Below we shall identify Bar Giora with an eclectic Simon, a Samaritan, who is described at once as a Christian, a Jew, and a pagan, a magician and a sorcerer, a Christian religious philosopher and an archheretic, a pseudo-apostle and a pseudo-Messiah, the founder of a religion and an incarnation of God.
Hence, Simon - like so many ‘Jews’ of the time - was influenced by the great John the Baptist. He was baptised by water.
But, again like many in Israel at that time, he held a view of messiahship that was radically unlike that being heralded by the Baptist (although it would become clear only in Jesus), leading to a “Lamb of God”. So Barabbas, as a young man - approximately during the ministry of John and the public ministry of Jesus of Nazareth - became involved, as a leader, in a populist uprising against the secular powers (Rome and the Herods), hoping to restore to Israel the glorious Davidic era. In the course of his military actions, Barabbas robbed and murdered. But he was well-known and well-received amongst many of the Jews. Perhaps he was then something of a Robin Hood type, favouring the poor – though also quite murderous. Anyway, the revolt was quashed by the Romans who imprisoned him, only for Pilate famously to release Barabbas during the Trial of Jesus and unjustly to condemn Jesus to crucifixion.
Barabbas then grew in fame and popularity and was considered the people’s hero. This charismatic rebel was as if a Messiah to them. And this began to go to his head.
We next meet him as Simon the Magus, the wily magician. Our eclectic subject was highly impressed by the Pentecostal Apostles, just as he had formerly been by John the Baptist. And so he asked for, and received, the baptism of the Holy Spirit, perhaps at the hands of Philip. It was then, too, that he acquired the further name of Bar-Jesus, here meaning a Disciple of Jesus.
Unfortunately, however, Barabbas was - like Judas Iscariot - a self-serving type of Christian, who sought to make gain out of his discipleship. He was now akin to the seemingly pious Christian who sets himself up as a visionary and gains a large following as a seer and wonderworker. So was this Simon, who set himself up as something great and worked ‘miracles’ and wonders: a false prophet. We recall that he was a charismatic type, but through the agency of the Devil. Saint Peter had him worked out and warned him: ‘You have no part or share in this, for your heart is not right before God. Repent therefore of this wickedness of yours ...’ (Acts 8:21-22); a warning that seemed to shake the magician: ‘Pray for me to the Lord, that nothing of what you have said may happen to me’ (v. 24). Saint Paul straight out called him (presuming he is also Bar-Jesus – see below for Epiphanius’ menti0n of Simon Magus’s contradicting Saint Paul] ‘You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of al deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord?’ (Acts 13:10), no stronger term than ‘son of the devil’ being imaginable. For the magician was attempting to lure a Roman proconsul, Sergius Paulus, away from the Gospel (vv. 7-8). Like Paul on a previous occasion, the magician was struck blind for a while. But Paul had been a sincere apologist against Christianity. This Simon (Bar-Jesus) was not sincere, but was a “Jewish false prophet” (v. 6).
I should like to add here another tentative connection of Simon with the “Alexander the Coppersmith ... who strongly opposed [Saint Paul’s] message” (2 Timothy 4:14, 15), presuming Alexander to be his Greco-Roman name. Paul warns Timothy about this dangerous opponent who is, like Bar-Jesus, vehemently opposed to the true Gospel teaching. To include Alexander in the mix does add an extra bit of geography. We already have Samaritan origins, then north-east to the island of Cyprus for Bar-Jesus, then Alexander inland at Ephesus. Of course Paul himself travelled widely to spread the Gospel message. Perhaps Simon sometimes followed the Apostles, firstly as a convert, but later as a false prophet, to harm their work. And we shall read below that Simon Magus, at least, went from Samaria to Rome – but that much earlier, about the time of the death of John the Baptist, Simon went to Egypt and there studied magic.
Whilst Simon Magus is thought of as a Samaritan, Bar-Jesus and Alexander were called Jews. Possibly the Magus was of Jewish background but living in Samaria; or, his alter egos were Jewish only in the sense of their religious affiliation.
Simon was now a full scale heresiarch, preaching an eclectic Judaeo-Christian-pagan Syro-Babylonian from of syncretic religious mysticism. Some say that he was the first Gnostic. I would agree. Much of his thought, as explained by the Church Fathers, strikes me as Platonic ethereal. It probably had a heavy dose of Samaritanism, too, which would not be surprising given Simon’s Samaritan background. In fact, Simon Magus is said to have exalted Mount Gerizim in Samaria over Mount Zion, as the Samaritans did. I think that discerning scholars might also discover roots of Islamic thinking here, since the Hagarists have argued for a profound Samaritan influence in Islam.
Whereas true religion has the New Adam and the New Eve, the eclectic mystery religion instituted by Simon (or, rather, the Devil) also had a notable woman as a consort to the notorious Simon. This was Helena. She would be a good candidate (at least in type) for Saint John’s “that woman Jezebel” (Revelation 2:20).
Simon even made his mark in Rome, and we find that he, as Bar-Jesus, was close to the intelligent Roman proconsul, Sergius Paulus, a potential candidate for conversion to the Christian message. In other words, Simon had become a famous world figure and wonderworker.
As Roman oppression increased, and the Jews became ever more restless, leading to the revolt during which Simon was a – if not the – key figure. He was for a while spectacularly successful. He was obviously a military leader of considerable talent. No doubt he had learned much from the Romans themselves. As Simon Bar Giora he must have assumed some sort of governance, having minted coins depicting “The Redemption of Zion”, exactly as did as Simon Bar Kochba, a captain who also had his own bag of magical tricks, ostensibly blowing away his enemies with fire spewing from his mouth. Were the coin minting and fire blowing (perhaps using bellows) part of the coppersmith/brazier-cum-magician’s trade?
Simon was by now a King-Messiah, a pseudo-christ.
Every dog has his day. Simon Superstar prevailed against the Romans for three and a half years. Then he lost everything: his dream; his City, his Temple and his life. He was one of those fire-spewing leaders whom the true Christ had publicly paraded in his triumphal procession, slaying him with the breath of his mouth. God’s little Lamb prevailing over the mighty dragon. Such is the fate of the false Christ.
Before I attempt to fill in, in more detail, who Barabbas might have been and what he was doing between, say, 30 AD (the Trial of Jesus) and 66 AD when he, as we are arguing, led a full-scale revolt against Rome, now as a hardened veteran (e.g. a Gaddafi in later life), and, presumably a hardened criminal and evildoer. But, for the moment, we are going to jump to the last part of his life, presumably, as Simon Bar Giora. I continue the scenario, in which we shall find that Bar Giora’s place of origin is uncertain, but may have been in Samaritan territory, “near Shechem”:
Simon Bar Abbas, I suggest, was the ‘son of a proselyte’ (which it the Aramaïc meaning of Bar Giora). In other words, Bar Giora (var. Piora) was a description rather than his proper name. The insurrectionist, whose place of origin is disputed, may have arisen from the region of Samaria or Transjordan. Relevant to all this are the following data from a Jewish source
BAR GIORA, SIMEON, Jewish military leader in the war against Rome (66–70 [AD]). Simeon was born, according to Josephus, in *Gerasa, a large Hellenistic city in Transjordan, where the Jews lived in peace with the city's non-Jewish population. Some scholars, however, identify his birthplace with the village of Jerash in the neighborhood of Hartuv (Press, Ereẓ, 1 (19512), 174, S.V. Geresh), others with Kefar Jorish near Shechem on the grounds that Simeon's activity began in its vicinity, i.e., in the province of Acrabatene. Since the word giora means proselyte in Aramaic, many scholars hold that his father was a convert to Judaism. The main source of information about Simeon is Josephus who is to be treated with circumspection, especially where an appraisal of the man and his activities are concerned, since Josephus entertained feelings of intense animosity toward him.
The account goes on to tell of Simon bar Giora’s activity during the Jewish revolt against Rome:
Simeon, already apparently known as a partisan leader, first distinguished himself in the battle at Beth-Horon against *Cestius Gallus (66 [AD]), in which the Jews inflicted a crushing defeat on the Roman army. Despite this achievement, however, Simeon was relegated to the background, since in Jerusalem the moderate party in control was disposed to come to terms with Rome. Simeon gathered around him a band of ardent patriots and, according to Josephus, engaged in brigandage [just as Barabbas had]. It is obvious, however, even from Josephus' own biased account, that these acts of "brigandage" were military operations conducted by the rebels under the leadership of Simeon against their internal enemies, opponents of the revolt, and sympathizers with Rome. In retaliation for these operations, the forces of the moderate government in Jerusalem compelled Simeon to take refuge among the *Sicarii who, under the command of *Eleazar b. Jair, had captured *Masada. For a time Simeon remained with them, taking part in their raids. Subsequently leaving them, he parted company, and "terrorized" the southern part of Ereẓ Israel. Although growing increasingly stronger, he was unable to capture Jerusalem. The Zealots in Jerusalem, who were fearful of him, seized his wife but released her because of his threats. In addition to his continuous war against the party in control in Jerusalem, Simeon also fought against the Idumeans and succeeded in occupying Idumea with the help of supporters among the Idumeans themselves. Hebron, too, fell into his hands. In April 69 [AD] he entered Jerusalem, the gates of the city having been opened to him by the enemies of *John of Giscala, who had called on Simeon to come to their aid. Simeon thus gained control of the larger part of Jerusalem, both of the Upper and a considerable section of the Lower City.
Eventually the Roman general, Titus, forced his way to Jerusalem and then took the city:
The struggle between Simeon and John of Giscala continued. Constant hostilities were waged between them in the city, and came to an end only when Titus' forces reached the outskirts of Jerusalem (April 70 [AD]). Although all the rebels joined together during the siege to fight against the Romans and performed deeds of astounding bravery, the advantage enjoyed by the Roman army proved decisive. The Temple was burned and the devastated city captured by the enemy.
And the fate of Simon (Simeon), who apparently considered himself some sort of a king and a Messiah figure:
Simeon and several of his most loyal friends hid in an underground passage among the ruins, but, unable to escape, Simeon finally surrendered to the Romans and was taken prisoner. The circumstances of his surrender were extremely strange. Josephus relates that Simeon suddenly appeared among the Temple ruins, as though out of the bowels of the earth, dressed in white and covered with a purple mantle. At the sight of him the Romans were terrified, but after recovering from their fear, bound him in chains. His strange appearance was probably connected with messianic expectations on his part; or by submitting to the victorious enemy he may have deliberately invited martyrdom.
And, just as Christ’s Death on the Cross was his victory parade over all of his enemies (“He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them by the Cross”), so now, ironically, was Israel’s false Messiah, Simon, led by Rome in triumphal procession to his death:
Simeon was led as a prisoner in the triumphal procession held in Rome by Vespasian and his sons to celebrate their victory over the Jews. Scourged all the way, he was taken to the Mamertine prison, at the northeast end of the Forum, and executed at the moment of the culmination of the triumph. That he and not John of Giscala played this part in the triumphal procession shows that the Romans regarded him as the most important leader in Jerusalem and as the rebel commander. This is evident from other extant information as well. His army was far larger than that of his rivals, having numbered about 15,000 at the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem. His soldiers were also the best organized and disciplined. The fact that he was invited to Jerusalem by the priests and the people may have provided him with some legal basis for his leadership, although not all the patriot elements recognized his authority. Since information about them is very sparse, it is difficult to comprehend and explain the basis of the conflict between their different parties. At times it is even difficult to distinguish between the parties themselves. Nevertheless, from extant information it would appear that Simeon b. Giora was the leader of a clear eschatological trend in the movement of rebellion against Rome, and possibly filled the role of "king messiah" within the complex of eschatological beliefs held by his followers. His exceptional bravery and daring, mentioned by Josephus, undoubtedly attracted many to him, and won him preeminence among the rebel leaders. In contrast to the bitter hostility that existed between him and John of Giscala, there was a measure of understanding between him and the Sicarii at Masada.
Conspicuous among Simeon's characteristics was the enmity he bore toward the rich and the sympathy he showed to the poor, even to the extent of freeing slaves. This approach of his doubtless had its origin in his party's social outlook, opposed as it was to the existing order also in regard to the economic system and social justice.
Our accumulated buzz words for Simon Bar Giora can easily be matched with those for Barabbas:
Buzz words for Simon Bar Giora: These descriptions are perfect for Barabbas, a popular leader of a rebellious peasantry; already apparently known as a partisan leader; robber; torturer; people’s savior and guardian, and, ultimately, slain by Romans. He was regarded with reverence and awe by the people.
But, by now, our character had matured and had developed loftier attributes, as indicated by the words government; significant army; Jewish king; and, whether Barabbas had initially had them or not, messianic expectations on his part.
Now previously I had in various articles, as noted above, tentatively identified this Simon Bar Giora with the even more famous Simon Bar Kochba (‘Son of the Star’). This is quite radical, of course, because history separates Bar Giora (First Jewish Revolt) from Bar Kochba (Second Jewish Revolt) by some six decades or so. But I have tentatively argued that there was in fact only the one major Jewish revolt against Rome, and that historians have managed to duplicate these. The 66-70 AD revolt had been so devastating for the land of Israel and its people, and for Jerusalem, that it is hard to imagine that there could have arisen such another major revolt merely a generation and a half later – and still with reference to the Temple. “Despite the devastation wrought by the Romans during the First Jewish-Roman War … which left the population and countryside in ruins ...”, the Jews were supposed to have rallied again in 132 AD.
There is also the question of the lengthy lives that this chronology engenders, 120 years for Yohanan bar Zakkai, for instance – possible, but not necessary if the supposed two revolts are to be merged into one. Whilst I shall come back to this at the end of the article, in the Appendix, there outlining my former arguments, I just want to refer here to some new points that I have picked up relating to coins issued in the name of Bar Giora, on the one hand (indicating just how significant he had become), and Bar Kochba, on the other. Both had coins minted re (and here is an important buzz ‘word’) the ‘Redemption of Zion’. Moreover, both coins show the Temple and the Ark of the Covenant. That is quite plausible in the case of Bar Giora, of course. But, in the case of Bar Kochba, in 132 AD, supposedly, it is a glaring anachronism. Of course historians take this as being messianic anticipatory on Bar Kochba’s part: what will be again. I, however, take it as being a clear indication that the revolt of Simon Bar Kochba preceded the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and that this was the same revolt as that of Simon Bar Giora. And that there is no need to posit that a totally destroyed Israel somehow arose back to life and was then sufficiently strong enough to have been able to mount an impressive 132 AD revolt against the might of Hadrianic Rome.
The way that history gets distorted and duplicated is apparent from a very strange story that we read in Flaccus’ account of the writings of Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of the Apostles, about a certain Carabbas - that immediately reminds one of Barabbas as to the name - and the mistreatment and mockery of Jesus and his kingship. The whole thing is wrongly taken as being totally unrelated to the incident recorded in the Gospels – but I would consider it to be a later reference (albeit grossly distorted) to the actual trial and mistreatment of Jesus Christ:
Writings of Philo of Alexandria, Flaccus, VI:36-39:
36: There was a certain madman named Carabbas ... this man spent all his days and nights naked in the roads, minding neither cold nor heat, the sport of idle children and wanton youths;
37: and they, driving the poor wretch as far as the public gymnasium, and setting him up there on high that he might be seen by everybody, flattened out a leaf of papyrus and put it on his head instead of a diadem, and clothed the rest of his body with a common door mat instead of a cloak and instead of a sceptre they put in his hand a small stick of the native papyrus which they found lying by the wayside and gave to him;
38: and when, like actors in theatrical spectacles, he had received all the insignia of royal authority, and had been dressed and adorned like a king, the young men bearing sticks on their shoulders stood on each side of him instead of spear-bearers, in imitation of the bodyguards of the king, and then others came up, some as if to salute him, and others pretending to wish to consult with him about the affairs of the state.
39: Then from the multitude of those who were standing around there arose a wonderful shout of men calling out Maris!; and this is the name by which it is said that they call the king of the Syrians; for they knew that Agrippa was by birth a Syrian, and also that he was possessed of a great district of Syria of which he was the sovereign ….
Cf. Matthew 17:
26: Then released he Barabbas unto them: and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.
27: Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common hall, and gathered unto him the whole band of soldiers.
28: And they stripped him, and put on him a scarlet robe.
29: And when they had plaited a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee before him, and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews!
http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=145397
But let us proceed now to try to identify Barabbas biblically-historically during the interim period between, say, 30 AD (the Trial of Jesus) and 66 AD when he, as we are arguing, led a full-scale revolt against Rome, now as a hardened veteran and, presumably, a hardened criminal and evildoer.
According to Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, Jesus had told his disciples that they would meet a man between Jericho and Samaria (the very regions that are proposed for Simon Bar Giora), and that they were to receive him into the fold. This man was the biblical Simon Magus, a wonderworker:
http://my.homewithgod.com/israel/acemmerich1/
…. James the Greater and one of the disciples were sent to the pagan regions north of Capharnaum. Thomas and Matthew were dispatched to Ephesus, in order to prepare the country where at a future day Jesus’ Mother and many of those that believed in Him were to dwell. They wondered greatly at the fact of Mary’s going to live there. Thaddeus and Simon were to go first to Samaria, though none cared to go there. All preferred cities entirely pagan. Jesus told them that they would all meet twice in Jerusalem before going to preach the Gospel in distant pagan lands. He spoke of a man between Samaria and Jericho, who would, like Himself, perform many miracles, though by the power of the devil. He would manifest a desire of conversion, and they must kindly receive him, for even the devil should contribute to His glory. Simon Magus was meant by these words of Jesus. ….
[End of quote]
In common with Barabbas, Bar Giora (Bar Kochba), is the trait of a popular and charismatic leader of rebellion against Rome, bold and courageous, fully notorious, a thief and a murderer. The progression from a small time bandit and revolutionary (Barabbas) to a strong leader of an armed force with priestly or messianic and even kingly pretensions, a minter of coins and controller of economy (Bar Giora), may actually represent the development and career of Barabbas from a young man to a hardened opponent of the Herods and Rome. And basically the description here of Bar Giora applies also to Bar Kochba, with even more emphasis on the governance and messianic aspects. But, in the case of Bar Kochba, we shall encounter a new element as well: that of a miraculous wonder worker, perhaps a magician with a heavy dose of fake and charlatanism.
