Was Jesus One of Many Would-Be Messiahs?

"Countless prophets, preachers, and messiahs tramped through the Holy Land delivering messages of God's imminent judgment." — Reza Aslan, Zealot, 2013¹

"In not one case do we hear of any group, after the death of its leader, claiming that he was in any sense alive again." — N. T. Wright, 1996²

Summary

A popular argument runs like this.  First-century Judea was full of men who claimed to be the messiah.  Jesus was one more.  His followers happened to keep going after his death, as followers sometimes do, and so we remember him and forget the rest.  The best-selling statement of it is Reza Aslan's Zealot, which places Jesus beside "Hezekiah and Judas, Theudas and Athronges, the Egyptian and the Samaritan, Simon son of Giora and Simon son of Kochba" as one more man killed "for daring to claim the mantle of king and messiah."¹  This article tests that argument against the sources that name these men.

1. Jesus does belong to a real type. Between the death of Herod in 4 BC and the fall of Bar Kokhba in AD 135, the table contains eighteen Jewish royal, prophetic or rebel entries, including an unnamed group and one lone prophet. Eight used royal language: a crown, royal robes, or the title of king. Six promised signs as prophets. The rest were rebel chiefs or a lone prophet. Rome crucified Jesus under the charge "THE KING OF THE JEWS,"³ which is the category of the crowned men. In what he did, Jesus is closer to the prophets.
2. "Many messiahs" is not what the sources say. Almost everything known about these men comes from one writer, Josephus, and he never calls any of them a messiah. He uses the Greek word christos, "anointed," of one man only: Jesus.⁴ The only other Jewish leader called messiah in any source is Bar Kokhba, and the title comes from the Jerusalem Talmud, compiled about three centuries after his death.⁵ A Samaritan, Dositheus, is said by Origen to have claimed to be "the Christ."⁶ By the strict definition the leading specialist uses, a man who claimed to restore David's line or fulfil prophecy, the count before Bar Kokhba is zero apart from Jesus,⁷ though Collins's own chronology still labels the three royal claimants of 4 BC "messianic pretenders."⁷ By the loosest, counting every named man with royal language and every sign prophet, it is fourteen in 140 years. Josephus adds that in 4 BC whoever gathered a band "pressed on as king,"⁴ so the true number of would-be kings in that one year of anarchy was larger than the named list. He names none of the others and calls none of them messiah. Neither count supports "countless."
3. None of these Jewish movements is reported to have kept its fallen leader as king or messiah, except his. That is a narrower claim than "every movement died with its leader," and the narrower claim is the one the sources support. Most followings were killed, captured or scattered, and for several the record simply stops. One, the family and teaching of Judas the Galilean, outlived him by about seventy years, under new leaders from his family. Acts 5:36-37 reports the dispersal of Judas's followers, while Josephus traces the continuing influence of his teaching and relatives. Immediate dispersal and later continuity can coexist; the sources do not establish that his following permanently ended. Josephus also reports the Christians' survival. Even in the minimal text most scholars accept, he says Jesus's followers "did not cease" to love him after the crucifixion and "the tribe of Christians … has not died out."⁸
4. Movements can survive their leaders. The Cretan "Moses" of the 430s vanished and his followers dispersed. The movement of Sabbatai Zevi survived his conversion to Islam in 1666 and his death in 1676. Much of the Lubavitch movement went on proclaiming its Rebbe, who died in 1994, as the messiah,⁹ though by 2018 its leading ethnographer found that fervour "all but abated."¹⁰ In antiquity, too, the followers of the Samaritan Dositheus and of John the Baptist outlived their leaders. David Berger, an Orthodox historian of Jewish messianism, counts "several dozen identifiable, mostly inconsequential messianic figures whose followings dissipated almost immediately after their deaths," with Jesus and Sabbatai as the "only two significant exceptions" before Lubavitch.⁹ These comparisons establish that survival is possible. Berger's judgment does not supply a measured frequency.
5. The survivors differ in what they said about the death. The Dositheans said their leader "had not tasted death." Sabbatai's prophet taught that the messiah was "hidden, body and soul," and that whoever thinks "he died like all men … commits a grave sin."¹¹ A legend even told of his cave found empty "on the third day," as proof that he had not really died.¹¹ Among Lubavitch messianists a growing number said by 2001 that the Rebbe "never died,"⁹ others expect him to rise in the future, and one scholar reports that "a few" claimed he had already been raised.¹² Death-denial or an expected future return is prominent in the Dosithean, Sabbatean and Lubavitch accounts. The reports of John's surviving disciples do not specify either response. The first Christians affirmed the death, by the most public and shameful method Rome had, and made it their founding message that God had already raised him. No other movement examined here is documented as making an accomplished resurrection its founding proclamation. Allison's reported Lubavitch minority nevertheless prevents a claim that no other group ever believed it. This is a statement about the surviving record, which for most ancient groups is thin and hostile.

