What evidence is there that the possessed people healed by Jesus were allegory of Zealots?

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Giuseppe
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What evidence is there that the possessed people healed by Jesus were allegory of Zealots?

Post by Giuseppe »

As from thread.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Charles Wilson
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Re: What evidence is there that the possessed people healed by Jesus were allegory of Zealots?

Post by Charles Wilson »

Joe Atwill, Caesar's Messiah:

https://www.amazon.com/Caesars-Messiah- ... 669&sr=8-1

Do yourself a favor and buy this book.
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rakovsky
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Re: What evidence is there that the possessed people healed by Jesus were allegory of Zealots?

Post by rakovsky »

This topic came up for me indirectly when I was reading Josephus. I was skeptical about his story about the Gadarene dissidents who opposed Herod supposedly killing themselves, since I considered the possibility that Herod's forces might have killed them and presented it as suicide.

To recap:
in Chapter 10 of Book XV, Josephus tells how people of Gadara publicly objected to Caesar about Herod's rule, and then that night they supposedly killed themselves for fear of Herod:
... as the Gadarens saw the inclination of Caesar and of his assessors, and expected, as they had reason to do, that they should be delivered up to the king, some of them, out of a dread of the torments they might undergo, cut their own throats in the night time, and some of them threw themselves down precipices, and others of them cast themselves into the river, and destroyed themselves of their own accord; which accidents seemed a sufficient condemnation of the rashness and crimes they had been guilty of; whereupon Caesar made no longer delay, but cleared Herod from the crimes he was accused of.
One curious issue related to this question is the setting for the Gospel story of the exorcism of the demoniac and the suicide of the pigs that get the demon. The Gospel story is set either (A) at Gadara or (B) at Gerasa, which is near Gadara, or (C) at Gergesa, which is on the Sea of Galilee. That is, different manuscripts say one or the other, according to Wiktionary.

I suspected that there is some overlap between Josephus' story and the Gospel story, and that it is not just a random coincidence. Maybe the allusion would be that the people in Gadara who killed themselves were driven into a demonic state or had demons that drove them to kill themselves. In that case, the Gospel story would only serve as very circumstantial evidence that the Gadarenes killed themselves. Of course, conceivably the reverse could be true, ie.: In the end of the 1st Century, Josephus could have written his account of the incident at Gadara and alluded himself to Mark's earlier Gospel story already in circulation.

BroJangles writes on the Reddit page "Archeological evidence for Gerasene Swines":
Josephus does relate an anecdote about some Gadarenes throwing themselves into a river (not the Sea of Galilee), but Mark's version of the demoniac is the original one, and Mark said Gerasa. Matthew changed that to Gadara (possibly because Gerasa was 30 miles away from the lake. Gadara was closer but still 12 miles away from the lake. Mark often shows a confused or erroneous understanding of Palestinian geography)
But someone else on Reddit cast doubt on Brojangle's claim that Mark was mistakenly calling it Gerasa: "Had you opened up your trusty Nestle-Aland at page 102, you would have seen that Gadarene was indeed a textual variant for Gerasine in Mk 5:1. (In no lesser sources than the Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus.)"

Wikipedia's article on the Exorcism of the Gerasene swine says that in Matthew, "The location is also changed to the region of the "Gadarenes" (Gadara) as in most Bible translations. The King James Version in (Matthew 8:28) has the location as "Gergesenes" which corresponds to the modern "Kursi" (Kheras), the most plausible location of the Gospel event."

My research on the prophecies of the Messiah's resurrection: http://rakovskii.livejournal.com
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