Jesus was not the only messianic figure to appear in ancient Palestine. The Jewish people of the first century were waiting for a messiah who would rise up to free them from Roman rule – and a number of seeming messiahs did appear (Acts 5:37). Two of the most important of these supposed messiahs were Simon bar Giora and Simeon bar Kosevah. You may not have heard of these individuals, but for many they were of life and death importance in their day, and their stories carry a message we can all learn from.
Simon bar Giora (died AD 70/71) was probably born during the later life of Jesus or only a few years after Jesus’s death. He was one of the many patriot leaders who emerged in Judea as a result of Roman oppression and misrule, and he eventually rose to prominence as the head of one of the major Judean factions during the First Jewish-Roman War. These patriot leaders gathered large followings and attacked both the Romans and those seen as Roman sympathizers. They appear to have been motivated by religious as well as political concerns and Simon apparently proclaimed liberty for slaves and the oppressed, very likely following Isaiah’s message (Isaiah 61:1) of the Lord’s Anointed who would bring good tidings to the humble and proclaim liberty to the captives – just as Jesus had done (Luke 4:18). But while Jesus did not claim to go beyond this point at his first coming, Simon embraced the following words of the prophecy which were that the anointed would also “proclaim … the day of vengeance of our God” (Isaiah 61:2).
Simon was a physically powerful man, and his victories against the Romans exhibited good leadership and strategic thinking as well. Even the Jewish historian and Roman collaborator Josephus – who clearly hated Simon – was forced to admit that the leader “was regarded with reverence and awe, and such was the esteem in which he was held by all under his command, that each man was prepared even to take his own life had he given the order.” In fact, Simon was acclaimed by the people as their messianic savior, yet when the tide of war turned and the Romans eventually defeated Simon, he was taken to Rome and executed there. In Judea, in the wake of the brutal Roman victory and resulting destruction of the Jewish temple in AD 70, Simon was soon forgotten.
Simeon bar Kosevah – also called bar Kochba – (died AD 135) achieved even greater fame with the Jewish people, convincing them of his anointed status at the time of the Second Jewish-Roman War. This second Jewish rebellion took place sixty years after the first and lasted approximately three years. During that time Bar Kosevah tried to revive the Hebrew language (by then largely replaced by Aramaic and Greek) and to make Hebrew the official language of the Jews as part of his messianic ideology. Although he was widely accepted by many Jews as the messiah who would free them from Roman misrule (he was even said to be the messiah by Akiva, the most famous rabbi of the time), Bar Kosevah also made many enemies. He did not unify the people, and according to the early Christian writer Eusebius, he executed many Christians for their refusal to fight against the Romans.
Bar Kosevah was also not a great military strategist or leader and despite many early victories achieved with an army of over 200,000, his downfall to the Romans was inevitable. After his defeat and death, most Jews soon forgot his messianic status and later Rabbis changed his name – calling him “Bar Koziba,” meaning “Son of the Lie.”
After the disastrous Second Jewish-Roman War, messianic hopes and claims diminished, but when the Jewish Talmud was composed, it made several predictions for the arrival of the messiah, including the year 440 (Sanhedrin 97b) and 471 (Avodah Zarah 9b). Around this time a Jew named Moses of Crete claimed that he was the one the Talmud had predicted. Promising that, like his biblical namesake, he would lead his followers through the water and back to the Promised Land, Moses convinced many of his fellow Jews to leave behind their belongings and march directly into the sea. Moses himself disappeared, but many of his followers drowned. He too was soon forgotten.
But these and other claimed messiahs all teach us something important about the Christian faith. While the death and resurrection of Jesus is often disparaged by cynics and disbelievers as just another messiah story, perpetrated by those who did not want to give up their messianic hopes, it is clearly different. Despite the expectations and whipped up emotions of the followers of the many supposed messiahs, not a single one was believed to have been raised from the dead. The followers of each of these pseudo- messiahs simply accepted their leader had been killed, and their movements disappeared almost overnight. This was not so, of course, with the early Christians who, had they not believed that Jesus had been resurrected, would have simply done the same as the followers of every messianic figure before and after him, and given up.
That the early Christians did not give up their hopes is obviously based on the great many individuals the New Testament tells us were witnesses to the resurrection. As N. T. Wright has written: “We are forced to … account for the fact that a group of first-century Jews, who had cherished messianic hopes and centered them on Jesus of Nazareth, claimed after his death that he really was the Messiah despite the crushing evidence to the contrary” (The Resurrection of the Son of God, p. 562). The followers of no other messiah claimed anything like that. The good news of Christianity is that Christianity is not just another messiah story.