Verdict.  Jesus was one of a type, and the skeptic is right that Rome saw him as one more royal pretender.  The surviving named cases do not establish that he was one of "countless" or "dozens" of messiahs:  the named list does not establish that number.  Among its Jewish leaders, only Bar Kokhba besides Jesus is called messiah, in sources compiled three centuries later;  Origen also calls the Samaritan Dositheus Christ.  The real difference lies in what the followers said after the leader died.  That difference does not prove the resurrection, because belief can outlive a disconfirming event, as the later cases show.  It does show that no movement around the first Christians is known to have made their claim, though the idea that a particular prophet could be raised was in the air.  Where that claim came from is the question the resurrection articles must answer.

Part 1: The claim, and the words for these men

The claim at full strength

Reza Aslan's Zealot (2013) is the most widely read statement of the claim.  Its introduction sets the scene:  "Countless prophets, preachers, and messiahs tramped through the Holy Land delivering messages of God's imminent judgment.  Many of these so-called false messiahs we know by name."¹  Aslan names them.  Simon of Peraea "crowned himself messiah."  Theudas, "a wonder-working prophet," also "crowned himself messiah and brought hundreds of followers to the Jordan."¹  And Jesus died as they did, "like Hezekiah and Judas, Theudas and Athronges, the Egyptian and the Samaritan, Simon son of Giora and Simon son of Kochba."¹  Aslan's conclusion follows:  "According to the standards of the Jewish religion and the Hebrew Scriptures, Jesus was as successful in his messianic aspirations as any of the other would-be messiahs."¹

The academic form of the claim is more careful and harder to dismiss.  Richard Horsley and John Hanson's Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs (1985) begins its chapter on royal pretenders with the charge over Jesus's cross:  "Both before and after Jesus of Nazareth (who is usually put in this category), there were several popular Jewish leaders, almost all of them from the peasantry, who, in the words of Josephus, 'laid claim to the kingdom,' 'donned the diadem,' or were 'proclaimed king' by their followers."¹³  They point out that several of these movements arose in 4 BC "just at the time when Jesus of Nazareth was presumably born," around Sepphoris, a few miles from Nazareth, and they call them "people rallying around the leadership of charismatic figures viewed as anointed kings of the Jews."¹³  On this view Jesus is not an oddity.  He is one example of a social form that Galilean and Judean peasants produced again and again under Roman rule.

Christian scholars use the same vocabulary.  N. T. Wright calls Simon bar Giora and Bar Kokhba "two of the most famous would-be Messiahs of the period."¹⁴  Martin Hengel calls Theudas "a prophetic and messianic pretender."¹⁵  Nobody on either side denies that Jesus had predecessors and successors.  The disagreement is over three narrower questions:  how many there were, which of them anyone called messiah, and whether Jesus's movement ended the way theirs did.

Three kinds of leader

Scholars sort these men into three types, and the sorting matters, because only one type is royal.

1. Popular kings. Men who took a crown, a royal title or royal dress, and fought. Horsley and Hanson call their movements "popular messianic movements." John Collins, the leading specialist on Jewish messianism, sets a stricter test: "Not everyone who aspired to a crown necessarily qualifies as a messianic pretender, but only those who claimed to restore the Davidic line or to bring the biblical prophecies to fulfillment."⁷
2. Sign prophets. The term is Rebecca Gray's. These men led crowds out to the Jordan, the wilderness or the Mount of Olives and promised a miracle on the model of Moses or Joshua. Gray's list has "six individuals or groups," all from Josephus: Theudas, the unnamed prophets under Felix, the Egyptian, an unnamed prophet under Festus, the prophet of the temple's last day in AD 70, and Jonathan in Cyrene after the war.¹⁶ She treats them as "distinct types" from the popular king, overlapping only in the Egyptian.¹⁶ Collins agrees that "these prophets typically led their followers into the wilderness," which "is better understood as a reenactment of the Exodus" than as guerrilla tactics.⁷
3. Bandits and rebel chiefs. Men such as Eleazar son of Dinaeus, or John of Gischala in the war of 66–70, who led armed bands without a royal or prophetic claim that the sources report.