This leads us inevitably to consider an evil magician and wonderworker of the New Testament of lofty ambition worthy of a Simon Bar Kochba, namely Simon Magus of the Acts of the Apostles. I shall also be double identifying the latter, connecting him with the magician, again, Bar Jesus (known too as Elymas) also of Acts. But, before we proceed with accounts of the New Testament magician and wonder worker, here is my basic explanation for the plethora of names for our leading character:
Original Names: Simon and Barabbas (Bar-Abbas).
Descriptions: Bar Giora (Piora), ‘Son of the Proselyte’; and Magus, ‘Magician’.
Greek descriptive name: Elymas [Atomas]
Greco-Roman name: (possibly) Alexander [the Coppersmith]
As a baptised Christian: Bar Jesus (can also mean Disciple of Jesus).
As a messiah figure: Bar Kosiba, Bar Kochba (‘Son of the Star’).
Derogatory Name: Bar Kozeba (‘Son of Deception’, ‘Son of Lies’).
If Simon Magus/Bar-Jesus (Alexander?) is also our composite Simon (beginning with Barabbas and ending with Bar Kochba), then he would serve to fill in the large gap (some 35 years?) between Barabbas and the Trial of Jesus on the one hand - when Barabbas first emerges in the Gospels – and, on the other hand, the rise of Simon Bar Giora in the 66 AD Jewish Revolt against Rome.
Here, then, is Wikipedia’s sometimes quite fanciful account of the terrible:
Simon Magus
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Magus):
Simon the Sorcerer or Simon the Magician, in Latin Simon Magus, (Greek Σίμων ὁ μάγος) was a Samaritan magus or religious figure and a convert to Christianity, baptised by Philip, whose later confrontation with Peter is recorded in Acts 8:9-24. The sin of simony, or paying for position and influence in the church, is named for Simon. The Apostolic Constitutions also accuses him of lawlessness.[1]
Surviving traditions about Simon appear in anti-heretical texts, such as those of Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius, where he is often regarded as the source of all heresies. Justin wrote that nearly all the Samaritans in his time were adherents of a certain Simon of Gitta, a village not far from Flavia Neapolis. Irenaeus held him as being one of the founders of Gnosticism and the sect of the Simonians.[2][3][4][5] Hippolytus quotes from a work he attributes to Simon or his followers the Simonians, Apophasis Megale, or Great Declaration. According to the early church heresiologists Simon is also supposed to have written several lost treatises, two of which bear the titles The Four Quarters of the World and The Sermons of the Refuter.
In apocryphal works including the Acts of Peter, Pseudo-Clementines, and the Epistle of the Apostles, Simon also appears as a formidable sorcerer with the ability to levitate and fly at will.
History
Acts of the Apostles
The different sources for information on Simon contain quite different pictures of him, so much so that it has been questioned whether they all refer to the same person. Assuming all references are to the same person, as some (but by no means all) of the Church fathers did, the earliest reference to him is the canonical Acts of the Apostles, this is his only appearance in the New Testament.
But there was a certain man, called Simon, which beforetime in the same city used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one: 10to whom they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, “This man is the great power of God.” 11And to him they had regard, because that of long time he had bewitched them with sorceries. 12But when they believed Philip preaching the things concerning the kingdom of God, and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women. 13Then Simon himself believed also: and when he was baptized, he continued with Philip, and wondered, beholding the miracles and signs which were done. 14Now when the apostles which were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent unto them Peter and John: 15who, when they were come down, prayed for them, that they might receive the Holy Ghost: 16(for as yet he was fallen upon none of them: only they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.) 17Then laid they their hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost. 18And when Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles’ hands the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money, 19saying, “Give me also this power, that on whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost.” 20But Peter said unto him, “Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money. 21Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God. 22Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee, 23for I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity.” 24Then answered Simon, and said, “Pray ye to the Lord for me, that none of these things which ye have spoken come upon me.”[6]
Acts tells of a person named Simōn practicing magic in the city of Sebaste in Samaria, meeting with Philip the Evangelist, and then trying to offer money to the Apostles in exchange for miraculous abilities, specifically the power of laying on of hands. In Acts 8:20, Peter denounces Simon's attitude, and declares, "May your money perish with you!"
Josephus
Josephus mentions a magician named Simon[7] as being involved with the procurator Felix, King Agrippa II and his sister Drusilla, where Felix has Simon convince Drusilla to marry him instead of the man she was engaged to. Some scholars have considered the two to be identical,[8] although this is not generally accepted, as the Simon of Josephus is a Jew rather than a Samaritan.
Wikipedia now proceeds to introduce the notorious woman with whom Simon was so deeply involved. Could she be the wicked “Jezebel” about whom John warns the Christians in the Book of Revelation? I shall come back to this idea later:
Justin Martyr and Irenaeus
Justin Martyr (in his Apologies, and in a lost work against heresies, which Irenaeus used as his main source) and Irenaeus (Adversus Haereses) record that after being cast out by the Apostles he came to Rome where, having joined to himself a profligate woman of the name of Helen, he gave out that it was he who appeared among the Jews as the Son, in Samaria as the Father and among other nations as the Holy Spirit. He performed such miracles by magic acts during the reign of Claudius that he was regarded as a god and honored with a statue on the island in the Tiber which the two bridges cross, with the inscription Simoni Deo Sancto, "To Simon the Holy God". However, in the 16th century, a statue was unearthed on the island in question, inscribed to Semo Sancus, a Sabine deity,[9] leading most scholars to believe that Justin Martyr confused Semoni Sancus with Simon.
Myth of Simon and Helen
Justin and Irenaeus are the first to recount the myth of Simon and Helen, which became the center of Simonian doctrine. Epiphanius of Salamis also makes Simon speak in the first person in several places in his Panarion, and the inference is that he is quoting from a version of it, though perhaps not verbatim.
In the beginning God had his first thought, his Ennoia, which was female, and that thought was to create the angels. The First Thought then descended into the lower regions and created the angels. But the angels rebelled against her out of jealousy and created the world as her prison, imprisoning her in a female body. Thereafter, she was reincarnated many times, each time being shamed. Her many reincarnations included Helen of Troy; among others, and she finally was reincarnated as Helen, a slave and prostitute in the Phoenician city of Tyre. God then descended in the form of Simon Magus, to rescue his Ennoia, and to confer salvation upon men through knowledge of himself.
"And on her account," he says, "did I come down; for this is that which is written in the Gospel 'the lost sheep'."[10]
For as the angels were mismanaging the world, owing to their individual lust for rule, he had come to set things straight, and had descended under a changed form, likening himself to the Principalities and Powers through whom he passed, so that among men he appeared as a man, though he was not a man, and was thought to have suffered in Judaea, though he had not suffered.
"But in each heaven I changed my form," says he, "in accordance with the form of those who were in each heaven, that I might escape the notice of my angelic powers and come down to the Thought, who is none other than her who is also called Prunikos and Holy Ghost, through whom I created the angels, while the angels created the world and men."[11]
…. In this account of Simon there is a large portion common to almost all forms of Gnostic myths, together with something special to this form. They have in common the place in the work of creation assigned to the female principle, the conception of the Deity; the ignorance of the rulers of this lower world with regard to the Supreme Power; the descent of the female (Sophia) into the lower regions, and her inability to return. Special to the Simonian tale is the identification of Simon himself with the Supreme, and of his consort Helena with the female principle.
Hippolytus
Upon the story of "the lost sheep," Hippolytus (in his Philosophumena) comments as follows.
But the liar was enamoured of this wench, whose name was Helen, and had bought her and had her to wife, and it was out of respect for his disciples that he invented this fairy-tale.[12]
Reduced to despair, he says, by the curse laid upon him by Peter, Simon embarked on the career that has been described:
Until he came to Rome also and fell foul of the Apostles. Peter withstood him on many occasions. ….
Simonians
Hippolytus gives a much more doctrinally detailed account of Simonianism, including a system of divine emanations and interpretations of the Old Testament, with extensive quotations from the Apophasis Megale. Some believe that Hippolytus' account is of a later, more developed form of Simonianism, and that the original doctrines of the group were simpler, close to the account given by Justin Martyr and Irenaeus (this account however is also included in Hippolytus' work).
Hippolytus says the free love doctrine was held by them in its purest form, and speaks in language similar to that of Irenaeus about the variety of magic arts practiced by the Simonians, and also of their having images of Simon and Helen under the forms of Zeus and Athena. ….
Epiphanius
Epiphanius writes that there were some Simonians still in existence in his day (c. AD 367), but he speaks of them as almost extinct. Gitta, he says, had sunk from a town into a village. Epiphanius further charges Simon with having tried to wrest the words of St. Paul about the armour of God (Ephesians 6:14-16) into agreement with his own identification of the Ennoia with Athena. ….
Pseudo-Clementine literature
The Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions and Homilies give an account of Simon Magus and some of his teachings in regards to the Simonians. They are of uncertain date and authorship, and seem to have been worked over by several hands in the interest of diverse forms of belief.
Simon was a Samaritan, and a native of Gitta. The name of his father was Antonius, that of his mother Rachel. He studied Greek literature in Alexandria, and, having in addition to this great power in magic, became so ambitious that he wished to be considered a highest power, higher even than the God who created the world. And sometimes he "darkly hinted" that he himself was Christ, calling himself the Standing One. Which name he used to indicate that he would stand for ever, and had no cause in him for bodily decay. He did not believe that the God who created the world was the highest, nor that the dead would rise. He denied Jerusalem, and introduced Mount Gerizim in its stead. In place of the Christ of the Christians he proclaimed himself; and the Law he allegorized in accordance with his own preconceptions. He did indeed preach righteousness and judgment to come: but this was merely a bait for the unwary.
There was one John the Baptist, who was the forerunner of Jesus in accordance with the law of parity; and as Jesus had twelve Apostles, bearing the number of the twelve solar months, so had he thirty leading men, making up the monthly tale of the moon. One of these thirty leading men was a woman called Helen, and the first and most esteemed by John was Simon. But on the death of John he was away in Egypt for the practice of magic ….
And now from: http://www.ccel.org/s/schaff/encyc/encyc10/htm/ii.ix.ii.htm
SIMON MAGUS.
1. In the Book of Acts.
One of the most difficult and interesting problems of apostolic and post-apostolic history is presented by Simon Magus, a Samaritan, who is described at once as a Christian, a Jew, and a pagan, a magician and a sorcerer, a Christian religious philosopher and an archheretic, a pseudo-apostle and a pseudo-Messiah, the founder of a religion and an incarnation of God. The earliest source concerning him is Acts viii. 5-24, where he appears as a sorcerer who had "bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one," yet becoming an adherent of the Apostle Philip and marveling at "the miracles and signs which were done" (verses 5-13). ….
2. In the Apocrypha and Justin Martyr.
The record of Acts is continued by the various recensions of the apocryphal Acts of Peter and kindred literature (cf. Clement of Alexandria, Strom., vii. 17; Hippolytus, Philosophumena, vi. 20; Eusebius, Hist. eccl., ii. 14-15; Arnobius, Adv. gentes ii. 12; Philostorgius, Haer., xxix.; Epiphanius, Haer., xxi. 4; etc.), all of which deal with the conflict between Simon Peter and Simon Magus. The scene is Samaria in the Acta Vercellenses only, the other sources and Justin substituting Judea (or Jerusalem and Caesarea) and, most frequently, Rome. The time is the reign of Nero or (in the Acta Vercellenses) Claudius …. the tradition of Simon's residence at Rome in the reign of Claudius was evidently wide-spread, and Justin also states that nearly all the Samaritans honored Simon Magus "as the first god, above all power, authority, and might," and as accompanied by a certain ex-courtezan Helena, designated "the first understanding from himself" (Apol., i. 26; Trypho, cxx.).
3. His System According to Later Heresiologists.
A valuable supplement to this information is given by a Roman heresiology written before 175 and incorporated by Irenaeus in his Haer., i. 23, also being used, in all probability, by Celsus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and the pseudo-Tertullian. Here Simon Magus appears in an essentially Gnostic garb, being, on the one hand, the "highest God " (or "Father"), and, on the other, "the most sublime power of God"; while Helena (here brought into connection with Tyre) is represented as "the first conception of his [Simon's] mind," "the mother of all," "wisdom," "the Holy Spirit," etc. Emanating from the Father, she descended to the realms beneath, where, in conformity to his will, she created the angelic powers which, without knowing the Father, created the world and man. Unwilling to be considered creatures, the angels imprisoned her in a female body, and she is the lost sheep for whose salvation the Father (Simon) appeared, to rescue both her and mankind from the slavery of the cosmic angelic powers. To deceive these powers, he was manifested to mankind as man, as the Father to the Samaritans and the Son to the Jews, suffering docetic passion. ….
The pseudo-Clementine sources also add that Simon Magus was the son of Antonius and Rachel, that he was educated in Greek learning at Alexandria, and that, after being received among the thirty disciples of John the Baptist, he became head of the sect after the death of his teacher. He is likewise described … as the representative of Samaritan worship on Mount Gerizim who expounded the Law allegorically and denied the resurrection of the dead, as the representative of pagan philosophy (especially of astrological fatalism), and even as the defender of Marcion's antithesis of the good and righteous God.
4. Untenable Theories Concerning Simon Magus.
In some passages in these writings Simon Magus wears the mask of Paul, and attacks are made on Pauline teachings under the guise of polemics in favor of the Petrine theology against the tenets of Simon Magus. …. [There is also] the theory which identifies Simon Magus with the beast of Rev. xiii. 11-17, although it is not impossible that the Beliar which the Sibylline Books, iii. 63 sqq., describe as destined to come "from the Sebastenes" (Samaritans) represented Simon.
…. It is, on the other hand, not improbable that Simon Magus is to be identified with a Jewish magician named Simon who acted as a go-between for the procurator Felix of Judea. This Simon is described by Josephus (Ant., XX., vii. 2) as a Cypriot, but this statement probably rests upon a confusion of the Cyprian capital, Cittium (Hebr. Kittim), with the obscure Samaritan village of Gitta (Hebr. Gittim).
5. A Sorcerer Syncretized with the Sun.
All evidence goes to prove that Simon was what his epithet Magus implies-a sorcerer. This was the motive for his association with the apostles in Samaria, but while it would seem that he pretended to be, in the pagan sense, a god in human form (cf. Justin, Apol., i. 26), there is no indication that either Acts or Justin regarded him as a pseudo-Messiah; and even the apocryphal Acts and the pseudo-Clementine literature characterize him as a false Christ merely on the ground that he was the first-born of Satan (cf. Ignatius, Epist. ad Trallenses, longer version, xi.). …. Historically, then, Simon was … a sorcerer who asserted that he was a god. This assertion, aided by the high fame which he enjoyed throughout Samaria (cf. Acts viii.), reached its culmination in his identification with the Semitic sun-god Shamash, whose cult was united with that of the moon-goddess Astarte. This is confirmed by Simon's companion, Helena, who is unknown to Acts, the apocryphal Acts, the Alexandrine heresiologists, or the "Great Announcement," but whose name ("Moon"), combined with the immoral past ascribed her and her Tyrian home, obviously points to the Tyrian moon-goddess with her licentious rites. How long this cult of Simon Magus, which had evidently arisen long before the time of Justin, persisted in Samaria and other regions is unknown, but in the days of Origen the "Simonians" were exceedingly few in number in Palestine and the neighboring countries (Contra Celsum, i. 57), and by the time of Epiphanius (Haer., xxii. 2) they had become extinct. On the other hand, they had spread widely in the West before 200, and there long maintained themselves, (cf. Hippolytus, Philosophumena, vi. 15). They seem to have developed a sect essentially occult and libertine in character, worshiping Simon (cf. Irenaeus, Haer., I. xxiii. 4), and finally giving rise to two systems, that of the "Great Announcement" and that described by the heresiologists who based their writings upon Justin. ….
Bar Jesus
Whilst Peter and James encounter the wicked magician, Simon Magus, Paul - perhaps also now with John (Acts 13:5) - encounters the wicked Jewish magician, Bar Jesus. It may well be one and the same magician, with Bar Jesus being his name when baptised as a Christian (see below). Bar (‘Son of’) in Hebrew can apparently have a wider meaning than just ‘son’, and might here mean a ‘disciple of Jesus’ (see below). Here is a description of this evil character, who even had his high Roman connections (just as the magician Simon Magus reputedly had an enormous reputation even in the city of Rome) (http://www.bsw.org/?l=71851&a=Comm04.html):
(Atomus) Elymas Bar-Jesus
"When they had gone though the whole island [of Cyprus] as far as Paphos, they met a certain magician, a Jewish false prophet, named Bar-Jesus. He was with the proconsul, Sergius Paulus, an intelligent man, who summoned Barnabas and Saul and wanted to hear the word of God. But Elymas the magician (for that is the translation of his name) opposed them and tried to turn the proconsul away from the faith. But Saul, also known as Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked intently at him and said, "You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord? And now listen - the hand of the Lord is against you, and you will be blind for a while, unable to see the sun. Immediately mist and darkness came over him, and he went about groping for someone to lead him by the hand" (Acts 13:6-11)
The name “Elymas”
Commentators have long been puzzled about how the name "Elymas" can be interpreted to mean "magician" in the passage above. However, Rick Strelan appears to have resolved the problem.(1) In a recent article he suggests that the magician had taken the name of Elam, the eldest son of Shem, the son of Noah, and that Elam was considered an archetypal magician. The name "Elymas" would then have signified "magician" and this would explain Acts 13:8. In support of his proposal Strelan quotes Josephus:
"For Elymos left behind him the Elamites, the ancestors of the Persians" (Ant 1.6.4), and notes that the magoi were commonly associated with the Persians. There is also evidence, not mentioned by Strelan, that Shem was considered a magician. Firstly, in the Book of Jubilees a book of healing arts is given by Noah to his eldest son, Shem:
"And we explained to Noah all the medicines of their diseases, together with their seductions, how he might heal them with herbs of the earth. And Noah wrote down all things in a book as we instructed him concerning every kind of medicine. Thus the evil spirits were precluded from (hurting) the sons of Noah. And he gave all that he had written to Shem, his eldest son; for he loved him exceedingly above all his sons."
