Judas the Galilean of Nazareth

[Jobar]

No need for a new thread, as the answer to PO9's question is "no".

As I mentioned, Unterbrink's work is not well written; his timeline graphics are extremely difficult to decipher, his chapter titles are often not descriptive of the material covered, and he desperately needs a comprehensive index. I hope that he gets some professional editorial help, and does a complete re-write at some point; his ideas are good, just poorly presented.

Also, I think he could fill a much larger book (this one is 265 pages of rather large print, and 7 appendices) with his thesis and its manifold consequences. For instance, I don't recall him even mentioning Q- might it have been a biography of Judas? If such a document ever existed, it seems strange to me how thoroughly it's been extirpated from all historical mention. Why? If it was a tale told from the viewpoint of a Jewish rebel against Rome, or sympathetic to such a one, that would be abundant justification for the Romans to ban it, and all the church copyists thereafter to treat it as blackest heresy.

The number of mysteries this hypothesis offers plausible answers to is large, and so far I haven't seen any problems with it that appear to render it seriously incoherent or implausible. (IMO, of course; I'm neither the Biblical expert nor the student of Judeo-Christian history that many here are. If I read about any problems that put the quietus on Unterbrink's idea, I'll just go back to my former mythicist stance! )

[perseusomega9]

"The author" is not the principle focus of the thread; nor is Paul; not is the Pauline epistles.

So the author does not use the Pauline epistles as a primary source? They aren't used as part of his reconstruction of Judas of Galilee = Jesus of Galilee?

[Jobar]

Some might be interested to know that Unterbrink's book was first mentioned at the Secular Cafe in the thread 'John Remsburg and the mythicist/historicist debate', http://secularcafe.org/showthread.php?t=21725. In post #84 there, Koyaanisqatsi is discussing Judas Iscariot, and the thread segues into talking about Judas the Galilean thusly-

Yes, and there's a whole list of things I can say about that, starting with the obvious fact that his name is "Judas Iscariot" and likely a reference to either Judas of Gallilee and/or a deliberate play on words, but for now I'm just trying to take GMark as it stands and reveal all of the more obvious examples of inconsistencies and contradictions that I believe evidence (particularly) a revisionist history as opposed to either a complete fiction or factual account.

Later, in #103, I comment on something Politesse said-

But if we hypothesize that Jesus was non-historical, then some chronicle of Judas' rebellion, heroizing him (indeed, naming him Messiah) and condemning the Romans, could well have been a main source of much of the Gospels; Q, perhaps. But the owners and readers of that chronicle would have been violently persecuted as rebels against Rome, and thus deadly dangerous to preach from. So a 'stealth' version was created, re-naming the central character, and doing a song-and-dance routine to exonerate Pilate and the Romans from any guilt at all for the death of their Messiah.

After all, if Jesus is a pastiche of hero-figures, as the mythicists hypothesize, it actually makes it more believable, that Judas' life was a generation earlier than Jesus.

At that time I did some googling, which led me to Unterbrink's work; post 128 there:

Here's a book relevant to this discussion: http://www.amazon.com/Judas-Galilean-Fl ... 0595321976

You can read a fair lot of it at that Amazon link.

Much of the subsequent discussion is about Judas.

My own final post in that thread, from before I read Unterbrink's book, applies as much now as it did then.

Wordy, all these hypotheses are built on extremely skimpy data; we always should remember that even Josephus, perhaps the most dependable source, may have been mistaken, or lying, or redacted by copyists long after he wrote. So all these theories need to be taken with varying amounts of salt.

But yeah, this particular version of events makes good sense, and seems to fit the (sparse and possibly inaccurate) data with fair consistency.

[DCHindley]

... I did some googling, which led me to Unterbrink's work; post 128 there:

Here's a book relevant to this discussion: http://www.amazon.com/Judas-Galilean-Fl ... 0595321976

You can read a fair lot of it at that Amazon link.

Much of the subsequent discussion is about Judas.

My own final post in that thread, from before I read Unterbrink's book, applies as much now as it did then.

Wordy, all these hypotheses are built on extremely skimpy data; we always should remember that even Josephus, perhaps the most dependable source, may have been mistaken, or lying, or redacted by copyists long after he wrote. So all these theories need to be taken with varying amounts of salt.

But yeah, this particular version of events makes good sense, and seems to fit the (sparse and possibly inaccurate) data with fair consistency.