Where does Jesus fit?  Rome put him in the first category:  the charge read "THE KING OF THE JEWS."³  Gray puts him in none of them.  She says the sign prophets "should be distinguished from solitary prophetic figures like Jesus son of Ananias and from popular prophets like John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth," because "both men had a relatively small band of actual disciples and followers."¹⁶  And she notices a difference in how Rome treated him.  Against the sign prophets Rome sent troops.  With John and Jesus, "it was thought sufficient simply to arrest and execute the leader of the movement; no large troops were employed and no effort was made to round up and kill all the followers."¹⁶

Why "messiah" is the wrong word for most of them

The Hebrew mashiach and the Greek christos both mean "anointed."  Horsley and Hanson themselves note that "the occurrence of the terms messiah or son of David is still rare in Jewish literature prior to, and contemporary with, the rise of actual popular messianic movements."¹³  So "messianic" in their title is a scholar's label for a type of movement, not a word the movements are known to have used.  When popular writers turn that label back into a claim, "Theudas crowned himself messiah," they report something no source says.  Josephus, the only source for Theudas apart from one line in Acts, says that Theudas "said he was a prophet" (προφήτης γὰρ ἔλεγεν εἶναι).  He mentions no crown and no royal title.⁴

Part 2: Every named leader, 4 BC to AD 135

The table lists the royal, prophetic and rebel figures considered here between Herod's death and the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt, with the word the source uses for each.  It includes unnamed groups and the lone prophet Jesus son of Ananias, so its eighteen Jewish entries are not eighteen named leaders of separate followings or a census of every movement.  The Greek is Niese's text of Josephus, and the English glosses are this article's.^17441818  Revolts with no named leader, such as the Galilean uprisings of 4 BC under Varus, are left out.  The two Samaritan leaders are marked, since Samaritans were not Jews and did not share the Jewish hope for a son of David.

Four things in the table bear on the skeptic's claim.

1. The named list is short. It covers about 140 years and several regions and has nineteen numbered entries, including the Samaritan of AD 36. It is not the whole of what Josephus implies. For 4 BC he writes that "Judea was full of bands of brigands, and whoever chanced on some men to join his revolt pressed on as king, to the ruin of the commonwealth," after "countless other disturbances" (μυρία θορύβων).⁴ So the year after Herod's death produced more self-made kings than the three he names. He describes them as band leaders, not prophets, and gives none of them a name or a messianic title. Eight of them used royal language (rows 1, 2, 3, 12, 13, 14, 18, 19), though John of Gischala's was a faction leader's bid for power over other rebels. Six were sign prophets on Gray's list (rows 6, 8, 9, 10, 15, 17), plus the Samaritan. Four were rebel chiefs or a lone prophet. Almost all of it comes from one author: Collins calls Josephus "virtually our only source for popular movements in Judaism in this period."⁷ Gray, in the same way, says that apart from Acts no independent source exists for the sign prophets.¹⁶
2. "Messiah" appears twice, both times late. Josephus uses kingly words for the crowned men and prophetic words for the sign prophets. He never uses christos of any of them. Part 3 takes up whether he hid the word.
3. They cluster around crises. Three of the royal claimants rose in the vacuum after Herod's death in 4 BC. Five leaders belong to the war of 66–74. The sign prophets cluster under the governors Felix and Festus, AD 52–62. Tacitus's summary of Jewish history says "Under Tiberius all was quiet," the reign in which Jesus was executed.¹⁹ Apart from the Samaritan of AD 36 and the bandit Eleazar, whose twenty years of raiding began somewhere in the 30s, the table has no named leader between AD 6 and AD 45.
4. Rome treated Jesus as a king and his followers as harmless. Every royal claimant in the table fought. Every one whose end is recorded was killed or captured, by Rome, a client ruler or Jewish rivals, and most lost their men with them; the ends of Judas son of Hezekiah and Lukuas are not recorded, and Josephus reports Athronges's brothers taken one by one without clearly saying what became of Athronges himself. Jesus raised no army, and his followers were left alone, which Gray notes is how Rome handled John the Baptist too.¹⁶

Part 3: Who was called messiah, and how many were there?