The Treatise of Shem is a Pseudepigraphic work, written in the name of Shem, probably in the first century BC. It is an astrological treatise and therefore shows that Shem was associated with astrology.
To sum up: Noah's eldest son was Shem, whose eldest son was Elam, whose name was written "Elymos" by Josephus in the first century. The evidence suggests that there was a tradition that the magical arts of astrology and perhaps healing passed down the Noah-Shem-Elam line. Therefore, by accepting the name "Elymas", Bar-Jesus was identifying himself as a magician in an ancient Jewish tradition.
The name "Bar-Jesus"
Strelan argues that Elymas was, like Simon Magus, a follower of Jesus, of sorts. He suggests that Elymas took the name "Bar-Jesus" because he considered himself to be a disciple of Jesus. Strelan cites several cases where the term "Bar" or "Son of" is used to mean "disciple of". While "Jesus" was a common name for Jews, Strelan is probably right. Someone who had named himself after Elam and had then started to perform his magic in the name of Jesus, might well have taken the name "Son of Jesus" to reflect the new source of his power or inspiration.
....
Atomus
It is clear that "Elymas" was not his birth name. The name "Bar-Jesus", on any hypothesis, cannot have been his only name in infancy, so he must have had another name. Josephus describes a Jewish magician from Cyprus:
"At the time when Felix was procurator of Judaea, he beheld her; and, inasmuch as she surpassed all other women in beauty, he conceived a passion for the lady. He sent to her one of his friends, a Cyprian Jew named Atomus, who pretended to be a magician, in an effort to persuade her to leave her husband and to marry Felix." (Josephus Ant.20.142)
Both Atomus and Elymas were Jewish magicians from Cyprus who associated with high Roman officials. Felix was procurator from A.D. 52-59 so Atomus incident was only about a decade later than the Elymas incident. It is therefore chronologically possible that they were one and the same person. If, as seems likely, Elymas was employed by Sergius Paulus, he might well have lost his job after the encounter with Paul. If his other name, Bar-Jesus, indicates that he had been in contact with the Jesus movement, he may have had Judean connections. Thus it would not be surprising if Elymas left the employment of Sergius Paulus and attached himself to Felix in Judea.
The similarity in sound between "Atomus" and "Elymas" makes the identity more likely.
The western text of Acts has "Etoimos", which may be a form of the name "Atomus".
There are many examples of cases where a new name is chosen, in part, because of its phonetic resemblance to the original name (BarKosiba/BarKokhba/BarKoziba, Titus-Timothy, Mary-Magdalene, Saul-Paul, Silvanus-Silas etc.).
[(1) Strelan "Who Was Bar Jesus (Acts 13, 6-12)?" Biblica 85 (2004) 65-81].
APPENDIX:
Folding Roman Imperial History
Common to the two (supposedly) revolts that history books describe, the Jews against Rome, I had noted, was
(i) a leader, Simon;
(ii) an Eleazer; and
(iii) an approximately 3 years duration.
Above all, I now find, it is apparent from Bar Kochba’s coins that the Temple was still standing in his day and that the Ark of the Covenant was still in it! (“These coins tell us more. In the first place, they show us the Temple and the Ark of the Covenant inside it”).
Moreover, my previous argument was that St. John’s Roman persecutor, some say Nero, some say Domitian, was one and the same emperor, Nero Domitianus. Domitian is frequently referred to as Nero Redivivus. In this way, I have historically ‘folded’ Bar Giora’s 66 AD revolt with Bar Kochba’s 132 AD revolt. Elsewhere I have tentatively put a case for Nero’s also being the emperor Hadrian (both Grecophiles; great builders; homosexual; and vicious). Both sent their best general, who had experience in Britain, to crush a Jewish revolt.
But I am still quite open to how the necessary folding of early Roman imperial history is to be effected.
This composite scenario that I am envisaging now lands us with a plethora of Simon Bar – type names (Bar Abbas; Bar Giora and Bar Kochba) for our leading character. I tentatively suggest that the character’s original name was Simon Bar Abbas (Barabbas), that Bar Giora, variously Bar Piora (‘Son of a Proselyte’), was how he was sometimes described, and we know (and shall read below) that Bar Kochba was the messianic name given to him by his great admirer, Rabbi Akiba.
…. For some time now I have strongly suspected that there has occurred, in the construction of Roman imperial history, the same sort of duplication that revisionists have observed in early Egyptian history. Chronologists, scientists, anthropologists, seem to have a pathological tendency to want to stretch things out. It is the legendary Procrustes of Attica in action with his rack (as opposed to his other, and opposite, radical action of ‘shortening’ or ‘lopping off’).
The so-called Stone Ages, they stretch out over several million years, in single file, though there is abundant evidence for overlap (e.g. the sophisticated astronomical knowledge of so-called primitive man as exhibited in the Lascaux cave paintings). Astronomers keep wanting to expand the size of the universe, galaxy upon galaxy, based on the Doppler Effect (or should that be the Doppelgänger Effect?); and to expand the age of the universe by billions of year (give or take a zero).
The same with the conventional recorded history. In many articles now I have argued, following the initial great insight of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky (Ages in Chaos series), that ancient Egyptian chronology, for instance, has been artificially stretched on the rack to the tune of 500 years or more. It needs a benign Procrustes to shrink it back to its original size. Dr. D. Courville, in The Exodus Problem and its Ramifications, rightly concluded that Egypt’s Old and Middle kingdoms - conventionally separated the one from the other (at their beginnings) by 700 years - were in actual fact contemporaneous, and not successive. Chronological reality is often like that; more of a ‘pond-ripple effect’, spreading outwards, than an ‘Indian file’ successive extension.
In my “Osman’s ‘Osmosis’ of Moses” and “Re-discovering the Egyptianized Moses”, written for The Glozel Newsletter (Waikato, N.Z.), I built upon Courville’s important re-alignment. This enabled me to propose that the great Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh, Chephren (conventionally dated to c. 2500 BC), of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, was the same person as the Twelfth Dynasty’s Sesostris (conventionally dated to c.1950 BC), of the Middle Kingdom. What conventional history has cleft in two, artificially separating the parts by some 500-700 years, needs to be rejoined together again. Pharaoh Chephren (Egyptian Kheper-ka-ra), I argued, was none other than pharaoh Sesostris (also known in Egyptian as Kha-kheper-ra). And this one Pharaoh was the “Chenephres” of Greek tradition; the Pharaoh who married Moses’ Egyptian foster-mother and from whom prince Moses eventually had to flee for his life.
See also related articles at the California Institute for Ancient Studies, e.g: http://www.specialtyinterests.net/old_kingdom.html
Now, that same sort of folding as with Egypt’s Old and Middle Kingdoms, I suspect, needs to be applied to early Roman imperial history - though thankfully not a fold of 700 years in the latter case, but more like 60 years (a minimum figure - though see a few radical suggestions below towards the possibility that even this may need to be expanded). I hope to be able to demonstrate this from various testimonies.
Strange Afterglows and Anomalies
One frequently encounters in Egyptology queries over whether some artefact, piece of literature, or even a destructive action, ought to be dated to the Old or Middle Kingdom. This very querying in itself can often be a tell-tale sign that a chronological folding is required (so that chronologists will no longer be forced into a dispute over a range of estimates incorporating many centuries). Now the same tendency of querying I am finding in historical discussions of Nero (54-68 AD, conventional dating) and Domitian (81-96 AD, conventional dating). Historians puzzle over whether such and such a persecution, or event, or cultural innovation, occurred during the reign of the one or the other Roman emperor.
A tell-tale sign?
It can be (though one can also of course end up with egg all over one’s face when the situation is misread). Some commentators, who cannot make up their minds whether St. John the Evangelist was exiled to the island of Patmos during the reign of the emperor Nero, or the reign of Domitian, end up by compromising and suggesting that the great Evangelist may in fact have experienced two exiles.
One of the first things I decided to do, to test if there might be any possibility of chronologically folding Nero and Domitian - as I am claiming to have been able to have done with Pharaohs Chephren and Sesostris, beginning with a name comparison - was to look at Nero’s other names. Like we, the ancients often had a set of names (not necessarily of course of the same signification as ours); and this can be the cause of much confusion and duplication (leading e.g. to the failure I think to link pharaoh Kheper-ka-ra of Egypt’s Old Kingdom with his alter ego, Kha-kheper-ra of the Middle Kingdom, because the latter Pharaoh is more commonly known by the unsimilar name of Sesostris).
So is there the chance that Nero was also called Domitian?
Even with this new theory in mind, I read over Nero’s four names, without a pause, once I had found them in K. Gentry’s The Beast of Revelation. Perhaps I was distracted by Nero’s nickname, Ahenobarbus; a description of his red facial hair, or beard, causing me to miss a connection. I was only stopped in my tracks a bit further along when I read that a name of Nero’s father was Domitius. I quickly scanned back to Nero’s set of names and saw that, yes, Nero certainly had as one of his names, Domitius (or Domitianus?), the Roman version of the name Domitian.
Nero was Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (Nero Cæsar); Nero being an adopted name. [He was also Nero Claudius Cæsar, see Ancient Rome, C. Mackay, Cambridge 2004, p. 201; a matter that will also shortly come under certain consideration].
Speaking of beards (Aheno-barbus), strangely, from the Memoirs of Julia Balbilla - a companion of the emperor Hadrian’s wife - we read her testimony that Hadrian, who is supposed to have ruled a full half century after Nero (that is, during 117-138 AD, conventional dating), was the first Roman emperor to have sported a beard: ‘Those who never saw more of the emperor [Hadrian] than his picture on a coin, and only knew that it was him because no other emperor had worn a beard, still talked about him as if they had met him”. (E. Speller, Following Hadrian, p. 46. Emphasis added).
But Nero, of course, had also worn a beard as many sculptures of him attest.
Hadrian had, due to Greek influence, grown his beard sometime during his reign. Thus Julia Balbilla: “Not yet an emperor, every gesture heavy with conscious gravity, nor bearded – though he told my brother later it was in Greece he had determined to let his beard grow should he reach full power …” (Ibid., p. 47). Nero, too, was, as we shall learn, a fervent Grecophile.
Hadrian will become the third character in A., the main part of this article (along with Nero and Domitian), whom I consider might to be required to make up the composite Persecutor of St. John the Evangelist, and also of the Jews. He is not unlike Nero in appearance - though perhaps Hadrian is a bit more refined looking.
This similarity of names (Nero Domitius, emperor Domitian, as with the Egyptian pharaohs) is of course by itself no certain proof of identity between Nero and Domitian. But it, coupled with other evidences, and the queries of historians already mentioned, will gradually begin to shape up to some sort of a real picture.
Moreover, the current chronology for the life of St. John the Evangelist would have him ending up as an unrealistically sprightly nonagenarian. I admit that there are some instances of this phenomenon throughout the world, but it is far from being the norm. St. Irenæus wrote (in Adv. Haer. Bk. II) that St. John “continued with the Elders till the times of [the emperor] Trajan”, who is supposed to have arrived on the scene even after Domitian. Trajan (98-117 AD, conventional dating) is regarded as the emperor whom Hadrian would succeed. Though there seems to be some numismatic and monumental evidence that Trajan was Hadrian as well. In my MA thesis for the University of Sydney, The Sothic Star Theory of the Egyptian Calendar, 1994, pp. 187-188, I wrote (with ref. to H. Mattingly & E. Sydenham’s The Roman Imperial Coinage:
From the same, or next, year [i.e. 117 AD, conventional dating] there was a coin having, as its obverse: ‘IMP CAESAR TRAIAN. HADRIANUS AUG’, and as its reverse, holding a globe with a phoenix on top of it, and with the legend: ‘SAEC. AUR’ [Saeculum Aureum = ‘Golden Age’] ….
Hadrian, moreover, was called Traianus [Trajan] Hadrianus Augustus.
There is also some indication that Hadrian and Antoninus Pius overlapped. It is possible that the latter, whose substantial period of reign was completely forgettable, is also in need of an alter ego? “His reign of twenty-three years is remarkable for nothing apart from the fact that nothing remarkable happened in all those years” (Mackay, p. 231). That sounds unlikely. So Antoninus Pius will probably be given some further consideration at a later time.
Trajan, too, was of similar facial feature to Nero and Hadrian. He was also a persecutor of Christians. We shall tentatively include Trajan also in our mix. Thus, now, Nero = Domitian = Trajan = Hadrian.
Hadrian, we shall find, was a rather complex character; perhaps somewhat like Herod the Great. He would seem to have been both like, and unlike, the alter egos whom I am proposing for him. He travelled, loved Greece, and was artistic, like Nero; he could be gloomy and was certainly most superstitious, cruel and fearful, like Domitian; he could also appear dignified, conscientious and competent, like Trajan. But he would be generally considered to have been far less clownish than Nero, whose real person may perhaps have been, to some degree, caricatured due to later criticisms; and less sullen and morose than Domitian. We shall come to discuss the complexities of the man in some detail.
According to the reckonings of the conventional Roman chronology, St. John would have been in his nineties by the time of his dwelling at Ephesus after his return from exile. Yet the activity that he is then said to have undertaken is that of a younger person. Eusebius wholeheartedly endorsed Clement of Alexandria’s account that John not only travelled about the region of Ephesus appointing bishops and reconciling whole churches, but also that while on horseback he chased with all of his might a young man. Unlikely energy for a person in his nineties.
{Similarly, Yohanan ben Zakkai is supposed to have bridged the First and Second Jewish Revolts and lived to be 120. Possible, but unlikely}.
A similar sort of uncertainty, as with the exile of St. John the Evangelist, occurs in relation to the demise of Pontius Pilate. According to The Jerome Biblical Commentary (75:143): “…later legends tell of [Pilate’s] suicide under Caligula (Eusebius, HE 2.7), or of his execution under Nero (John of Antioch, in Fragm. hist. graec. 4.574)”.
Can we possibly also equate Caligula with Nero?
Again, was it Caligula, or was it Claudius - or was it all one and the same - who had granted to Herod Agrippa the Roman province of Judaea?
More of those tantalising questions.
If Nero were now also to be chronologically ‘folded’ with Caligula, with whom he admittedly shares some definite perverse traits - and perhaps also with Claudius (whose name he shares) - then the composite (including Hadrian) would demand a revision of Roman imperial history to the tune of about a century (c. 38 AD-138 AD). It would also seem to curtail too much the New Testament history. The New Testament, if I have read it correctly, does mention only three Roman emperors: (Caesar) Augustus (Luke 2:1); Tiberius (Caesar) (Luke 3:1); and Claudius (Acts 11:28; 18:2). Whilst the same ruler can be referred to in the Bible by different names (e.g. the Assyrian king, Tiglath-pileser [III], 2 Kings 15:29, is also called Pul, 2 Kings 15:9), chronological considerations alone (apart from historical) would probably necessitate at least that Tiberius Augustus ruled later than Augustus, and seemingly that Claudius ruled later than Tiberius, thereby making for three distinct Roman emperors here.
Whether the actual succession was in fact simply (i) Augustus; (ii) Tiberius; and then (iii) our composite emperor (based on Nero), would be difficult to establish at this stage, and I shall be presuming, for the time being, that it was the standard sequence: Augustus; Tiberius; Caligula; Claudius; and Nero. Thus I shall be leaving Caligula and Claudius out of the main mix, concentrating on the Neronic and Domitianic periods (supposedly two periods, that is), which periods we are going to find below also share the commonality of being (supposedly two) periods of Jewish revolt. Some parallels of our composite emperor with Caligula and Claudius will however be mentioned in the course of this article, leaving the door open for possible future equations. Certainly, Caligula and the presumably deformed Claudius do not appear to have the same stamp of appearance as do Nero/Trajan/Hadrian. However, it may be possible to find more likeness between the former and the younger, beardless Nero.
Now, here are some of the examples of the queries historians make between Nero and Domitian, plus some historical anomalies relevant to this revised scenario:
• Despite the strong conviction by some that the emperor worship that they detect in Revelation can be found no earlier than Domitian, others insist that Nero practised it. Nero was particularly infatuated with Apollo, and even claimed the title, “Son of Apollos”. Seneca, one of young Nero’s tutors, convinced Nero that he was destined to become the very revelation of Augustus and Apollo. [A coin with an obverse bust of Trajan has DIVO written on it, which may indicate that the emperor Trajan was divinised, see Sothic Star Theory, p. 187].
• Despite unanimity amongst early Fathers that St. John was banished to Patmos in the reign of Domitian, shortly after his being dipped in a cauldron of burning oil, St. Jerome said that this dipping occurred in Nero’s reign (Against Jovinianum 11:26). That total picture would be appropriate of course if Nero were Domitian.
Another anomaly. The conventional chronology of imperial Rome has also served to throw out of kilter the early history of the Roman Catholic Church that has been chronologically tied to it. Let us take the case of Pope St. Clement I of Rome. Clement, like St. John, is supposed to have written around 90-95 AD, yet he spoke as if the Jerusalem Temple were still standing. Clement’s relevant statement is as follows (I Clement 41):
Not in every place, brethren, are the continual daily sacrifices offered, or the freewill offerings, or the sin offerings and the trespass offerings, but in Jerusalem alone. And even there the offering is not made in every place, but before the sanctuary in the court of the altar; and this too through the high-priest and the aforesaid ministers, after that the victim to be offered hath been inspected for blemishes.
This statement clearly pre-dates 70 AD. Clement as a writer, therefore, needs to be retro-dated by at least 20 years. That similar anomalies occur with the current chronology of Pope Pius I is shown in some detail by Gentry in Before Jerusalem Fell (93ff).
Added to all this is another strange afterglow about 60 years after the destruction of Jerusalem, with the Emperor Hadrian’s putting down a so-called ‘Second’ Jewish Revolt in the Holy Land, and supposedly removing all the stones of the Temple. This, rather than Titus’ destruction of the city in 70 AD, is considered by some to be the more perfect fulfilment of Jesus Christ’s prophecy that ‘... not a single stone here will be left on another; everything will be destroyed’ (Matthew 24:2).