Yeah, Unterbrink does make some interesting observations, but also employs a lot of color commentary ("obviously" "surely" etc.) that suggests he is primarily making an apology for his POV. The factoids he utilizes (quotes from ancient authors, etc.) are real, but he plucks them sort of willy-nilly from disparate sources to bolster his case, which makes his case not nearlky as strong as he would like you to believe. And the modern authors he cites in the footnotes are interesting. Hyam MacCoby, Robert Eisenman, A. Ellegard, and so on, could just as easily been S G F Brandon, Robert Eisler or Hugh Schonfield. I used to like J M Robertson's Pagan Christs until I re-read it after gaining a more critical perspective and found it was mostly assertions without much in the way of citations of ancient sources. One is actually be better off using Freke & Gandy's Jesus Mysteries, but I think he cites that as well.

Now don't get me wrong, some of these authors (particularly Eisler, Eisenman - who largely follows Eisler in many areas, Brandon - who goes into great lengths about Jesus' possible links to Zealotism, and even Schonfield - especially for his comparative timelines and willingness to bring in subjects like Sabbatical years that no one else was talking about) make valid observations, although one can always nit pick their explanations for the observations.

His timeline for Judas the Galilean makes a lot of assumptions. I though the Judah son of Matthias who brought down the eagle was executed by Herod, but Unterbrink has him pop up alive again as Judah the Gaulonite in the revolt after Herod's death. When the latter's sons were caught and executed by the procurators, they are said to descend from Judah the Galilean who led a tax revolt after Herod's death. They could theoretically be different people, but due to similarities in details about their stories Unterbring connects them as referring to a single individual.

DCH

[toejam]

Purchased Unterbrink's "Judas of Nazareth" yesterday. Three chapters in. Makes for a great page turner. And it's definitely making me think, which I appreciate. I love considering new ideas. But it's like trying to build a house from cards. The more you think it's coming together, a small gust of wind blows the whole thing down. There's a part of me that really wants this thesis to be true as it's such a cool idea. But it's becoming increasingly obvious that much of the evidence is being jerrymandered and is highly speculative. The devil is in the details. I'm open to the big-picture idea that the historical Jesus was a whitewashing of the legends surrounding the historical Judas the Galilean, and that the Saulus character in Josephus was the historical Paul, but the moment one tries to make a detailed argument, the pieces fall apart. The 'big picture' has more going for it than the detailed argument, if that makes sense.

[maryhelena]

Purchased Unterbrink's "Judas of Nazareth" yesterday. Three chapters in. Makes for a great page turner. And it's definitely making me think, which I appreciate. I love considering new ideas. But it's like trying to build a house from cards. The more you think it's coming together, a small gust of wind blows the whole thing down. There's a part of me that really wants this thesis to be true as it's such a cool idea. But it's becoming increasingly obvious that much of the evidence is being Jerry-mandered and is highly speculative. The devil is in the details. I'm open to the idea that the historical Jesus was a whitewashing of the legends surrounding the historical Judas the Galilean, and that the Saulus character in Josephus was the historical Paul, but the moment one tries to make a detailed argument, the pieces fall apart.

Underbrink is building his argument on sand. There is no historical evidence for the Josephan figure of Judas the Galilean. When Josephus relates a story it's always best to check his dating. In the case of Judas the Galilean it's 6 c.e. - approximately 70 years from 63 b.c.e. The Josephan story about Judas the Galilean and his two sons is very likely a retelling of earlier history. History about Aristobulus II and his two sons Alexander and Antigonus. History repeats itself - no more so than when it's a prophetic historian doing the retelling....Josephus is as able to write pseudo-history as is any gospel writer...

If one wants to look to history, Jewish history, as inspiration for the gospel writers - then one has to deal with actual historical figures not shadows, as it were, of historical figures.

Josephus claims Hasmonean ancestry - and it is Hasmonean history that is the historical thread running through his work - and the gospel story.

[toejam]

There is no historical evidence for the Josephan figure of Judas the Galilean.

Nonsense. We've been through this already viewtopic.php?f=3&t=941&start=30#p21351

[maryhelena]

There is no historical evidence for the Josephan figure of Judas the Galilean.

Nonsense. We've been through this already viewtopic.php?f=3&t=941&start=30#p21351

OK - present the evidence?

[toejam]

Josephus and Acts.

[toejam]

Simply asserting their references don't count as evidence is as silly as Wendy Wright declaring that fossils don't count as evidence for evolution.