Josephus's silence

Josephus wrote the Jewish War in the 70s and the Antiquities in AD 93–94.  A search of the Greek of both books finds the word christos used of a person only twice, and both times of Jesus:  once in the disputed passage at Antiquities 18.63, and once as "the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, whose name was James" at 20.200.  The War has no instance at all.⁴

Horsley and Hanson argue that this silence is deliberate.  Josephus, they write, "studiously avoids terms such as 'branch' or 'son of David' and 'messiah,'" while he "does not hesitate to use language of 'kingship.'"¹³  Martin Hengel agrees that "Josephus has almost nothing at all to say about the messianic hope of his people," so that "little more can be expected of him regarding a description of any messianic pretenders than a statement about their ambition to achieve royal dignity."¹⁵  There is a reason to think so.  Josephus tells of an "ambiguous oracle" in the Jewish scriptures "to the effect that at that time one from their country would become ruler of the world," which incited the Jews to war, and he says it really meant Vespasian, the Roman general who became emperor in Judea.⁷  A Jewish historian writing for a Roman audience under Vespasian's sons had every motive to keep messianic language out of view.

So the silence of Josephus does not show that none of these men was called messiah by his followers.  Collins draws the right conclusion:  "It may be that he 'studiously avoids' such language, as Horsley suggests, and that they really were messianic pretenders, but we have no real evidence of their aspirations."⁷  The honest position is that the sources do not say, in either direction.

One thing can be said.  Josephus did know the word and did use it, as a label, for the one man whose followers in his own day called him by it.  "Jesus who was called Christ" reads as a way of identifying which Jesus he means.  If the followers of Simon bar Giora or Menahem had been known by the 90s as people who called their dead leader "the anointed," Josephus could have identified them the same way.  This is an inference from his usage, not a statement he makes, and it can be no stronger than that.

Bar Kokhba

Bar Kokhba is the one Jewish leader besides Jesus for whom a source makes a messianic claim.  Collins:  "Bar Kosiba is the only royal pretender, other than Jesus, for whom a messianic claim is explicitly made in the sources."⁷  The Jerusalem Talmud reports that Rabbi Akiva read Balaam's prophecy of a star out of Jacob, Numbers 24:17, as a pun on his name:  "When Rebbi Aqiba saw Bar Koziba he said, this is King Messias.  Rebbi Joḥanan ben Torta said to him, Aqiba!  Grass will grow from your jaws and still David's son" will not have come.²⁰  The Babylonian Talmud has him say "I am the Messiah," fail the messiah's test of judging by smell from Isaiah 11:3, and be killed.²¹

The witnesses closest to him do not use the word.  His own letters call him "Shimeon Bar Kosiba, President over Israel," with the title nasi, "prince."²²  Justin Martyr, who lived through the revolt, calls him only "the leader of the revolt of the Jews," and says he punished Christians who would not "deny Jesus Christ."²³  Eusebius, writing about 300 from older Greek historians, says he "claimed to be a luminary who had come down to them from heaven."²⁴  The Talmud that calls him "King Messias" was compiled about AD 450, on Fitzmyer's dating, three centuries after his death.⁵  The claim is probably true:  the name Bar Kokhba, "son of the star," only makes sense against Numbers 24:17, and Justin's report of a test of loyalty against "Jesus Christ" makes best sense if Bar Kokhba's followers saw the two as rivals.  But it rests on late sources.