But I ask how could the Jews have rallied so mightily, re-populated the area to such an extent, so soon after 70 AD, when their capital city had been absolutely burned to the ground, and whatever citizens survived had been sold into slavery? Thus The Jerome Biblical Commentary (75:163, 164):
The Jews were slaughtered …. By September 70 [AD] the city [of Jerusalem] was finally taken, plundered, and razed; its walls were torn down … A Roman garrison was stationed in the city ….
Iudaea capta was the inscription that appeared on the coins struck for the Roman province thereafter.
Yet the thought is still entertained that Temple worship resumed briefly about half a century later, at the time of a presumed Second Jewish Revolt (ibid.):
Except for a very brief time during the “Liberation of Jerusalem” by Simon ben Kosibah (Bar Cochba …), when it is likely that the Temple sacrifice was resumed, the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 meant much more than the mere leveling of the holy city. It brought an end to the tradition of centuries according to which sacrifice was offered to Yahweh only in Jerusalem.
We are expected to believe that it basically happened all over again.
But I rather think that it is clearly the one historical scenario duplicated, with the most significant ramifications for early Roman imperial structure. “Its causes are not certain”, we read of the presumed Second Revolt (ibid., 167); a typical comment provoked by the conventional history. Interestingly, when possible causes are proffered, from Dio Cassius, they relate to Hadrian’s anti-Jewishness, which we are going to find was also a trait shared by his various proposed alter egos as well (ibid.):
Dio Cassius (Rom. Hist. 69.12, 1-2) records that [the Second Revolt] was sparked by Hadrian’s attempt to build a Graeco-Roman city (Aelia Capitolina) on the site of Jerusalem and to erect a shrine to Jupiter on the ruins [sic] of the Temple of Yahweh. The Vita Hadriani 14.2 gives an imperial edict forbidding circumcision as the cause for the revolt.
Now this (a) smacks of (b) Caligula, of (c) Claudius, of (d) Nero, and of (e) Domitian. For example:
(b) Caligula (Mackay, p. 198): “He went so far as to order the governor of Syria to erect a statue of himself as god in the Temple in Jerusalem, an act that would have caused a major revolt in Judaea. The governor delayed long enough that [Caligula] was dead before he was obliged to carry out this clearly insane command”.
(c) Claudius (Acts 18:2): “There [Corinth Paul] found a Jew named Aquila … who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all Jews to leave Rome”.
(d) Nero (Mackay, p. 207): “… Nero put T. Flavius Vespasianus (“Vespasian” in English) in charge of suppressing the [Jewish] revolt, and a force totalling about 60,000 men was gathered from various provinces for this purpose”.
(e) Domitian (http://www.christianchronicler.com/history1/first_century_pressure.html): “Later in the first century, another Emperor, Domitian (A.D. 81-96), instituted a more serious persecution [presumably than Nero’s]. Domitian saw Christianity as an unlicensed religion and ordered its persecution in A.D. 91. This persecution arose partly because of Domitian's insistence that he be recognized as deity prior to his death. Rome usually deified an Emperor after his death. Romans accorded such recognition primarily as a patriotic gesture, but the idea offended Christians and they refused to accord deference to the Emperor. In addition, Domitian hated Jews and anything Jewish. Since Christianity arose from Jewish roots, he hated Christians as much as Jews. He directed his persecution against Jews and the Christian community”.
In the case of (f) Trajan: “The sources for Trajan’s campaigns are very poor” (Mackay, p. 225). But we do know that there was a “revolt among the Jews of the diaspora in Roman territory … in Egypt and Cyrene”, against which “Trajan sent one of his best generals from the Dacian war to restore order” (ibid., pp. 227, 228). Trajan was also a persecutor of Christians.
There was a ‘third’ bloody capture of Jerusalem in Roman history. Actually this preceded the other supposedly two assaults in the Neronic and Hadrianic eras. It is considered to have occurred in Republican times, in 63 BC, when Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great), one time ally of Julius Caesar, captured Jerusalem and killed 12,000 Jews. This is quite a massive event, yet is often mentioned only in passing. I suspect that there also needs to be a folding of some Roman Republican history with early Roman Imperial history. The larger-than-life, ambiguous, and even godlike, Julius Caesar, may be a composite of several historical characters. See e.g: http://www.specialtyinterests.net/old_kingdom.html
Moreover, there was (i) a Pompey the Great (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus) also at the time of Caligula (see A. Barrett, Caligula – the Corruption of Power, p. 237) about a century after (presumably) the Republican Pompey. And there was then also (ii) a Marcus Crassus; the same name as the ‘earlier’ Pompey’s fellow consul (see Mackay, p. 135). Moroever, Caligula may have been murdered by (iii) a Cassius Longinus (Barrett, p. 162); the same name as the chief conspirator against Julius Caesar.
All very strange indeed and greatly needing to be explained – but the explanation of which is beyond the scope of this particular article!
The Travelling Emperor
Given my premise that Nero was also Hadrian, then one might be led to suggest that Hadrian’s grand tour of Asia Minor, at a late stage in his reign, “finalising his great league of unified Greek communities” (ibid., p. 166) and indulging in self-glorification, might be somewhat synchronous with St. John’s seven letters to the churches in that regions - and also with St. Paul’s great missionary activities there - strengthening them for the persecution. I take up Speller’s account of Hadrian’s travels, beginning on p. 167:
So the cities of the eastern empire resurrected their history, discovered ancient links with the homeland, excitedly re-named themselves: Hadriane, Hadriani, Hadriana, Hadrianoutherae, Hadrianeia, Hadrianoi, Hadrianopolis; and in the main, enthusiastically embraced the new cult of [Hadrian’s deceased lover] Antinous, just as they had always, unlike Rome, worshipped the living emperor. ….
Tarsus, the greatest city of Cilicia, was already a thriving commercial centre … when Hadrian arrived in 131 and founded the hoped-for games ….
Hadrian swept through the great Greek cities of Pamphylia and Lycia, distributing largesse, founding monuments …. Arches were erected at Attalia (modern Antalya) and Perge. At Phaselis ….
… He arrived at Ephesus on the west coast of Asia minor and celebrated at the new temple erected in his name ….
[Could this be also when he exiled St. John of Ephesus to Patmos?].
… Athens received money, buildings, dedications to Athenian boys, a corn dole for its poorest citizens and the gift of the island of Cephalonia … The supreme moment of theatre was the dedication of the temple of Olympian Zeus …. This time not just a god but the abode of a god – or gods: Zeus and Hadrian – was revealed. A magnificent ivory and gold statue of Zeus was unveiled. Hadrian, who was also worshipped there, donated a rare serpent to the priests. In the orgy of gratitude, statues of Hadrian donated by Greek communities were erected everywhere within the complex. ….
In all of this Grecophilia, indifference to Rome, emperor-worship, and lavish theatre, one cannot help thinking of Nero. Thus Mackay (op. cit., pp. 204, 207, 208):
One aspect of Nero’s personality (apart from his proclivity to murder) that earned him the disfavor of the upper class was his fondness for the arts. Already in A.D. 60, he instituted a new series of Greek-style artistic contests in Rome under the name Neronia (“Neronian games”). He wished to perform himself at that time, but the senate managed to avoid this by offering him victory crowns ahead of time; at the second celebration in A.D. 65, he did perform. His participation was disgraceful in terms of Roman values, since performers were normally people of low social standing. ….
Despite the clear signs of dissatisfaction with his rule, Nero decided in the fall of A.D. 66 to cross over to Greece, the land of culture. There he intended to display his artistic skills (the Olympic games had even been postponed for his visit). Nero apparently competed honestly, but it should come as no surprise that he won whatever competition he entered. In honor of his reception, Nero restored the province to the semi-independent status it had under the Republic. Nero had a great time, but his days were numbered.
… When [Nero] retuned to Rome in early 68 A.D., he celebrated a sort of parody of a traditional military triumph, entering the city in the manner of a victorious Greek athlete rather than as a Roman general … Finally, instead of winding up at the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, where victorious generals fulfilled their vows by dedicating plunder, he rode to the Palatine temple of Apollo, the god of artists. Nero was going out of his way to flout Roman sensibilities ….
Historians are reluctant, however, to liken Hadrian to Nero in all of this. Speller, for instance, contrasts Hadrian’s presumably more dignified sense of theatre with that of the supposedly clownish Nero (pp. 171-172):
There were parties, readings and music. At the theatre Hadrian, inevitably, excelled himself. Unlike Nero, Hadrian never appeared as a buffoon on the stage, but day after day he simply played himself, and extraordinary actor-manager of his own life on the stage of the city.
….Returning to Rome meant facing a more demanding, more critical population.
But these emperors, or this emperor, were/was complex. Allowing for some bad press, and possible exaggeration from late sources, the tyrannical Nero could be Hadrian. About Hadrian, Speller has written (pp. 3, 4):
Despite his apparent strengths, something went very wrong in the last years of his life … at his death … he was said to be hated by the people; some even called him a tyrant.
… A combination of melancholy, quick temper and intellectual competitiveness did not promote friendship or even, at times, respect ….
Also with Nero, he is thought to have made a very good start, but then to have deteriorated. “It was generally agreed that Nero’s first five years were exemplary”, writes Mackay (p. 202), but, later, “Nero increasingly asserted his independence, as he fell under the sway of his girlfriend Poppaea and other bad influences”.
Was this Poppaea Sabina the same person as Hadrian’s wife, Sabina?
The same pattern emerges with Caligula (whether or not he be the same as Nero/Hadrian). Mackay again (p. 198):
In the fall of A.D. 37, Gaius [Caligula] nearly died of an illness, and after his recovery began acting tyrannically. The biographer Suetonius claims that the illness deranged him …. Gaius became increasingly erratic and cruel in his behavior. He stole other men’s wives (twice) [Nero had stolen Poppaea from general Otho], and the treason law was revived. … He came to have delusions of grandeur ….
And again with Domitian; some inherent good, but a steep decline into tyranny (Speller, p. 36):
… although there are records to suggest that he was in some ways a conscientious ruler, he lived the remainder of his life in a state of increasing paranoia, expressed in pre-emptive and imaginative sadism …. Domitian’s fear made him cruel, and the more cruel he was the more he had to fear; to an educated Greek or Roman, in his sadistic paranoia, Domitian displayed the characteristics of the eponymous Greek tyrant Damocles.
Interestingly, the so-called Second Revolt lasted about as long as did the First – about the three and a half years. Hadrian’s main Jewish opponent was the legendary Simon bar Cochba (son of the Star), thought by the Jews to be the Messiah. Indeed Rabbi Aqiba, intellectual leader of the Jews, proclaimed Simon as such. Had not Jesus Christ himself warned his followers that some would rise up claiming to be the Christ, i.e. the Messiah (Matthew 24:24)? And Simon perfectly fits this description. Simon was a guerilla fighter, and is very reminiscent of the terrible Simon bar Giora of 70 AD, guerilla fighter, who led one of the three factions in Jerusalem, fighting amongst themselves even when the Romans had the city encircled.
Even the Jewish spiritual leader on both occasions was one called Eleazer. Thus The Jerome Biblical Commentary (First Revolt): “The leader of the Jews was Eleazer …” (75:158), and (Second Revolt): “… their spiritual leader, the priest Eleazer …” (75:168).
The case of the missing wall. We read in the Jerome Biblical Commentary about a wall that Herod Agrippa is supposed to have built during the reign of the emperor Claudius, but which might actually have been built during the First Jewish Revolt (a decade or so later) or in Bar Cochba’s time of the Second Jewish Revolt (75:151):
Herod Agrippa undertook to build Jerusalem’s “third north wall”, which, if completed, would have made the city impregnable …. But before it could be finished, Claudius who had been warned by Maurus, the legate of Syria, forbade any further work on it (Ant. 19.7, 2 § 326-27). The location of this wall is disputed by archaeologists; either it coincided roughly with the present North Wall of the Old City … or with a line of ancient wall somewhat N of the Old City …. However, an excavation in 1965 by Kathleen Kenyon … suggests a date no earlier than the sixties for “Sukenik’s [previous archaeologist’s] wall”. Either it was not built by Agrippa, or else Agrippa only laid out the line for the third wall and the real building was done in the First Jewish Revolt (W.F. Albright) or in Bar Cochba’s time.
The ‘folding’ of imperial Roman chronology that I am primarily proposing here, albeit extremely tentatively at this early stage, is:
A. Nero = Domitian = (more tentatively) Trajan = Hadrian.
B. First Jewish Revolt = Second Jewish Revolt.
C. Simon Giora = Simon Bar Kosiba (alias Bar Kochba)
D. Leader of the Jews, Eleazer = spiritual leader and priest, Eleazer.
The Victorious Messiah’s
Triumphal Parade
by
Damien F. Mackey
“And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the Cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them by the Cross”.
[Colossians 2:13-15]
Introduction
One of the great contributions that Pope Benedict XVI has made in his book Jesus of Nazareth. Part Two: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, is, in my opinion, in his clear differentiation between the type of Messiah that the majority of the Jews were anticipating, and in the actual type of Messiah that they got in Jesus the Christ. Even amongst the Apostles, one of whom was a Simon the Zealot (Luke 6:15), some at least were sword-bearing. And this included Simon Peter himself, who hacked off the ear of the high priest’s slave (John 18:10) in the Garden of Gethsemane. Was Judas the betrayer, himself, a Sicarii (dagger bearer, Iscariot = Sicarii), as well as being a thief? It was a self-serving type of Messiahship that most were desiring, one to rid themselves of the hated Romans, and perhaps to restore the theocratic world of King David and Solomon (the Lions of Judah), which most would have regarded as a halçyon golden age for Israel.
But this One who now claimed to be the Son of God, this Jesus of Nazareth, came with neither sword nor earthly army. And he was far more inclined to criticize the Jewish leaders than the Romans. Admittedly, the crowds flocked to him because of his personal magnetism and his miracle working. But his doctrine was radically different from that of the Jewish leaders. He proclaimed the Beatitudes, peace and love, and offering no resistance, and service and loving one’s enemies. God the Father he revealed to be a God of otherness. Peter himself, who had become convinced that Jesus was indeed the one who was to come, and who was in awe at the incident of the Transfiguration, still tried to manoeuvre his Lord away from this talk of death on a Cross. Later he drew the sword in defence of the Lord, who of course needed no defending. God the Father would promptly send Jesus, at his bidding, “more than twelve legions of angels” (Matthew 26:53).
But He was like a lamb led to the slaughter, when crucified. Milton Terry has written, regarding Revelation’s emphasis on his crucifixion (as in 1:7), a “lamb”, “slain”, that there is a certain irony in this imagery: “The great trouble with Judaism was that it looked for a mighty lion; and was scandalized to behold, instead, a little lamb” (cf. Luke 24:21, 25-27; John 6:15; 19:15). [Biblical Apologetics, p. 323].
And finally, even after the Resurrection, at the Ascension, the Apostles were still asking him if he were going to “restore the kingdom to Israel” (Acts 1:6). They still had not properly understood Him.
Needed was the Holy Spirit, to enlighten them inwardly, so that they might become other Christs.
So it is not all that surprising, given this prevailing mentality, that the crowds, egged on by the priests and the scribes, would have clamoured for Barabbas rather than for Jesus.
Barabbas
We might be tempted to think of this Barabbas as a dirty witless oaf, somewhat as portrayed for instance in Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ. But he was probably not like that at all. He was, as was Jesus, a leader who apparently drew people through personal magnetism. So he would have been somewhat charismatic. He, though, was a revolutionary (lestes) against Rome. Just what the people wanted. Indeed, Barabbas was popular with the masses. Probably not so much so with the Temple aristocracy, who may have found him rather too brutal and lawless for their liking. But that was not going to stop them from inciting the crowd to call for Barabbas over Jesus.
Ironically, Greek versions give his name as Jesus Barabbas, which mean ‘Jesus son of the father’*; a name most fitting to the real Savior. And it is quite common for writers to proceed from this to make the outlandish suggestion even that Jesus and Barabbas were one and the same person. Anyway, if ever there were a populist type of Messiah, then this Barabbas was the epitome of it.
And, given, that Barabbas did represent some sort of threat to the Roman occupation, whereas it was obvious to Pilate that Jesus of Nazareth did not, it is rather mystifying that the Romans would have let him go?
[*Abba has been found as a personal name in a 1st-century burial at Giv'at ja-Mivtar, and Abba also appears as a personal name frequently in the Gemara section of the Talmud, dating from AD 200–400. These findings support "Barabbas" being used to indicate the son of a person named Abba or Abbas ].
So, who was Barabbas?
Where did He come from?
Where did He go?
These three questions are asked at:
http://turretinfan.blogspot.com/2009/09/who-is-barabbas.html
where the writer then summarises the little that we know of Barabbas in the Gospels:
[Barabbas] was a robber (John's account), a notable prisoner (Matthew's account), someone who had (with others who were also imprisoned) made an insurrection/sedition and committed murder in the insurrection (Mark's and Luke's accounts). So, this man was a true brigand and a captain of them. His name appears to be taken from "bar abba" meaning "son of the father" (although some have suggested "bar rabbi" meaning "son of the teacher." Supposedly, he participated in the 'insurrection', - what "insurrection"? The "insurrection" wherein fanatically 'religious' Jews sought to overthrow Herod's Roman supported 'secular' governance - in an unsuccessful attempt to re-establish the ancient 'theocratic' form of governance as was instituted by David' (after the Lord rebuked the 'anointed' king Saul and replaced him with David?
The Church Fathers it seems, according to this source, were unable to add very much to this:
I scanned through the early church writers to see if there were any interesting legends about him. I mostly came up empty. Tertullian describes him as “the most abandoned criminal” (Tertullian, Against Marcion, Book 4, Chapter 42). Cyril of Alexandria describes him as “a notorious robber” and “a dangerous and brutal criminal, [who was] not free from blood-guiltiness” (Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John, at John 18:40). Augustine calls him “the robber,” “the murderer,” and “the destroyer [of life]” (Augustine, Tractate 116 on John’s Gospel, at John 19:1). Even Faustus (whom Augustine opposed) called him “the notorious robber” (Faustus quoted in Augustine’s Reply to Faustus, Book 14, Section 1). Chrysostom provides a characteristically colorful description:
“For which was right? To let go the acknowledged criminal, or Him about whose guilt there was a question? For, if in the case of acknowledged offenders it was fit there should be a liberation, much more in those of whom there was a doubt. For surely this man did not seem to them worse than acknowledged murderers. For on this account, it is not merely said they had a robber; but one noted, that is, who was infamous in wickedness, who had perpetrated countless murders”.
