Thanks again for the link Giuseppe. I agree with Joseph Turmel's assessment that 2 Thess 2 is a prophecy about a specific real individual. Having read now hundreds of ancient prophecies and having some understanding of how and why they were produced, I had drawn the exact same conclusions as Turmel regarding the nature of the prophecy in terms of it having been written with knowledge of details about the "man of lawlessness".
I did not, however, know much about Bar Kokhba. If what Turmel says is correct about Bar Kokhba, then I agree with his assessment of the identity of the man of lawlessness.
If that is indeed true then I think its a very big deal, because I think certainly Mark 13:14 is based on 2 Thess 2.
But, this does create a bit of confusion. However, this type of confusion was common regarding ancient prophetic material, precisely because people were misled about the origin and date of authorship of the materials.
So here is what I think may have happened:
The bulk of the Pauline letters, the so-called authentic letters, were written prior to the First Jewish-Roman War. There actually was some Pauline ministry, but it was ultimately insignificant in its own time.
In the lead up to the Bar Kokhba revolt, perhaps beginning with Hadrian's actions in Jerusalem, there was a renewed interest in Paul and the Pauline letter collection was formed. As a part of this process 2 Thessalonians was written and added to the collection, very likely by the person who made the collection.
This collection now garnered some interest.
The person who wrote what we call the Gospel of Mark obtained the collection and understood Paul to be a figure who lived in the mid first century, prior to the First Jewish-Roman War. This person did not know that 2 Thess was a later forgery and read it as if it were written by the "real Paul" prior to the First Jewish-Roman War. This person did not realize that the the "man of lawlessness" was supposed to be Bar Kokhba and mistakenly identified him as Caligula.
This misunderstanding is what led to the setting of his story during the reign of Pilate per Philo's works that covered the reign of Caligula. The writer of Mark then sets up the Caligula Crisis as the prelude to the First Jewish-Roman War.
24 “But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, 25 and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers that are in the heavens will be shaken. 26 Then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. 27 And then He will send forth the angels, and will gather together His elect from the four winds, from the farthest end of the earth to the farthest end of heaven.
So the first tribulation is the Caligula Crisis, then "after that tribulation" is the First Jewish-Roman War, which is described in Mark by relating Josephus' description of the armies in the clouds to the prophecy of Daniel.
But the use of 2 Thess 2 by Mark then necessarily means that Mark had to have been written between about 135 and 140, which I find quite astonishing. I had long been holding out that Mark was written at least prior to 120.
But I've seen this exact type of temporal misplacement among ancient writers when interpreting prophecies over and over again, leading exactly to these types of confusing and convoluted outcomes. This was quite common in interpretation of the Sibylline prophecies for example, leading to the creation of stories with confusing timelines. I think Mark 13 is so confusing and enigmatic precisely because of this.
The writer was having a hard time understanding 2 Thess 2 and the best he could figure was the 2 Thess 2 was talking about Caligula, even though the statue was never actually setup in the temple. But he shoehorned the reference in anyway because he thought it was authentic Paul.