Dositheus the Samaritan

One more man is called "Christ" in an early source, and he is a Samaritan.  Origen, writing in Caesarea about AD 248, says that "after the times of Jesus, Dositheus the Samaritan also wished to persuade the Samaritans that he was the Christ predicted by Moses; and he appears to have gained over some to his views."²⁵  In his earlier Commentary on John he adds what the followers believed.  In this article's translation of the Greek, they carried books of Dositheus "and told certain stories about him, that he had not tasted death but was still alive somewhere."⁶  Origen thought the sect was nearly gone:  the Dositheans "now … are completely extinguished, so that it is said their whole number does not amount to thirty."²⁵  That figure is a polemicist's.  Origen says the same of Simon Magus's followers, that "it is impossible to find, I suppose, thirty," and elsewhere that they "are found nowhere,"²⁵ and Stanley Isser, who wrote the standard study of the sect, finds "reason to doubt the number."²⁶  The sect outlived Origen by centuries.  About AD 588 the patriarch of Alexandria, Eulogius, held a synod to judge two Samaritan factions, one of which "proclaimed someone named Dosthes or Dositheus" as the prophet Moses had foretold.²⁶  Dositheus matters to this article because his followers are the best-attested ancient group besides the Christians that kept believing in their "Christ" after he left them.  Part 4 returns to what they believed about his death.

The count, priced

How many "would-be messiahs" were there?  The answer depends wholly on the definition, so here are the counts under each.²⁷

The eighteen Jewish entries average one per 7.7 years across 139 years, and most cluster in the two crises of 4 BC and AD 66-74.  This measures entries in the surviving record, not the rate at which movements arose.  For the forty years after AD 6, the period of Jesus's adult life and the first decade of his movement, the table has only the Samaritan and a bandit chief.  David Berger and Michael Wyschogrod, two Orthodox Jewish writers arguing against Christian claims, say the first century had "at least three or four 'Messiahs.'"²⁸  That is close to the count of royal claimants in that century (rows 1, 2, 3, 12, 13 and 14 fall in it) and far from "countless."  Two things push the other way, and the skeptic is entitled to both.  Collins, whose strict test gives the count of one, still heads his chronology for 4 BC "Activity of messianic pretenders, Judas, Simon and Athronges," and marks the war of 66 "Messianic(?) activity of Menahem and Simon bar Giora."⁷  So the leading specialist uses the label for these men while holding that no source states their claim.  And Josephus's remark that in 4 BC whoever gathered a band "pressed on as king"⁴ means the royal count for that year is a floor, not a total.  The skeptic is right that Jesus had company.  "Many messiahs" is a label scholars and popular writers apply.  The sources themselves do not say it.

Part 4: What happened when the leader died

Gamaliel's test

Acts puts the argument of this article in the mouth of Gamaliel, a Pharisee on the Jerusalem council, a few years after the crucifixion.  "For before these days Theudas rose up, making himself out to be somebody; to whom a number of men, about four hundred, joined themselves.  He was slain; and all, as many as obeyed him, were dispersed and came to nothing.  After this man, Judas of Galilee rose up in the days of the enrollment, and drew away some people after him.  He also perished, and all, as many as obeyed him, were scattered abroad."  His advice follows:  "if this counsel or this work is of men, it will be overthrown.  But if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow it."³

The speech has a known problem.  Josephus dates Theudas to about AD 45, after the likely date of the speech, and Judas to AD 6, before Theudas rather than after him.  Steve Mason, a leading Josephus scholar, thinks Luke "has reversed the order of the two characters" and probably knew Josephus's account.²⁹  The objections below take this up.  For this Part the point is narrower.  Whoever framed the argument, its premise is a claim about outcomes, and Josephus can check the outcomes independently.

The outcomes, case by case

Josephus records suppression, dispersal and continuing leadership, rather than establishing that a movement of human origin must disappear.  N. T. Wright sums up the options that followers of a dead leader had:  they "would either be rounded up as well or melt away into the undergrowth.  The other possibility was to latch on to a new leader:  in the case of the apparent dynasty that ended up being known as the Sicarii, when one leader was killed they simply chose another from the same family."²  Some outcomes overlap, and in other cases the record simply stops.  These categories cannot establish permanent cessation.