- Chrysostom, Homily 86 on Matthew, Section 2, at Matthew 27:11-12
On the whole, though, the early church basically leaves Barabbas alone. A couple (Origen and Rabanius) describe him as figuring the Devil, while Pseudo-Jerome goes so far as to associate him with the scapegoat which was freed. I’m told the “Gospel According to the Hebrews” is an apocryphal work that takes the “son of the teacher” interpretation as opposed to “son of the father,” but generally the apocryphal works also pretty much leave him alone or simply parrot the canonical accounts.
Gill provides similar comments, and adds:
“The Ethiopic version adds, “the prince”, or “chief of robbers, and all knew him”; and the Arabic, instead of a “prisoner”, reads, a “thief”, as he was”.
He also points out that this name was a common name among the Jews, providing various citations to folks by that name. There does not seem to be much more out there on him.
[End of quotes]
So, did this well-known bandit and insurrectionist, Barabbas, simply fade away after he was released by Pilate? Or did he continue to act as according to form, becoming even more notorious with the passing of time? Or was he eventually converted to Christianity, after Pentecost, when many Jews embraced Baptism and chose to follow the resurrected One?
I am going to be suggesting that Barabbas did not fade away at all, and that he went on to become a most significant character in the New Testament and in Jewish history, and that he did even, for a time, embrace the true Baptism. And that it was only then that he acquired the name of “Jesus”, and not before. But that he was an insincere convert, continuing to be self-seeking (very much like Judas himself), and that he would go on to become the epitome of those ‘false christs’ about whom Jesus had warned (Matthew 24:23-24; Mark13:21-22), ‘a figure of the devil’ (Origen and Rabanius), whose fame would spread even to Rome. And that he would finally end in disaster: the ultimate fate of any false messiah.
I am going to be laying down a profile of Barabbas - of who I think that he may have been both historically and biblically. Admittedly, what follows will be sometimes linked by rather tenuous threads, given the little that we know about Barabbas. My starting point towards further reconstruction of Barabbas will be a tradition (admittedly lacking any sort of detail) that has been expressed in the following words: “Some sources also say that [Barabbas] was later killed [he having fallen again into the hands of the Romans] while taking part in another revolt against the Romans”. (http://www.gospel-mysteries.net/barabbas.html)
Barabbas as a Leader of Jewish Revolt Against Rome
Our accumulated data so far would suggest strongly that Barabbas was notable or notorious, an insurrectionist/murderer, a leader or captain, a fanatically religious Jew, who resisted the Romans and the Herods, and who wished to return to a theocratic state as of old. He was imprisoned by the Romans, but set free by Pontius Pilate. Later he fell into the hands of the Romans again. He was also designated a prince and a type of false messiah figuring the Devil.
Whether or not Barabbas actually regarded himself as a Messiah figure remains to be seen. Certainly the temptation for this must have been there, he having seemingly triumphed over the notable Jesus of Nazareth, who many had thought (prior to his death on the Cross) was the Messiah.
I am going to propose that (based on the tradition that Barabbas later got involved in further insurrection against Rome) this Barabbas was none other than the famous Jewish figure Simon Bar Giora, who was the primary military leader of the so-called First Jewish Revolt against Rome from 66-70 AD (conventional dates). Though the connection would be very hard to prove, there is nothing I think that would seriously militate against it. And, just as Barabbas is supposed later to have tried his hand again at the Romans, and died in the process, so was his proposed alter ego, Bar Giora, “already apparently known as a partisan leader” (see below). So that might serve to tie up both ends of the brigand’s career book-ended by being a captive of the Romans: already ... known as a partisan leader and later ... taking part in a revolt against the Romans. Simon Bar Giora I have in previous articles tentatively identified with the even more famous Simon Bar Kochba (‘Son of the Star’), a Jewish revolutionary against Rome, a truly messianic figure. This connection will take some explaining because Bar Giora and Bar Kochba are historically separated by about 60 years. {See Appendix for possible ‘folding’ of early Roman imperial history}.
Finally, I am going to suggest further that Barabbas was the pernicious magician Simon Magus encountered by Peter and John, and the magician, Bar Jesus, encountered by Paul (and possibly also “Alexander the Coppersmith”, 2 Timothy 4:14). Admittedly, it is a very big step, seemingly, from Barabbas to Simon Magus, with very little apparent connection between the two; whereas a more plausible case can be mounted for Barabbas as Bar Giora. But from the quasi-messianic Simon Bar Giora (as Barabbas) back to the quasi-messianic Simon Magus is probably a more promising scenario.
Anyway, here is my proposed profile of the life of Barabbas overall, with explanations to follow afterwards. I think that it is quite a reasonable human profile:
Barabbas was born Simon (or Simeon) Bar Abbas. He was the son of a Samaritan convert to Judaism, whose Greco-Roman name, we are going to find, may have been Antonius. Simon Barabbas was thus known as ‘Simon Son of the Proselyte’, or Simon Bar Giora (Bar Piora). The family was therefore somewhat eclectic: Samaritan, Jew. Below we shall identify Bar Giora with an eclectic Simon, a Samaritan, who is described at once as a Christian, a Jew, and a pagan, a magician and a sorcerer, a Christian religious philosopher and an archheretic, a pseudo-apostle and a pseudo-Messiah, the founder of a religion and an incarnation of God.
Hence, Simon - like so many ‘Jews’ of the time - was influenced by the great John the Baptist. He was baptised by water.
But, again like many in Israel at that time, he held a view of messiahship that was radically unlike that being heralded by the Baptist (although it would become clear only in Jesus), leading to a “Lamb of God”. So Barabbas, as a young man - approximately during the ministry of John and the public ministry of Jesus of Nazareth - became involved, as a leader, in a populist uprising against the secular powers (Rome and the Herods), hoping to restore to Israel the glorious Davidic era. In the course of his military actions, Barabbas robbed and murdered. But he was well-known and well-received amongst many of the Jews. Perhaps he was then something of a Robin Hood type, favouring the poor – though also quite murderous. Anyway, the revolt was quashed by the Romans who imprisoned him, only for Pilate famously to release Barabbas during the Trial of Jesus and unjustly to condemn Jesus to crucifixion.
Barabbas then grew in fame and popularity and was considered the people’s hero. This charismatic rebel was as if a Messiah to them. And this began to go to his head.
We next meet him as Simon the Magus, the wily magician. Our eclectic subject was highly impressed by the Pentecostal Apostles, just as he had formerly been by John the Baptist. And so he asked for, and received, the baptism of the Holy Spirit, perhaps at the hands of Philip. It was then, too, that he acquired the further name of Bar-Jesus, here meaning a Disciple of Jesus.
Unfortunately, however, Barabbas was - like Judas Iscariot - a self-serving type of Christian, who sought to make gain out of his discipleship. He was now akin to the seemingly pious Christian who sets himself up as a visionary and gains a large following as a seer and wonderworker. So was this Simon, who set himself up as something great and worked ‘miracles’ and wonders: a false prophet. We recall that he was a charismatic type, but through the agency of the Devil. Saint Peter had him worked out and warned him: ‘You have no part or share in this, for your heart is not right before God. Repent therefore of this wickedness of yours ...’ (Acts 8:21-22); a warning that seemed to shake the magician: ‘Pray for me to the Lord, that nothing of what you have said may happen to me’ (v. 24). Saint Paul straight out called him (presuming he is also Bar-Jesus – see below for Epiphanius’ menti0n of Simon Magus’s contradicting Saint Paul] ‘You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of al deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord?’ (Acts 13:10), no stronger term than ‘son of the devil’ being imaginable. For the magician was attempting to lure a Roman proconsul, Sergius Paulus, away from the Gospel (vv. 7-8). Like Paul on a previous occasion, the magician was struck blind for a while. But Paul had been a sincere apologist against Christianity. This Simon (Bar-Jesus) was not sincere, but was a “Jewish false prophet” (v. 6).
I should like to add here another tentative connection of Simon with the “Alexander the Coppersmith ... who strongly opposed [Saint Paul’s] message” (2 Timothy 4:14, 15), presuming Alexander to be his Greco-Roman name. Paul warns Timothy about this dangerous opponent who is, like Bar-Jesus, vehemently opposed to the true Gospel teaching. To include Alexander in the mix does add an extra bit of geography. We already have Samaritan origins, then north-east to the island of Cyprus for Bar-Jesus, then Alexander inland at Ephesus. Of course Paul himself travelled widely to spread the Gospel message. Perhaps Simon sometimes followed the Apostles, firstly as a convert, but later as a false prophet, to harm their work. And we shall read below that Simon Magus, at least, went from Samaria to Rome – but that much earlier, about the time of the death of John the Baptist, Simon went to Egypt and there studied magic.
Whilst Simon Magus is thought of as a Samaritan, Bar-Jesus and Alexander were called Jews. Possibly the Magus was of Jewish background but living in Samaria; or, his alter egos were Jewish only in the sense of their religious affiliation.
Simon was now a full scale heresiarch, preaching an eclectic Judaeo-Christian-pagan Syro-Babylonian from of syncretic religious mysticism. Some say that he was the first Gnostic. I would agree. Much of his thought, as explained by the Church Fathers, strikes me as Platonic ethereal. It probably had a heavy dose of Samaritanism, too, which would not be surprising given Simon’s Samaritan background. In fact, Simon Magus is said to have exalted Mount Gerizim in Samaria over Mount Zion, as the Samaritans did. I think that discerning scholars might also discover roots of Islamic thinking here, since the Hagarists have argued for a profound Samaritan influence in Islam.
Whereas true religion has the New Adam and the New Eve, the eclectic mystery religion instituted by Simon (or, rather, the Devil) also had a notable woman as a consort to the notorious Simon. This was Helena. She would be a good candidate (at least in type) for Saint John’s “that woman Jezebel” (Revelation 2:20).
Simon even made his mark in Rome, and we find that he, as Bar-Jesus, was close to the intelligent Roman proconsul, Sergius Paulus, a potential candidate for conversion to the Christian message. In other words, Simon had become a famous world figure and wonderworker.
As Roman oppression increased, and the Jews became ever more restless, leading to the revolt during which Simon was a – if not the – key figure. He was for a while spectacularly successful. He was obviously a military leader of considerable talent. No doubt he had learned much from the Romans themselves. As Simon Bar Giora he must have assumed some sort of governance, having minted coins depicting “The Redemption of Zion”, exactly as did as Simon Bar Kochba, a captain who also had his own bag of magical tricks, ostensibly blowing away his enemies with fire spewing from his mouth. Were the coin minting and fire blowing (perhaps using bellows) part of the coppersmith/brazier-cum-magician’s trade?
Simon was by now a King-Messiah, a pseudo-christ.
Every dog has his day. Simon Superstar prevailed against the Romans for three and a half years. Then he lost everything: his dream; his City, his Temple and his life. He was one of those fire-spewing leaders whom the true Christ had publicly paraded in his triumphal procession, slaying him with the breath of his mouth. God’s little Lamb prevailing over the mighty dragon. Such is the fate of the false Christ.
Before I attempt to fill in, in more detail, who Barabbas might have been and what he was doing between, say, 30 AD (the Trial of Jesus) and 66 AD when he, as we are arguing, led a full-scale revolt against Rome, now as a hardened veteran (e.g. a Gaddafi in later life), and, presumably a hardened criminal and evildoer. But, for the moment, we are going to jump to the last part of his life, presumably, as Simon Bar Giora. I continue the scenario, in which we shall find that Bar Giora’s place of origin is uncertain, but may have been in Samaritan territory, “near Shechem”:
Simon Bar Abbas, I suggest, was the ‘son of a proselyte’ (which it the Aramaïc meaning of Bar Giora). In other words, Bar Giora (var. Piora) was a description rather than his proper name. The insurrectionist, whose place of origin is disputed, may have arisen from the region of Samaria or Transjordan. Relevant to all this are the following data from a Jewish source
(http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0003_0_02036.html):
BAR GIORA, SIMEON, Jewish military leader in the war against Rome (66–70 [AD]). Simeon was born, according to Josephus, in *Gerasa, a large Hellenistic city in Transjordan, where the Jews lived in peace with the city's non-Jewish population. Some scholars, however, identify his birthplace with the village of Jerash in the neighborhood of Hartuv (Press, Ereẓ, 1 (19512), 174, S.V. Geresh), others with Kefar Jorish near Shechem on the grounds that Simeon's activity began in its vicinity, i.e., in the province of Acrabatene. Since the word giora means proselyte in Aramaic, many scholars hold that his father was a convert to Judaism. The main source of information about Simeon is Josephus who is to be treated with circumspection, especially where an appraisal of the man and his activities are concerned, since Josephus entertained feelings of intense animosity toward him.
The account goes on to tell of Simon bar Giora’s activity during the Jewish revolt against Rome:
Simeon, already apparently known as a partisan leader, first distinguished himself in the battle at Beth-Horon against *Cestius Gallus (66 [AD]), in which the Jews inflicted a crushing defeat on the Roman army. Despite this achievement, however, Simeon was relegated to the background, since in Jerusalem the moderate party in control was disposed to come to terms with Rome. Simeon gathered around him a band of ardent patriots and, according to Josephus, engaged in brigandage [just as Barabbas had]. It is obvious, however, even from Josephus' own biased account, that these acts of "brigandage" were military operations conducted by the rebels under the leadership of Simeon against their internal enemies, opponents of the revolt, and sympathizers with Rome. In retaliation for these operations, the forces of the moderate government in Jerusalem compelled Simeon to take refuge among the *Sicarii who, under the command of *Eleazar b. Jair, had captured *Masada. For a time Simeon remained with them, taking part in their raids. Subsequently leaving them, he parted company, and "terrorized" the southern part of Ereẓ Israel. Although growing increasingly stronger, he was unable to capture Jerusalem. The Zealots in Jerusalem, who were fearful of him, seized his wife but released her because of his threats. In addition to his continuous war against the party in control in Jerusalem, Simeon also fought against the Idumeans and succeeded in occupying Idumea with the help of supporters among the Idumeans themselves. Hebron, too, fell into his hands. In April 69 [AD] he entered Jerusalem, the gates of the city having been opened to him by the enemies of *John of Giscala, who had called on Simeon to come to their aid. Simeon thus gained control of the larger part of Jerusalem, both of the Upper and a considerable section of the Lower City.
Eventually the Roman general, Titus, forced his way to Jerusalem and then took the city:
The struggle between Simeon and John of Giscala continued. Constant hostilities were waged between them in the city, and came to an end only when Titus' forces reached the outskirts of Jerusalem (April 70 [AD]). Although all the rebels joined together during the siege to fight against the Romans and performed deeds of astounding bravery, the advantage enjoyed by the Roman army proved decisive. The Temple was burned and the devastated city captured by the enemy.
And the fate of Simon (Simeon), who apparently considered himself some sort of a king and a Messiah figure:
Simeon and several of his most loyal friends hid in an underground passage among the ruins, but, unable to escape, Simeon finally surrendered to the Romans and was taken prisoner. The circumstances of his surrender were extremely strange. Josephus relates that Simeon suddenly appeared among the Temple ruins, as though out of the bowels of the earth, dressed in white and covered with a purple mantle. At the sight of him the Romans were terrified, but after recovering from their fear, bound him in chains. His strange appearance was probably connected with messianic expectations on his part; or by submitting to the victorious enemy he may have deliberately invited martyrdom.
And, just as Christ’s Death on the Cross was his victory parade over all of his enemies (“He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them by the Cross”), so now, ironically, was Israel’s false Messiah, Simon, led by Rome in triumphal procession to his death:
Simeon was led as a prisoner in the triumphal procession held in Rome by Vespasian and his sons to celebrate their victory over the Jews. Scourged all the way, he was taken to the Mamertine prison, at the northeast end of the Forum, and executed at the moment of the culmination of the triumph. That he and not John of Giscala played this part in the triumphal procession shows that the Romans regarded him as the most important leader in Jerusalem and as the rebel commander. This is evident from other extant information as well. His army was far larger than that of his rivals, having numbered about 15,000 at the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem. His soldiers were also the best organized and disciplined. The fact that he was invited to Jerusalem by the priests and the people may have provided him with some legal basis for his leadership, although not all the patriot elements recognized his authority. Since information about them is very sparse, it is difficult to comprehend and explain the basis of the conflict between their different parties. At times it is even difficult to distinguish between the parties themselves. Nevertheless, from extant information it would appear that Simeon b. Giora was the leader of a clear eschatological trend in the movement of rebellion against Rome, and possibly filled the role of "king messiah" within the complex of eschatological beliefs held by his followers. His exceptional bravery and daring, mentioned by Josephus, undoubtedly attracted many to him, and won him preeminence among the rebel leaders. In contrast to the bitter hostility that existed between him and John of Giscala, there was a measure of understanding between him and the Sicarii at Masada.
Conspicuous among Simeon's characteristics was the enmity he bore toward the rich and the sympathy he showed to the poor, even to the extent of freeing slaves. This approach of his doubtless had its origin in his party's social outlook, opposed as it was to the existing order also in regard to the economic system and social justice.
Our accumulated buzz words for Simon Bar Giora can easily be matched with those for Barabbas:
Buzz words for Simon Bar Giora: These descriptions are perfect for Barabbas, a popular leader of a rebellious peasantry; already apparently known as a partisan leader; robber; torturer; people’s savior and guardian, and, ultimately, slain by Romans. He was regarded with reverence and awe by the people.
But, by now, our character had matured and had developed loftier attributes, as indicated by the words government; significant army; Jewish king; and, whether Barabbas had initially had them or not, messianic expectations on his part.
Now previously I had in various articles, as noted above, tentatively identified this Simon Bar Giora with the even more famous Simon Bar Kochba (‘Son of the Star’). This is quite radical, of course, because history separates Bar Giora (First Jewish Revolt) from Bar Kochba (Second Jewish Revolt) by some six decades or so. But I have tentatively argued that there was in fact only the one major Jewish revolt against Rome, and that historians have managed to duplicate these. The 66-70 AD revolt had been so devastating for the land of Israel and its people, and for Jerusalem, that it is hard to imagine that there could have arisen such another major revolt merely a generation and a half later – and still with reference to the Temple. “Despite the devastation wrought by the Romans during the First Jewish-Roman War … which left the population and countryside in ruins ...”, the Jews were supposed to have rallied again in 132 AD.
There is also the question of the lengthy lives that this chronology engenders, 120 years for Yohanan bar Zakkai, for instance – possible, but not necessary if the supposed two revolts are to be merged into one. Whilst I shall come back to this at the end of the article, in the Appendix, there outlining my former arguments, I just want to refer here to some new points that I have picked up relating to coins issued in the name of Bar Giora, on the one hand (indicating just how significant he had become), and Bar Kochba, on the other. Both had coins minted re (and here is an important buzz ‘word’) the ‘Redemption of Zion’. Moreover, both coins show the Temple and the Ark of the Covenant. That is quite plausible in the case of Bar Giora, of course. But, in the case of Bar Kochba, in 132 AD, supposedly, it is a glaring anachronism. Of course historians take this as being messianic anticipatory on Bar Kochba’s part: what will be again. I, however, take it as being a clear indication that the revolt of Simon Bar Kochba preceded the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and that this was the same revolt as that of Simon Bar Giora. And that there is no need to posit that a totally destroyed Israel somehow arose back to life and was then sufficiently strong enough to have been able to mount an impressive 132 AD revolt against the might of Hadrianic Rome.
The way that history gets distorted and duplicated is apparent from a very strange story that we read in Flaccus’ account of the writings of Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of the Apostles, about a certain Carabbas - that immediately reminds one of Barabbas as to the name - and the mistreatment and mockery of Jesus and his kingship. The whole thing is wrongly taken as being totally unrelated to the incident recorded in the Gospels – but I would consider it to be a later reference (albeit grossly distorted) to the actual trial and mistreatment of Jesus Christ:
Writings of Philo of Alexandria, Flaccus, VI:36-39:
36: There was a certain madman named Carabbas ... this man spent all his days and nights naked in the roads, minding neither cold nor heat, the sport of idle children and wanton youths;
37: and they, driving the poor wretch as far as the public gymnasium, and setting him up there on high that he might be seen by everybody, flattened out a leaf of papyrus and put it on his head instead of a diadem, and clothed the rest of his body with a common door mat instead of a cloak and instead of a sceptre they put in his hand a small stick of the native papyrus which they found lying by the wayside and gave to him;
38: and when, like actors in theatrical spectacles, he had received all the insignia of royal authority, and had been dressed and adorned like a king, the young men bearing sticks on their shoulders stood on each side of him instead of spear-bearers, in imitation of the bodyguards of the king, and then others came up, some as if to salute him, and others pretending to wish to consult with him about the affairs of the state.
39: Then from the multitude of those who were standing around there arose a wonderful shout of men calling out Maris!; and this is the name by which it is said that they call the king of the Syrians; for they knew that Agrippa was by birth a Syrian, and also that he was possessed of a great district of Syria of which he was the sovereign ….
Cf. Matthew 17:
26: Then released he Barabbas unto them: and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.
27: Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common hall, and gathered unto him the whole band of soldiers.
28: And they stripped him, and put on him a scarlet robe.
29: And when they had plaited a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee before him, and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews!
http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=145397
But let us proceed now to try to identify Barabbas biblically-historically during the interim period between, say, 30 AD (the Trial of Jesus) and 66 AD when he, as we are arguing, led a full-scale revolt against Rome, now as a hardened veteran and, presumably, a hardened criminal and evildoer.
According to Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, Jesus had told his disciples that they would meet a man between Jericho and Samaria (the very regions that are proposed for Simon Bar Giora), and that they were to receive him into the fold. This man was the biblical Simon Magus, a wonderworker:
http://my.homewithgod.com/israel/acemmerich1/
…. James the Greater and one of the disciples were sent to the pagan regions north of Capharnaum. Thomas and Matthew were dispatched to Ephesus, in order to prepare the country where at a future day Jesus’ Mother and many of those that believed in Him were to dwell. They wondered greatly at the fact of Mary’s going to live there. Thaddeus and Simon were to go first to Samaria, though none cared to go there. All preferred cities entirely pagan. Jesus told them that they would all meet twice in Jerusalem before going to preach the Gospel in distant pagan lands. He spoke of a man between Samaria and Jericho, who would, like Himself, perform many miracles, though by the power of the devil. He would manifest a desire of conversion, and they must kindly receive him, for even the devil should contribute to His glory. Simon Magus was meant by these words of Jesus. ….
[End of quote]
In common with Barabbas, Bar Giora (Bar Kochba), is the trait of a popular and charismatic leader of rebellion against Rome, bold and courageous, fully notorious, a thief and a murderer. The progression from a small time bandit and revolutionary (Barabbas) to a strong leader of an armed force with priestly or messianic and even kingly pretensions, a minter of coins and controller of economy (Bar Giora), may actually represent the development and career of Barabbas from a young man to a hardened opponent of the Herods and Rome. And basically the description here of Bar Giora applies also to Bar Kochba, with even more emphasis on the governance and messianic aspects. But, in the case of Bar Kochba, we shall encounter a new element as well: that of a miraculous wonder worker, perhaps a magician with a heavy dose of fake and charlatanism.
This leads us inevitably to consider an evil magician and wonderworker of the New Testament of lofty ambition worthy of a Simon Bar Kochba, namely Simon Magus of the Acts of the Apostles. I shall also be double identifying the latter, connecting him with the magician, again, Bar Jesus (known too as Elymas) also of Acts. But, before we proceed with accounts of the New Testament magician and wonder worker, here is my basic explanation for the plethora of names for our leading character:
Original Names: Simon and Barabbas (Bar-Abbas).
Descriptions: Bar Giora (Piora), ‘Son of the Proselyte’; and Magus, ‘Magician’.
Greek descriptive name: Elymas [Atomas]
Greco-Roman name: (possibly) Alexander [the Coppersmith]
As a baptised Christian: Bar Jesus (can also mean Disciple of Jesus).
As a messiah figure: Bar Kosiba, Bar Kochba (‘Son of the Star’).
Derogatory Name: Bar Kozeba (‘Son of Deception’, ‘Son of Lies’).
If Simon Magus/Bar-Jesus (Alexander?) is also our composite Simon (beginning with Barabbas and ending with Bar Kochba), then he would serve to fill in the large gap (some 35 years?) between Barabbas and the Trial of Jesus on the one hand - when Barabbas first emerges in the Gospels – and, on the other hand, the rise of Simon Bar Giora in the 66 AD Jewish Revolt against Rome.
Here, then, is Wikipedia’s sometimes quite fanciful account of the terrible:
Simon Magus
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Magus):
Simon the Sorcerer or Simon the Magician, in Latin Simon Magus, (Greek Σίμων ὁ μάγος) was a Samaritan magus or religious figure and a convert to Christianity, baptised by Philip, whose later confrontation with Peter is recorded in Acts 8:9-24. The sin of simony, or paying for position and influence in the church, is named for Simon. The Apostolic Constitutions also accuses him of lawlessness.[1]
Surviving traditions about Simon appear in anti-heretical texts, such as those of Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius, where he is often regarded as the source of all heresies. Justin wrote that nearly all the Samaritans in his time were adherents of a certain Simon of Gitta, a village not far from Flavia Neapolis. Irenaeus held him as being one of the founders of Gnosticism and the sect of the Simonians.[2][3][4][5] Hippolytus quotes from a work he attributes to Simon or his followers the Simonians, Apophasis Megale, or Great Declaration. According to the early church heresiologists Simon is also supposed to have written several lost treatises, two of which bear the titles The Four Quarters of the World and The Sermons of the Refuter.
In apocryphal works including the Acts of Peter, Pseudo-Clementines, and the Epistle of the Apostles, Simon also appears as a formidable sorcerer with the ability to levitate and fly at will.
History
Acts of the Apostles
The different sources for information on Simon contain quite different pictures of him, so much so that it has been questioned whether they all refer to the same person. Assuming all references are to the same person, as some (but by no means all) of the Church fathers did, the earliest reference to him is the canonical Acts of the Apostles, this is his only appearance in the New Testament.
But there was a certain man, called Simon, which beforetime in the same city used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one: 10to whom they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, “This man is the great power of God.” 11And to him they had regard, because that of long time he had bewitched them with sorceries. 12But when they believed Philip preaching the things concerning the kingdom of God, and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women. 13Then Simon himself believed also: and when he was baptized, he continued with Philip, and wondered, beholding the miracles and signs which were done. 14Now when the apostles which were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent unto them Peter and John: 15who, when they were come down, prayed for them, that they might receive the Holy Ghost: 16(for as yet he was fallen upon none of them: only they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.) 17Then laid they their hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost. 18And when Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles’ hands the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money, 19saying, “Give me also this power, that on whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost.” 20But Peter said unto him, “Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money. 21Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God. 22Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee, 23for I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity.” 24Then answered Simon, and said, “Pray ye to the Lord for me, that none of these things which ye have spoken come upon me.”[6]
Acts tells of a person named Simōn practicing magic in the city of Sebaste in Samaria, meeting with Philip the Evangelist, and then trying to offer money to the Apostles in exchange for miraculous abilities, specifically the power of laying on of hands. In Acts 8:20, Peter denounces Simon's attitude, and declares, "May your money perish with you!"
Josephus
Josephus mentions a magician named Simon[7] as being involved with the procurator Felix, King Agrippa II and his sister Drusilla, where Felix has Simon convince Drusilla to marry him instead of the man she was engaged to. Some scholars have considered the two to be identical,[8] although this is not generally accepted, as the Simon of Josephus is a Jew rather than a Samaritan.
Wikipedia now proceeds to introduce the notorious woman with whom Simon was so deeply involved. Could she be the wicked “Jezebel” about whom John warns the Christians in the Book of Revelation? I shall come back to this idea later:
Justin Martyr and Irenaeus
Justin Martyr (in his Apologies, and in a lost work against heresies, which Irenaeus used as his main source) and Irenaeus (Adversus Haereses) record that after being cast out by the Apostles he came to Rome where, having joined to himself a profligate woman of the name of Helen, he gave out that it was he who appeared among the Jews as the Son, in Samaria as the Father and among other nations as the Holy Spirit. He performed such miracles by magic acts during the reign of Claudius that he was regarded as a god and honored with a statue on the island in the Tiber which the two bridges cross, with the inscription Simoni Deo Sancto, "To Simon the Holy God". However, in the 16th century, a statue was unearthed on the island in question, inscribed to Semo Sancus, a Sabine deity,[9] leading most scholars to believe that Justin Martyr confused Semoni Sancus with Simon.
Myth of Simon and Helen
Justin and Irenaeus are the first to recount the myth of Simon and Helen, which became the center of Simonian doctrine. Epiphanius of Salamis also makes Simon speak in the first person in several places in his Panarion, and the inference is that he is quoting from a version of it, though perhaps not verbatim.
In the beginning God had his first thought, his Ennoia, which was female, and that thought was to create the angels. The First Thought then descended into the lower regions and created the angels. But the angels rebelled against her out of jealousy and created the world as her prison, imprisoning her in a female body. Thereafter, she was reincarnated many times, each time being shamed. Her many reincarnations included Helen of Troy; among others, and she finally was reincarnated as Helen, a slave and prostitute in the Phoenician city of Tyre. God then descended in the form of Simon Magus, to rescue his Ennoia, and to confer salvation upon men through knowledge of himself.
"And on her account," he says, "did I come down; for this is that which is written in the Gospel 'the lost sheep'."[10]
For as the angels were mismanaging the world, owing to their individual lust for rule, he had come to set things straight, and had descended under a changed form, likening himself to the Principalities and Powers through whom he passed, so that among men he appeared as a man, though he was not a man, and was thought to have suffered in Judaea, though he had not suffered.
"But in each heaven I changed my form," says he, "in accordance with the form of those who were in each heaven, that I might escape the notice of my angelic powers and come down to the Thought, who is none other than her who is also called Prunikos and Holy Ghost, through whom I created the angels, while the angels created the world and men."[11]
…. In this account of Simon there is a large portion common to almost all forms of Gnostic myths, together with something special to this form. They have in common the place in the work of creation assigned to the female principle, the conception of the Deity; the ignorance of the rulers of this lower world with regard to the Supreme Power; the descent of the female (Sophia) into the lower regions, and her inability to return. Special to the Simonian tale is the identification of Simon himself with the Supreme, and of his consort Helena with the female principle.
Hippolytus
Upon the story of "the lost sheep," Hippolytus (in his Philosophumena) comments as follows.
But the liar was enamoured of this wench, whose name was Helen, and had bought her and had her to wife, and it was out of respect for his disciples that he invented this fairy-tale.[12]
Reduced to despair, he says, by the curse laid upon him by Peter, Simon embarked on the career that has been described:
Until he came to Rome also and fell foul of the Apostles. Peter withstood him on many occasions. ….
Simonians
Hippolytus gives a much more doctrinally detailed account of Simonianism, including a system of divine emanations and interpretations of the Old Testament, with extensive quotations from the Apophasis Megale. Some believe that Hippolytus' account is of a later, more developed form of Simonianism, and that the original doctrines of the group were simpler, close to the account given by Justin Martyr and Irenaeus (this account however is also included in Hippolytus' work).
Hippolytus says the free love doctrine was held by them in its purest form, and speaks in language similar to that of Irenaeus about the variety of magic arts practiced by the Simonians, and also of their having images of Simon and Helen under the forms of Zeus and Athena. ….
Epiphanius
Epiphanius writes that there were some Simonians still in existence in his day (c. AD 367), but he speaks of them as almost extinct. Gitta, he says, had sunk from a town into a village. Epiphanius further charges Simon with having tried to wrest the words of St. Paul about the armour of God (Ephesians 6:14-16) into agreement with his own identification of the Ennoia with Athena. ….
Pseudo-Clementine literature
The Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions and Homilies give an account of Simon Magus and some of his teachings in regards to the Simonians. They are of uncertain date and authorship, and seem to have been worked over by several hands in the interest of diverse forms of belief.
Simon was a Samaritan, and a native of Gitta. The name of his father was Antonius, that of his mother Rachel. He studied Greek literature in Alexandria, and, having in addition to this great power in magic, became so ambitious that he wished to be considered a highest power, higher even than the God who created the world. And sometimes he "darkly hinted" that he himself was Christ, calling himself the Standing One. Which name he used to indicate that he would stand for ever, and had no cause in him for bodily decay. He did not believe that the God who created the world was the highest, nor that the dead would rise. He denied Jerusalem, and introduced Mount Gerizim in its stead. In place of the Christ of the Christians he proclaimed himself; and the Law he allegorized in accordance with his own preconceptions. He did indeed preach righteousness and judgment to come: but this was merely a bait for the unwary.
There was one John the Baptist, who was the forerunner of Jesus in accordance with the law of parity; and as Jesus had twelve Apostles, bearing the number of the twelve solar months, so had he thirty leading men, making up the monthly tale of the moon. One of these thirty leading men was a woman called Helen, and the first and most esteemed by John was Simon. But on the death of John he was away in Egypt for the practice of magic ….
And now from: http://www.ccel.org/s/schaff/encyc/encyc10/htm/ii.ix.ii.htm
SIMON MAGUS.
1. In the Book of Acts.
One of the most difficult and interesting problems of apostolic and post-apostolic history is presented by Simon Magus, a Samaritan, who is described at once as a Christian, a Jew, and a pagan, a magician and a sorcerer, a Christian religious philosopher and an archheretic, a pseudo-apostle and a pseudo-Messiah, the founder of a religion and an incarnation of God. The earliest source concerning him is Acts viii. 5-24, where he appears as a sorcerer who had "bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one," yet becoming an adherent of the Apostle Philip and marveling at "the miracles and signs which were done" (verses 5-13). ….
2. In the Apocrypha and Justin Martyr.
The record of Acts is continued by the various recensions of the apocryphal Acts of Peter and kindred literature (cf. Clement of Alexandria, Strom., vii. 17; Hippolytus, Philosophumena, vi. 20; Eusebius, Hist. eccl., ii. 14-15; Arnobius, Adv. gentes ii. 12; Philostorgius, Haer., xxix.; Epiphanius, Haer., xxi. 4; etc.), all of which deal with the conflict between Simon Peter and Simon Magus. The scene is Samaria in the Acta Vercellenses only, the other sources and Justin substituting Judea (or Jerusalem and Caesarea) and, most frequently, Rome. The time is the reign of Nero or (in the Acta Vercellenses) Claudius …. the tradition of Simon's residence at Rome in the reign of Claudius was evidently wide-spread, and Justin also states that nearly all the Samaritans honored Simon Magus "as the first god, above all power, authority, and might," and as accompanied by a certain ex-courtezan Helena, designated "the first understanding from himself" (Apol., i. 26; Trypho, cxx.).
3. His System According to Later Heresiologists.
A valuable supplement to this information is given by a Roman heresiology written before 175 and incorporated by Irenaeus in his Haer., i. 23, also being used, in all probability, by Celsus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and the pseudo-Tertullian. Here Simon Magus appears in an essentially Gnostic garb, being, on the one hand, the "highest God " (or "Father"), and, on the other, "the most sublime power of God"; while Helena (here brought into connection with Tyre) is represented as "the first conception of his [Simon's] mind," "the mother of all," "wisdom," "the Holy Spirit," etc. Emanating from the Father, she descended to the realms beneath, where, in conformity to his will, she created the angelic powers which, without knowing the Father, created the world and man. Unwilling to be considered creatures, the angels imprisoned her in a female body, and she is the lost sheep for whose salvation the Father (Simon) appeared, to rescue both her and mankind from the slavery of the cosmic angelic powers. To deceive these powers, he was manifested to mankind as man, as the Father to the Samaritans and the Son to the Jews, suffering docetic passion. ….