1. Followers killed or captured. Theudas's followers were killed or taken alive.⁴ So were the Egyptian's, the prophets' under Felix and Festus, and the 6,000 in the temple portico, of whom "not one" escaped (περιεσώθη … οὐδείς).¹⁸ Athronges's brothers were taken one by one, and most of Jonathan's followers in Cyrene were killed or captured.
2. Scattered, or simply not heard of again. The Egyptian's survivors slipped away, each to his own home, and the Egyptian himself "vanished," so this leader did not die with his movement at all.⁴¹⁸ Nothing more is heard of the followers of Judas son of Hezekiah, Simon of Peraea, Lukuas, John of Gischala or Simon bar Giora. That is silence, not a report that they vanished.
3. Passed to a relative. The family of Judas the Galilean is the one movement Josephus traces across generations. Hengel: "The continuity of the new sect as an organization was guaranteed by the continued existence of Judas' dynasty in his sons and grandsons."¹⁵ Two sons were crucified about AD 46–48. Menahem, of the same family, entered Jerusalem as a king in 66 and was killed; his kinsman Eleazar son of Yair escaped to Masada and led the Sicarii there until 73 or 74.⁴¹⁸ After Masada, Sicarii who fled to Egypt were tortured to make them call Caesar "master," and Josephus says not even the children would.¹⁸

The third outcome is the closest to what happened with Jesus, and it is worth stating plainly.  Judas's movement did outlive Judas, by about seventy years.  Gamaliel's speech says Judas's followers "were scattered abroad."  That can describe an immediate dispersal without ruling out the later continuity Josephus reports.  It cannot establish permanent dissolution.  Josephus says Judas's "fourth philosophy" planted the roots of the later troubles and that the nation caught its madness under the governor Florus, on the eve of the war of 66.⁴  It kept his teaching, that God alone is master, and it found new leaders in his family.  Even after Masada the Sicarii in Egypt still urged Jews to regard "God alone as master," and their "madness" reached Cyrene.¹⁸  What it did not do, in any source, was claim that Judas was alive, or risen, or the messiah.  Menahem entered Jerusalem as a king in his own right.  The sources report new leadership in Judas's family, rather than a proclamation that Judas had returned.

So the record supports a narrower statement than "every movement died with its leader."  Several followings outlived their leaders in some form.  What no source reports, for any Jewish leader in the table, is a group that went on calling its fallen leader king or messiah, or said he was alive.  For several leaders the record simply stops, and Josephus, who supplies almost all of it, had reasons to say little about such hopes.  So this is a statement about what the sources preserve.

Bar Kokhba: the hardest test

Bar Kokhba is the best test case, because he is the one claimant whom a great rabbi hailed as messiah during his life.  The late traditions preserve both an acclamation and its rejection.  They do not document a post-defeat group retaining him as messiah;  that absence does not establish what every surviving follower believed.  The rabbinic tradition that preserves Akiva's acclamation also preserves the rebuke of Rabbi Johanan ben Torta, and the Babylonian Talmud's story ends with "the gentiles killed him" because he failed the messiah's test.²⁰²¹  The rabbis turned his name, Bar Kosiba, into a pun on "lie," as Eusebius's editor notes:  "After his defeat the Jews called him Bar Choziba, 'son of a lie.'"²⁴  Collins and Joseph Heinemann trace the rabbis' later "Messiah son of Joseph," who dies in battle before the son of David comes, to his defeat.³⁰  On that reconstruction, later expectation accommodated a defeated warrior as a forerunner.  This is a proposed explanation of a later tradition, not direct evidence of what Bar Kokhba's followers did immediately after his death.

Two movements that kept their founder

Two ancient groups besides the Christians are said to have kept faith in a dead or departed leader.

1. The Dositheans. Origen says the followers of the Samaritan Dositheus believed "that he had not tasted death but was still alive somewhere."⁶ Origen reports a denial of death, rather than a death followed by resurrection. This establishes what Origen attributes to them, not every belief in the sect across centuries. Origen says they numbered fewer than thirty in his day,²⁵ but a Dosithean faction was still pressing its case in Alexandria some three centuries later.²⁶ Isser suggests their own story may have told of the disappearance of Dositheus's body, "if not a resurrection like Jesus'," on the model of Moses, whose grave was never found.²⁶ Elsewhere Isser reconstructs two possibilities: Dositheus never died, or rose immediately.²⁶ These are his inferences from hostile sources; no Dosithean account survives to confirm either reconstruction.
2. The disciples of John the Baptist. Herod Antipas executed John shortly before Jesus's own death, and John's followers did not vanish. Paul met "disciples" at Ephesus in the 50s who knew only "John's baptism."³ A Christian novel of the third or fourth century, the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, says that "some even of the disciples of John, who seemed to be great ones, have separated themselves from the people, and proclaimed their own master as the Christ."³¹ That is a late and hostile report, and it does not say they claimed John was raised. But it is a real report of a group calling a dead prophet "the Christ," and the article does not hide it. The Clementine Homilies, another reworking of shared material, even name John's successor: "John being killed, Dositheus desiring the leadership … succeeded to the seat."³² That is legend, but on the same footing as the Recognitions it reports John's following passing to a new leader with his own claim, the third of Wright's outcomes, rather than ending. Mark also reports that Herod and others thought Jesus was "John the Baptizer … risen from the dead,"³ so the idea that one particular man might be raised before the end was at least thinkable. E. P. Sanders asked the obvious question: "Without the resurrection, would his disciples have endured longer than did John the Baptist's? We can only guess, but I would guess not."³³