The pseudo-Clementine sources also add that Simon Magus was the son of Antonius and Rachel, that he was educated in Greek learning at Alexandria, and that, after being received among the thirty disciples of John the Baptist, he became head of the sect after the death of his teacher. He is likewise described … as the representative of Samaritan worship on Mount Gerizim who expounded the Law allegorically and denied the resurrection of the dead, as the representative of pagan philosophy (especially of astrological fatalism), and even as the defender of Marcion's antithesis of the good and righteous God.
4. Untenable Theories Concerning Simon Magus.
In some passages in these writings Simon Magus wears the mask of Paul, and attacks are made on Pauline teachings under the guise of polemics in favor of the Petrine theology against the tenets of Simon Magus. …. [There is also] the theory which identifies Simon Magus with the beast of Rev. xiii. 11-17, although it is not impossible that the Beliar which the Sibylline Books, iii. 63 sqq., describe as destined to come "from the Sebastenes" (Samaritans) represented Simon.
…. It is, on the other hand, not improbable that Simon Magus is to be identified with a Jewish magician named Simon who acted as a go-between for the procurator Felix of Judea. This Simon is described by Josephus (Ant., XX., vii. 2) as a Cypriot, but this statement probably rests upon a confusion of the Cyprian capital, Cittium (Hebr. Kittim), with the obscure Samaritan village of Gitta (Hebr. Gittim).
5. A Sorcerer Syncretized with the Sun.
All evidence goes to prove that Simon was what his epithet Magus implies-a sorcerer. This was the motive for his association with the apostles in Samaria, but while it would seem that he pretended to be, in the pagan sense, a god in human form (cf. Justin, Apol., i. 26), there is no indication that either Acts or Justin regarded him as a pseudo-Messiah; and even the apocryphal Acts and the pseudo-Clementine literature characterize him as a false Christ merely on the ground that he was the first-born of Satan (cf. Ignatius, Epist. ad Trallenses, longer version, xi.). …. Historically, then, Simon was … a sorcerer who asserted that he was a god. This assertion, aided by the high fame which he enjoyed throughout Samaria (cf. Acts viii.), reached its culmination in his identification with the Semitic sun-god Shamash, whose cult was united with that of the moon-goddess Astarte. This is confirmed by Simon's companion, Helena, who is unknown to Acts, the apocryphal Acts, the Alexandrine heresiologists, or the "Great Announcement," but whose name ("Moon"), combined with the immoral past ascribed her and her Tyrian home, obviously points to the Tyrian moon-goddess with her licentious rites. How long this cult of Simon Magus, which had evidently arisen long before the time of Justin, persisted in Samaria and other regions is unknown, but in the days of Origen the "Simonians" were exceedingly few in number in Palestine and the neighboring countries (Contra Celsum, i. 57), and by the time of Epiphanius (Haer., xxii. 2) they had become extinct. On the other hand, they had spread widely in the West before 200, and there long maintained themselves, (cf. Hippolytus, Philosophumena, vi. 15). They seem to have developed a sect essentially occult and libertine in character, worshiping Simon (cf. Irenaeus, Haer., I. xxiii. 4), and finally giving rise to two systems, that of the "Great Announcement" and that described by the heresiologists who based their writings upon Justin. ….
Bar Jesus
Whilst Peter and James encounter the wicked magician, Simon Magus, Paul - perhaps also now with John (Acts 13:5) - encounters the wicked Jewish magician, Bar Jesus. It may well be one and the same magician, with Bar Jesus being his name when baptised as a Christian (see below). Bar (‘Son of’) in Hebrew can apparently have a wider meaning than just ‘son’, and might here mean a ‘disciple of Jesus’ (see below). Here is a description of this evil character, who even had his high Roman connections (just as the magician Simon Magus reputedly had an enormous reputation even in the city of Rome) (http://www.bsw.org/?l=71851&a=Comm04.html):
(Atomus) Elymas Bar-Jesus
"When they had gone though the whole island [of Cyprus] as far as Paphos, they met a certain magician, a Jewish false prophet, named Bar-Jesus. He was with the proconsul, Sergius Paulus, an intelligent man, who summoned Barnabas and Saul and wanted to hear the word of God. But Elymas the magician (for that is the translation of his name) opposed them and tried to turn the proconsul away from the faith. But Saul, also known as Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked intently at him and said, "You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord? And now listen - the hand of the Lord is against you, and you will be blind for a while, unable to see the sun. Immediately mist and darkness came over him, and he went about groping for someone to lead him by the hand" (Acts 13:6-11)
The name “Elymas”
Commentators have long been puzzled about how the name "Elymas" can be interpreted to mean "magician" in the passage above. However, Rick Strelan appears to have resolved the problem.(1) In a recent article he suggests that the magician had taken the name of Elam, the eldest son of Shem, the son of Noah, and that Elam was considered an archetypal magician. The name "Elymas" would then have signified "magician" and this would explain Acts 13:8. In support of his proposal Strelan quotes Josephus:
"For Elymos left behind him the Elamites, the ancestors of the Persians" (Ant 1.6.4), and notes that the magoi were commonly associated with the Persians. There is also evidence, not mentioned by Strelan, that Shem was considered a magician. Firstly, in the Book of Jubilees a book of healing arts is given by Noah to his eldest son, Shem:
"And we explained to Noah all the medicines of their diseases, together with their seductions, how he might heal them with herbs of the earth. And Noah wrote down all things in a book as we instructed him concerning every kind of medicine. Thus the evil spirits were precluded from (hurting) the sons of Noah. And he gave all that he had written to Shem, his eldest son; for he loved him exceedingly above all his sons."
The Treatise of Shem is a Pseudepigraphic work, written in the name of Shem, probably in the first century BC. It is an astrological treatise and therefore shows that Shem was associated with astrology.
To sum up: Noah's eldest son was Shem, whose eldest son was Elam, whose name was written "Elymos" by Josephus in the first century. The evidence suggests that there was a tradition that the magical arts of astrology and perhaps healing passed down the Noah-Shem-Elam line. Therefore, by accepting the name "Elymas", Bar-Jesus was identifying himself as a magician in an ancient Jewish tradition.
The name "Bar-Jesus"
Strelan argues that Elymas was, like Simon Magus, a follower of Jesus, of sorts. He suggests that Elymas took the name "Bar-Jesus" because he considered himself to be a disciple of Jesus. Strelan cites several cases where the term "Bar" or "Son of" is used to mean "disciple of". While "Jesus" was a common name for Jews, Strelan is probably right. Someone who had named himself after Elam and had then started to perform his magic in the name of Jesus, might well have taken the name "Son of Jesus" to reflect the new source of his power or inspiration.
....
Atomus
It is clear that "Elymas" was not his birth name. The name "Bar-Jesus", on any hypothesis, cannot have been his only name in infancy, so he must have had another name. Josephus describes a Jewish magician from Cyprus:
"At the time when Felix was procurator of Judaea, he beheld her; and, inasmuch as she surpassed all other women in beauty, he conceived a passion for the lady. He sent to her one of his friends, a Cyprian Jew named Atomus, who pretended to be a magician, in an effort to persuade her to leave her husband and to marry Felix." (Josephus Ant.20.142)
Both Atomus and Elymas were Jewish magicians from Cyprus who associated with high Roman officials. Felix was procurator from A.D. 52-59 so Atomus incident was only about a decade later than the Elymas incident. It is therefore chronologically possible that they were one and the same person. If, as seems likely, Elymas was employed by Sergius Paulus, he might well have lost his job after the encounter with Paul. If his other name, Bar-Jesus, indicates that he had been in contact with the Jesus movement, he may have had Judean connections. Thus it would not be surprising if Elymas left the employment of Sergius Paulus and attached himself to Felix in Judea.
The similarity in sound between "Atomus" and "Elymas" makes the identity more likely.
The western text of Acts has "Etoimos", which may be a form of the name "Atomus".
There are many examples of cases where a new name is chosen, in part, because of its phonetic resemblance to the original name (BarKosiba/BarKokhba/BarKoziba, Titus-Timothy, Mary-Magdalene, Saul-Paul, Silvanus-Silas etc.).
[(1) Strelan "Who Was Bar Jesus (Acts 13, 6-12)?" Biblica 85 (2004) 65-81].
APPENDIX:
Folding Roman Imperial History
Common to the two (supposedly) revolts that history books describe, the Jews against Rome, I had noted, was
(i) a leader, Simon;
(ii) an Eleazer; and
(iii) an approximately 3 years duration.
Above all, I now find, it is apparent from Bar Kochba’s coins that the Temple was still standing in his day and that the Ark of the Covenant was still in it! (“These coins tell us more. In the first place, they show us the Temple and the Ark of the Covenant inside it”).
Moreover, my previous argument was that St. John’s Roman persecutor, some say Nero, some say Domitian, was one and the same emperor, Nero Domitianus. Domitian is frequently referred to as Nero Redivivus. In this way, I have historically ‘folded’ Bar Giora’s 66 AD revolt with Bar Kochba’s 132 AD revolt. Elsewhere I have tentatively put a case for Nero’s also being the emperor Hadrian (both Grecophiles; great builders; homosexual; and vicious). Both sent their best general, who had experience in Britain, to crush a Jewish revolt.
But I am still quite open to how the necessary folding of early Roman imperial history is to be effected.
This composite scenario that I am envisaging now lands us with a plethora of Simon Bar – type names (Bar Abbas; Bar Giora and Bar Kochba) for our leading character. I tentatively suggest that the character’s original name was Simon Bar Abbas (Barabbas), that Bar Giora, variously Bar Piora (‘Son of a Proselyte’), was how he was sometimes described, and we know (and shall read below) that Bar Kochba was the messianic name given to him by his great admirer, Rabbi Akiba.
…. For some time now I have strongly suspected that there has occurred, in the construction of Roman imperial history, the same sort of duplication that revisionists have observed in early Egyptian history. Chronologists, scientists, anthropologists, seem to have a pathological tendency to want to stretch things out. It is the legendary Procrustes of Attica in action with his rack (as opposed to his other, and opposite, radical action of ‘shortening’ or ‘lopping off’).
The so-called Stone Ages, they stretch out over several million years, in single file, though there is abundant evidence for overlap (e.g. the sophisticated astronomical knowledge of so-called primitive man as exhibited in the Lascaux cave paintings). Astronomers keep wanting to expand the size of the universe, galaxy upon galaxy, based on the Doppler Effect (or should that be the Doppelgänger Effect?); and to expand the age of the universe by billions of year (give or take a zero).
The same with the conventional recorded history. In many articles now I have argued, following the initial great insight of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky (Ages in Chaos series), that ancient Egyptian chronology, for instance, has been artificially stretched on the rack to the tune of 500 years or more. It needs a benign Procrustes to shrink it back to its original size. Dr. D. Courville, in The Exodus Problem and its Ramifications, rightly concluded that Egypt’s Old and Middle kingdoms - conventionally separated the one from the other (at their beginnings) by 700 years - were in actual fact contemporaneous, and not successive. Chronological reality is often like that; more of a ‘pond-ripple effect’, spreading outwards, than an ‘Indian file’ successive extension.
In my “Osman’s ‘Osmosis’ of Moses” and “Re-discovering the Egyptianized Moses”, written for The Glozel Newsletter (Waikato, N.Z.), I built upon Courville’s important re-alignment. This enabled me to propose that the great Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh, Chephren (conventionally dated to c. 2500 BC), of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, was the same person as the Twelfth Dynasty’s Sesostris (conventionally dated to c.1950 BC), of the Middle Kingdom. What conventional history has cleft in two, artificially separating the parts by some 500-700 years, needs to be rejoined together again. Pharaoh Chephren (Egyptian Kheper-ka-ra), I argued, was none other than pharaoh Sesostris (also known in Egyptian as Kha-kheper-ra). And this one Pharaoh was the “Chenephres” of Greek tradition; the Pharaoh who married Moses’ Egyptian foster-mother and from whom prince Moses eventually had to flee for his life.
See also related articles at the California Institute for Ancient Studies, e.g: http://www.specialtyinterests.net/old_kingdom.html
Now, that same sort of folding as with Egypt’s Old and Middle Kingdoms, I suspect, needs to be applied to early Roman imperial history - though thankfully not a fold of 700 years in the latter case, but more like 60 years (a minimum figure - though see a few radical suggestions below towards the possibility that even this may need to be expanded). I hope to be able to demonstrate this from various testimonies.
Strange Afterglows and Anomalies
One frequently encounters in Egyptology queries over whether some artefact, piece of literature, or even a destructive action, ought to be dated to the Old or Middle Kingdom. This very querying in itself can often be a tell-tale sign that a chronological folding is required (so that chronologists will no longer be forced into a dispute over a range of estimates incorporating many centuries). Now the same tendency of querying I am finding in historical discussions of Nero (54-68 AD, conventional dating) and Domitian (81-96 AD, conventional dating). Historians puzzle over whether such and such a persecution, or event, or cultural innovation, occurred during the reign of the one or the other Roman emperor.
A tell-tale sign?
It can be (though one can also of course end up with egg all over one’s face when the situation is misread). Some commentators, who cannot make up their minds whether St. John the Evangelist was exiled to the island of Patmos during the reign of the emperor Nero, or the reign of Domitian, end up by compromising and suggesting that the great Evangelist may in fact have experienced two exiles.
One of the first things I decided to do, to test if there might be any possibility of chronologically folding Nero and Domitian - as I am claiming to have been able to have done with Pharaohs Chephren and Sesostris, beginning with a name comparison - was to look at Nero’s other names. Like we, the ancients often had a set of names (not necessarily of course of the same signification as ours); and this can be the cause of much confusion and duplication (leading e.g. to the failure I think to link pharaoh Kheper-ka-ra of Egypt’s Old Kingdom with his alter ego, Kha-kheper-ra of the Middle Kingdom, because the latter Pharaoh is more commonly known by the unsimilar name of Sesostris).
So is there the chance that Nero was also called Domitian?
Even with this new theory in mind, I read over Nero’s four names, without a pause, once I had found them in K. Gentry’s The Beast of Revelation. Perhaps I was distracted by Nero’s nickname, Ahenobarbus; a description of his red facial hair, or beard, causing me to miss a connection. I was only stopped in my tracks a bit further along when I read that a name of Nero’s father was Domitius. I quickly scanned back to Nero’s set of names and saw that, yes, Nero certainly had as one of his names, Domitius (or Domitianus?), the Roman version of the name Domitian.
Nero was Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (Nero Cæsar); Nero being an adopted name. [He was also Nero Claudius Cæsar, see Ancient Rome, C. Mackay, Cambridge 2004, p. 201; a matter that will also shortly come under certain consideration].
Speaking of beards (Aheno-barbus), strangely, from the Memoirs of Julia Balbilla - a companion of the emperor Hadrian’s wife - we read her testimony that Hadrian, who is supposed to have ruled a full half century after Nero (that is, during 117-138 AD, conventional dating), was the first Roman emperor to have sported a beard: ‘Those who never saw more of the emperor [Hadrian] than his picture on a coin, and only knew that it was him because no other emperor had worn a beard, still talked about him as if they had met him”. (E. Speller, Following Hadrian, p. 46. Emphasis added).
But Nero, of course, had also worn a beard as many sculptures of him attest.
Hadrian had, due to Greek influence, grown his beard sometime during his reign. Thus Julia Balbilla: “Not yet an emperor, every gesture heavy with conscious gravity, nor bearded – though he told my brother later it was in Greece he had determined to let his beard grow should he reach full power …” (Ibid., p. 47). Nero, too, was, as we shall learn, a fervent Grecophile.
Hadrian will become the third character in A., the main part of this article (along with Nero and Domitian), whom I consider might to be required to make up the composite Persecutor of St. John the Evangelist, and also of the Jews. He is not unlike Nero in appearance - though perhaps Hadrian is a bit more refined looking.
This similarity of names (Nero Domitius, emperor Domitian, as with the Egyptian pharaohs) is of course by itself no certain proof of identity between Nero and Domitian. But it, coupled with other evidences, and the queries of historians already mentioned, will gradually begin to shape up to some sort of a real picture.
Moreover, the current chronology for the life of St. John the Evangelist would have him ending up as an unrealistically sprightly nonagenarian. I admit that there are some instances of this phenomenon throughout the world, but it is far from being the norm. St. Irenæus wrote (in Adv. Haer. Bk. II) that St. John “continued with the Elders till the times of [the emperor] Trajan”, who is supposed to have arrived on the scene even after Domitian. Trajan (98-117 AD, conventional dating) is regarded as the emperor whom Hadrian would succeed. Though there seems to be some numismatic and monumental evidence that Trajan was Hadrian as well. In my MA thesis for the University of Sydney, The Sothic Star Theory of the Egyptian Calendar, 1994, pp. 187-188, I wrote (with ref. to H. Mattingly & E. Sydenham’s The Roman Imperial Coinage:
From the same, or next, year [i.e. 117 AD, conventional dating] there was a coin having, as its obverse: ‘IMP CAESAR TRAIAN. HADRIANUS AUG’, and as its reverse, holding a globe with a phoenix on top of it, and with the legend: ‘SAEC. AUR’ [Saeculum Aureum = ‘Golden Age’] ….
Hadrian, moreover, was called Traianus [Trajan] Hadrianus Augustus.
There is also some indication that Hadrian and Antoninus Pius overlapped. It is possible that the latter, whose substantial period of reign was completely forgettable, is also in need of an alter ego? “His reign of twenty-three years is remarkable for nothing apart from the fact that nothing remarkable happened in all those years” (Mackay, p. 231). That sounds unlikely. So Antoninus Pius will probably be given some further consideration at a later time.
Trajan, too, was of similar facial feature to Nero and Hadrian. He was also a persecutor of Christians. We shall tentatively include Trajan also in our mix. Thus, now, Nero = Domitian = Trajan = Hadrian.
Hadrian, we shall find, was a rather complex character; perhaps somewhat like Herod the Great. He would seem to have been both like, and unlike, the alter egos whom I am proposing for him. He travelled, loved Greece, and was artistic, like Nero; he could be gloomy and was certainly most superstitious, cruel and fearful, like Domitian; he could also appear dignified, conscientious and competent, like Trajan. But he would be generally considered to have been far less clownish than Nero, whose real person may perhaps have been, to some degree, caricatured due to later criticisms; and less sullen and morose than Domitian. We shall come to discuss the complexities of the man in some detail.
According to the reckonings of the conventional Roman chronology, St. John would have been in his nineties by the time of his dwelling at Ephesus after his return from exile. Yet the activity that he is then said to have undertaken is that of a younger person. Eusebius wholeheartedly endorsed Clement of Alexandria’s account that John not only travelled about the region of Ephesus appointing bishops and reconciling whole churches, but also that while on horseback he chased with all of his might a young man. Unlikely energy for a person in his nineties.
{Similarly, Yohanan ben Zakkai is supposed to have bridged the First and Second Jewish Revolts and lived to be 120. Possible, but unlikely}.
A similar sort of uncertainty, as with the exile of St. John the Evangelist, occurs in relation to the demise of Pontius Pilate. According to The Jerome Biblical Commentary (75:143): “…later legends tell of [Pilate’s] suicide under Caligula (Eusebius, HE 2.7), or of his execution under Nero (John of Antioch, in Fragm. hist. graec. 4.574)”.
Can we possibly also equate Caligula with Nero?
Again, was it Caligula, or was it Claudius - or was it all one and the same - who had granted to Herod Agrippa the Roman province of Judaea?
More of those tantalising questions.
If Nero were now also to be chronologically ‘folded’ with Caligula, with whom he admittedly shares some definite perverse traits - and perhaps also with Claudius (whose name he shares) - then the composite (including Hadrian) would demand a revision of Roman imperial history to the tune of about a century (c. 38 AD-138 AD). It would also seem to curtail too much the New Testament history. The New Testament, if I have read it correctly, does mention only three Roman emperors: (Caesar) Augustus (Luke 2:1); Tiberius (Caesar) (Luke 3:1); and Claudius (Acts 11:28; 18:2). Whilst the same ruler can be referred to in the Bible by different names (e.g. the Assyrian king, Tiglath-pileser [III], 2 Kings 15:29, is also called Pul, 2 Kings 15:9), chronological considerations alone (apart from historical) would probably necessitate at least that Tiberius Augustus ruled later than Augustus, and seemingly that Claudius ruled later than Tiberius, thereby making for three distinct Roman emperors here.
Whether the actual succession was in fact simply (i) Augustus; (ii) Tiberius; and then (iii) our composite emperor (based on Nero), would be difficult to establish at this stage, and I shall be presuming, for the time being, that it was the standard sequence: Augustus; Tiberius; Caligula; Claudius; and Nero. Thus I shall be leaving Caligula and Claudius out of the main mix, concentrating on the Neronic and Domitianic periods (supposedly two periods, that is), which periods we are going to find below also share the commonality of being (supposedly two) periods of Jewish revolt. Some parallels of our composite emperor with Caligula and Claudius will however be mentioned in the course of this article, leaving the door open for possible future equations. Certainly, Caligula and the presumably deformed Claudius do not appear to have the same stamp of appearance as do Nero/Trajan/Hadrian. However, it may be possible to find more likeness between the former and the younger, beardless Nero.
Now, here are some of the examples of the queries historians make between Nero and Domitian, plus some historical anomalies relevant to this revised scenario:
• Despite the strong conviction by some that the emperor worship that they detect in Revelation can be found no earlier than Domitian, others insist that Nero practised it. Nero was particularly infatuated with Apollo, and even claimed the title, “Son of Apollos”. Seneca, one of young Nero’s tutors, convinced Nero that he was destined to become the very revelation of Augustus and Apollo. [A coin with an obverse bust of Trajan has DIVO written on it, which may indicate that the emperor Trajan was divinised, see Sothic Star Theory, p. 187].
• Despite unanimity amongst early Fathers that St. John was banished to Patmos in the reign of Domitian, shortly after his being dipped in a cauldron of burning oil, St. Jerome said that this dipping occurred in Nero’s reign (Against Jovinianum 11:26). That total picture would be appropriate of course if Nero were Domitian.
Another anomaly. The conventional chronology of imperial Rome has also served to throw out of kilter the early history of the Roman Catholic Church that has been chronologically tied to it. Let us take the case of Pope St. Clement I of Rome. Clement, like St. John, is supposed to have written around 90-95 AD, yet he spoke as if the Jerusalem Temple were still standing. Clement’s relevant statement is as follows (I Clement 41):
Not in every place, brethren, are the continual daily sacrifices offered, or the freewill offerings, or the sin offerings and the trespass offerings, but in Jerusalem alone. And even there the offering is not made in every place, but before the sanctuary in the court of the altar; and this too through the high-priest and the aforesaid ministers, after that the victim to be offered hath been inspected for blemishes.
This statement clearly pre-dates 70 AD. Clement as a writer, therefore, needs to be retro-dated by at least 20 years. That similar anomalies occur with the current chronology of Pope Pius I is shown in some detail by Gentry in Before Jerusalem Fell (93ff).
Added to all this is another strange afterglow about 60 years after the destruction of Jerusalem, with the Emperor Hadrian’s putting down a so-called ‘Second’ Jewish Revolt in the Holy Land, and supposedly removing all the stones of the Temple. This, rather than Titus’ destruction of the city in 70 AD, is considered by some to be the more perfect fulfilment of Jesus Christ’s prophecy that ‘... not a single stone here will be left on another; everything will be destroyed’ (Matthew 24:2).
But I ask how could the Jews have rallied so mightily, re-populated the area to such an extent, so soon after 70 AD, when their capital city had been absolutely burned to the ground, and whatever citizens survived had been sold into slavery? Thus The Jerome Biblical Commentary (75:163, 164):
The Jews were slaughtered …. By September 70 [AD] the city [of Jerusalem] was finally taken, plundered, and razed; its walls were torn down … A Roman garrison was stationed in the city ….
Iudaea capta was the inscription that appeared on the coins struck for the Roman province thereafter.
Yet the thought is still entertained that Temple worship resumed briefly about half a century later, at the time of a presumed Second Jewish Revolt (ibid.):
Except for a very brief time during the “Liberation of Jerusalem” by Simon ben Kosibah (Bar Cochba …), when it is likely that the Temple sacrifice was resumed, the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 meant much more than the mere leveling of the holy city. It brought an end to the tradition of centuries according to which sacrifice was offered to Yahweh only in Jerusalem.
We are expected to believe that it basically happened all over again.
But I rather think that it is clearly the one historical scenario duplicated, with the most significant ramifications for early Roman imperial structure. “Its causes are not certain”, we read of the presumed Second Revolt (ibid., 167); a typical comment provoked by the conventional history. Interestingly, when possible causes are proffered, from Dio Cassius, they relate to Hadrian’s anti-Jewishness, which we are going to find was also a trait shared by his various proposed alter egos as well (ibid.):
Dio Cassius (Rom. Hist. 69.12, 1-2) records that [the Second Revolt] was sparked by Hadrian’s attempt to build a Graeco-Roman city (Aelia Capitolina) on the site of Jerusalem and to erect a shrine to Jupiter on the ruins [sic] of the Temple of Yahweh. The Vita Hadriani 14.2 gives an imperial edict forbidding circumcision as the cause for the revolt.
Now this (a) smacks of (b) Caligula, of (c) Claudius, of (d) Nero, and of (e) Domitian. For example:
(b) Caligula (Mackay, p. 198): “He went so far as to order the governor of Syria to erect a statue of himself as god in the Temple in Jerusalem, an act that would have caused a major revolt in Judaea. The governor delayed long enough that [Caligula] was dead before he was obliged to carry out this clearly insane command”.
(c) Claudius (Acts 18:2): “There [Corinth Paul] found a Jew named Aquila … who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all Jews to leave Rome”.
(d) Nero (Mackay, p. 207): “… Nero put T. Flavius Vespasianus (“Vespasian” in English) in charge of suppressing the [Jewish] revolt, and a force totalling about 60,000 men was gathered from various provinces for this purpose”.
(e) Domitian (http://www.christianchronicler.com/history1/first_century_pressure.html): “Later in the first century, another Emperor, Domitian (A.D. 81-96), instituted a more serious persecution [presumably than Nero’s]. Domitian saw Christianity as an unlicensed religion and ordered its persecution in A.D. 91. This persecution arose partly because of Domitian's insistence that he be recognized as deity prior to his death. Rome usually deified an Emperor after his death. Romans accorded such recognition primarily as a patriotic gesture, but the idea offended Christians and they refused to accord deference to the Emperor. In addition, Domitian hated Jews and anything Jewish. Since Christianity arose from Jewish roots, he hated Christians as much as Jews. He directed his persecution against Jews and the Christian community”.
In the case of (f) Trajan: “The sources for Trajan’s campaigns are very poor” (Mackay, p. 225). But we do know that there was a “revolt among the Jews of the diaspora in Roman territory … in Egypt and Cyrene”, against which “Trajan sent one of his best generals from the Dacian war to restore order” (ibid., pp. 227, 228). Trajan was also a persecutor of Christians.
There was a ‘third’ bloody capture of Jerusalem in Roman history. Actually this preceded the other supposedly two assaults in the Neronic and Hadrianic eras. It is considered to have occurred in Republican times, in 63 BC, when Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great), one time ally of Julius Caesar, captured Jerusalem and killed 12,000 Jews. This is quite a massive event, yet is often mentioned only in passing. I suspect that there also needs to be a folding of some Roman Republican history with early Roman Imperial history. The larger-than-life, ambiguous, and even godlike, Julius Caesar, may be a composite of several historical characters. See e.g: http://www.specialtyinterests.net/old_kingdom.html
Moreover, there was (i) a Pompey the Great (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus) also at the time of Caligula (see A. Barrett, Caligula – the Corruption of Power, p. 237) about a century after (presumably) the Republican Pompey. And there was then also (ii) a Marcus Crassus; the same name as the ‘earlier’ Pompey’s fellow consul (see Mackay, p. 135). Moroever, Caligula may have been murdered by (iii) a Cassius Longinus (Barrett, p. 162); the same name as the chief conspirator against Julius Caesar.
All very strange indeed and greatly needing to be explained – but the explanation of which is beyond the scope of this particular article!
The Travelling Emperor
Given my premise that Nero was also Hadrian, then one might be led to suggest that Hadrian’s grand tour of Asia Minor, at a late stage in his reign, “finalising his great league of unified Greek communities” (ibid., p. 166) and indulging in self-glorification, might be somewhat synchronous with St. John’s seven letters to the churches in that regions - and also with St. Paul’s great missionary activities there - strengthening them for the persecution. I take up Speller’s account of Hadrian’s travels, beginning on p. 167:
So the cities of the eastern empire resurrected their history, discovered ancient links with the homeland, excitedly re-named themselves: Hadriane, Hadriani, Hadriana, Hadrianoutherae, Hadrianeia, Hadrianoi, Hadrianopolis; and in the main, enthusiastically embraced the new cult of [Hadrian’s deceased lover] Antinous, just as they had always, unlike Rome, worshipped the living emperor. ….
Tarsus, the greatest city of Cilicia, was already a thriving commercial centre … when Hadrian arrived in 131 and founded the hoped-for games ….
Hadrian swept through the great Greek cities of Pamphylia and Lycia, distributing largesse, founding monuments …. Arches were erected at Attalia (modern Antalya) and Perge. At Phaselis ….
… He arrived at Ephesus on the west coast of Asia minor and celebrated at the new temple erected in his name ….
[Could this be also when he exiled St. John of Ephesus to Patmos?].
… Athens received money, buildings, dedications to Athenian boys, a corn dole for its poorest citizens and the gift of the island of Cephalonia … The supreme moment of theatre was the dedication of the temple of Olympian Zeus …. This time not just a god but the abode of a god – or gods: Zeus and Hadrian – was revealed. A magnificent ivory and gold statue of Zeus was unveiled. Hadrian, who was also worshipped there, donated a rare serpent to the priests. In the orgy of gratitude, statues of Hadrian donated by Greek communities were erected everywhere within the complex. ….
In all of this Grecophilia, indifference to Rome, emperor-worship, and lavish theatre, one cannot help thinking of Nero. Thus Mackay (op. cit., pp. 204, 207, 208):
One aspect of Nero’s personality (apart from his proclivity to murder) that earned him the disfavor of the upper class was his fondness for the arts. Already in A.D. 60, he instituted a new series of Greek-style artistic contests in Rome under the name Neronia (“Neronian games”). He wished to perform himself at that time, but the senate managed to avoid this by offering him victory crowns ahead of time; at the second celebration in A.D. 65, he did perform. His participation was disgraceful in terms of Roman values, since performers were normally people of low social standing. ….
Despite the clear signs of dissatisfaction with his rule, Nero decided in the fall of A.D. 66 to cross over to Greece, the land of culture. There he intended to display his artistic skills (the Olympic games had even been postponed for his visit). Nero apparently competed honestly, but it should come as no surprise that he won whatever competition he entered. In honor of his reception, Nero restored the province to the semi-independent status it had under the Republic. Nero had a great time, but his days were numbered.
… When [Nero] retuned to Rome in early 68 A.D., he celebrated a sort of parody of a traditional military triumph, entering the city in the manner of a victorious Greek athlete rather than as a Roman general … Finally, instead of winding up at the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, where victorious generals fulfilled their vows by dedicating plunder, he rode to the Palatine temple of Apollo, the god of artists. Nero was going out of his way to flout Roman sensibilities ….
Historians are reluctant, however, to liken Hadrian to Nero in all of this. Speller, for instance, contrasts Hadrian’s presumably more dignified sense of theatre with that of the supposedly clownish Nero (pp. 171-172):
"There were parties, readings and music. At the theatre Hadrian, inevitably, excelled himself. Unlike Nero, Hadrian never appeared as a buffoon on the stage, but day after day he simply played himself, and extraordinary actor-manager of his own life on the stage of the city.….Returning to Rome meant facing a more demanding, more critical population.But these emperors, or this emperor, were/was complex. Allowing for some bad press, and possible exaggeration from late sources, the tyrannical Nero could be Hadrian".
About Hadrian, Speller has written (pp. 3, 4):
"
Despite his apparent strengths, something went very wrong in the last years of his life … at his death … he was said to be hated by the people; some even called him a tyrant.
… A combination of melancholy, quick temper and intellectual competitiveness did not promote friendship or even, at times, respect …".
Also with Nero, he is thought to have made a very good start, but then to have deteriorated. “It was generally agreed that Nero’s first five years were exemplary”, writes Mackay (p. 202), but, later, “Nero increasingly asserted his independence, as he fell under the sway of his girlfriend Poppaea and other bad influences”.
Was this Poppaea Sabina the same person as Hadrian’s wife, Sabina?
The same pattern emerges with Caligula (whether or not he be the same as Nero/Hadrian). Mackay again (p. 198):
"
In the fall of A.D. 37, Gaius [Caligula] nearly died of an illness, and after his recovery began acting tyrannically. The biographer Suetonius claims that the illness deranged him …. Gaius became increasingly erratic and cruel in his behavior. He stole other men’s wives (twice) [Nero had stolen Poppaea from general Otho], and the treason law was revived. … He came to have delusions of grandeur ….
And again with Domitian; some inherent good, but a steep decline into tyranny" (Speller, p. 36):
"… although there are records to suggest that he was in some ways a conscientious ruler, he lived the remainder of his life in a state of increasing paranoia, expressed in pre-emptive and imaginative sadism …. Domitian’s fear made him cruel, and the more cruel he was the more he had to fear; to an educated Greek or Roman, in his sadistic paranoia, Domitian displayed the characteristics of the eponymous Greek tyrant Damocles".
Interestingly, the so-called Second Revolt lasted about as long as did the First – about the three and a half years. Hadrian’s main Jewish opponent was the legendary Simon bar Cochba (son of the Star), thought by the Jews to be the Messiah. Indeed Rabbi Aqiba, intellectual leader of the Jews, proclaimed Simon as such. Had not Jesus Christ himself warned his followers that some would rise up claiming to be the Christ, i.e. the Messiah (Matthew 24:24)? And Simon perfectly fits this description. Simon was a guerilla fighter, and is very reminiscent of the terrible Simon bar Giora of 70 AD, guerilla fighter, who led one of the three factions in Jerusalem, fighting amongst themselves even when the Romans had the city encircled.
Even the Jewish spiritual leader on both occasions was one called Eleazer. Thus The Jerome Biblical Commentary (First Revolt): “The leader of the Jews was Eleazer …” (75:158), and (Second Revolt): “… their spiritual leader, the priest Eleazer …” (75:168).
The case of the missing wall. We read in the Jerome Biblical Commentary about a wall that Herod Agrippa is supposed to have built during the reign of the emperor Claudius, but which might actually have been built during the First Jewish Revolt (a decade or so later) or in Bar Cochba’s time of the Second Jewish Revolt (75:151):
"Herod Agrippa undertook to build Jerusalem’s “third north wall”, which, if completed, would have made the city impregnable …. But before it could be finished, Claudius who had been warned by Maurus, the legate of Syria, forbade any further work on it (Ant. 19.7, 2 § 326-27). The location of this wall is disputed by archaeologists; either it coincided roughly with the present North Wall of the Old City … or with a line of ancient wall somewhat N of the Old City …. However, an excavation in 1965 by Kathleen Kenyon … suggests a date no earlier than the sixties for “Sukenik’s [previous archaeologist’s] wall”. Either it was not built by Agrippa, or else Agrippa only laid out the line for the third wall and the real building was done in the First Jewish Revolt (W.F. Albright) or in Bar Cochba’s time".
The ‘folding’ of imperial Roman chronology that I am primarily proposing here, albeit extremely tentatively at this early stage, is:
A. Nero = Domitian = (more tentatively) Trajan = Hadrian.
B. First Jewish Revolt = Second Jewish Revolt.
C. Simon Giora = Simon Bar Kosiba (alias Bar Kochba)
D. Leader of the Jews, Eleazer = spiritual leader and priest, Eleazer.
only saw the devastation brought about by sin, war, hunger and death; he also saw, in the first place, the victory of Christ.—POPE PIUS XII, Address, November 15, 1946; footnote of The Navarre Bible, "Revelation", p.70