Jesus's movement

Against this background the Christian record is easy to state.  The earliest datable Christian writer, Paul, writing about AD 50–55, calls Jesus Christos in nearly every paragraph and quotes a formula he had "received":  "that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day."³  He admits what the title cost:  "we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews."³  Leadership in Jerusalem passed, as with Judas the Galilean, to a relative:  Paul met "James, the Lord's brother," and names him first among the "pillars."³  Josephus confirms that James led a group in Jerusalem until the high priest had him stoned in AD 62, and identifies him as "the brother of Jesus who was called Christ."⁴  After James, according to Hegesippus as quoted by Eusebius, the family of the Lord met and chose another relative, "Simeon the son of Clopas," as his successor.²⁴

So the Christian movement shows the third pattern, a family succession, and something no other movement in the table shows.  The new leaders did not make claims of their own.  James did not become king or messiah.  Hegesippus, a Christian writer of about AD 170–180 quoted by Eusebius, tells the one story that puts this to a test.  Two grandsons of Jesus's brother Jude were denounced to the emperor Domitian "as being of the family of David," and "they admitted it."  Asked about Christ's kingdom, they said "that it was neither of the world nor earthly, but heavenly and angelic, and it would be at the end of the world, when he would come in glory."  Domitian released them as "simple folk," and they went on as "leaders of the churches."²⁴  The story has legendary colour, and a skeptic can fairly say it shows what Christians of Hegesippus's day wanted remembered.  But it is the only report of what the Davidic heirs said when Rome asked, and what they claimed was a kingdom for their dead kinsman at his return, not a throne for themselves.  The movement kept calling its executed founder "the Christ" and said he had been raised.

Josephus noticed.  Even the minimal text of his paragraph on Jesus that John Meier and most scholars accept ends with the outcome:  "And when Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him previously did not cease to do so.  And up until this very day the tribe of Christians (named after him) has not died out."⁸  In the Greek, the followers "did not cease" (οὐκ ἐπαύσαντο), and the tribe "has not disappeared" (οὐκ ἐπέλιπε).⁴  That passage is disputed.  Some scholars think the whole of it was inserted by Christians, and most think Christians altered parts of it.³⁴  The two sentences that matter here are among the parts most scholars keep, because they are not Christian in tone:  "tribe" is an outsider's word, and the remark that the tribe has not died out reads as mild surprise.  Tacitus, a Roman senator writing about AD 116 who despised the movement, describes the same pattern:  the "superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome."³⁵

Part 5: Later tests: Crete, Sabbatai Zevi, Lubavitch and the Millerites

If movements always died with their messiah, Jesus's survival would be unique and would cry out for explanation.  The skeptic answers that they do not always die, and points to later cases.  The skeptic is partly right.  Three later messianic movements are well documented, and they come out three different ways.  A fourth case, the Millerites of 1844, had no messiah to lose, but skeptics cite it as the standard example of faith surviving a plain disconfirmation, so it is tested here too.

Moses of Crete, in the 430s

The church historian Socrates, writing in Constantinople in the 440s, tells of "a certain Jewish impostor" in Crete who "pretended that he was Moses, and had been sent from heaven to lead out the Jews inhabiting that island, and conduct them through the sea."  For a year he toured the island's cities, and many Jews gave up their property to follow him.  He led them to a headland and told them to jump.  Many died.  When the survivors turned on him, "they were unable to seize him, for he suddenly disappeared."³⁶  No further movement is reported.  Socrates adds that "many of the Jews in Crete at that time abandoning Judaism attached themselves to the Christian faith."³⁶  Socrates reports a failed sign, a vanished leader and conversions away from the following.  One case cannot measure the ordinary outcome.

Sabbatai Zevi, 1665–1676 and after

Sabbatai Zevi, a rabbi from Smyrna, was proclaimed messiah in 1665 by his prophet, Nathan of Gaza, and within a year the movement had swept the Jewish world.  In September 1666, arrested by the Ottoman sultan, he converted to Islam.  He died in exile at Dulcigno on the Day of Atonement, 17 September 1676, "two months after his fiftieth birthday and almost exactly ten years after his apostasy."¹¹

Gershom Scholem, the historian of Jewish mysticism who wrote the standard history of the movement, explains why it matters.  Before Sabbatai, a messianic movement would arise and then "the movement petered out.  This was the usual course of things … Occasionally traditions about such an outbreak would linger in popular memory, but after a generation or two everything would be forgotten.  The Sabbatian movement is the great exception to this rule."¹¹  It survived both the apostasy and the death, "persisting for generations in various forms and metamorphoses."¹¹  One group, the Dönmeh of Salonika, followed Sabbatai into Islam and "kept its identity distinct throughout the ages."¹¹

Scholem himself draws the Christian comparison.  "A savior who dies like a criminal and a redeemer whose mission leads him to apostasy are equally unacceptable to the naive religious consciousness.  Yet the apparent stumbling-block proved to be a source of strength from which both movements drew their religious justification, for both believed in a second manifestation in glory of him whom they had beheld in his degradation."¹¹

How did the Sabbateans handle the death?  They denied it.  Scholem reports the believers' first reaction, that "perhaps this was no 'real death' at all.  Once before, at his apostasy, the messiah had become 'hidden' after an initial triumphant manifestation.  His passing away may, after all, be a second and even deeper occultation."¹¹  Nathan's angelic informants then made it doctrine:  Sabbatai "was exalted and hidden, body and soul, on the Day of Atonement, at the time of ne'ilah.  Whoever thinks that he died like all men and his spirit returned to God commits a grave sin."¹¹

The doctrine soon had a story, and it is the closest later parallel to the Gospels' empty tomb.  A few years after the death, Baruch of Arezzo told how Sabbatai had foretold his death and said, "Carry me then to the cave that I have prepared for myself near the sea, and on the third day my brother Elijah shall come to the cave."  The brother came on the third day and "found the cave empty.  'Neither Our Lord nor anything else was in the cave, but it was full of light.'"¹¹  Scholem traces the legend to the believers' feeling that this was perhaps "no 'real death' at all."  The story served the doctrine that Sabbatai had not died.  It did not say that he had died and then been raised.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe, 1994 to the present

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson led the Lubavitch, or Chabad, Hasidic movement from Brooklyn for more than forty years, until his death on 12 June 1994.  He taught that the redemption was imminent, and many of his followers believed he was the messiah.  David Berger, an Orthodox historian of Jewish messianism, reported in 2001 that "a large segment—almost certainly a substantial majority—of a highly significant Orthodox movement called Lubavitch, or Chabad, Hasidism affirms that the Lubavitcher Rebbe … initiated the authentic messianic mission and will soon return to complete the redemption in his capacity as the messiah."⁹  Simon Dein, who did twenty years of fieldwork in the community, found that "Following failed prophecy, Lubavitchers continued missionizing at the same high level as previously."³⁷

This is the strongest modern parallel to the first Christians, and it is real.  A Jewish movement hailed a dead man as the messiah and kept growing.  Dein reported a decline in 2018:  "the messianic fervor in the Lubavitcher community has all but abated but still a few mainly Israeli Lubavitchers, maintain that he never died and is the Jewish Messiah," and that the movement "has largely survived his death":  "The Rebbe has been replaced by his teachings."¹⁰  Followers even report seeing him.  The anthropologist Yoram Bilu collected 76 reports of apparitions of the Rebbe between 1994 and 2010, and found that "75 percent occurred in the second half of that period."³⁸

Again, though, the death is the problem the believers solve, and they solve it in more than one way.  Dein found that the messianists split:  "While some messianists hold that Menachem Schneerson died but is to be resurrected as the Messiah, others hold that he is still alive, but concealed."³⁹  Berger watched the second view gain ground:  "a growing number of messianists began to assert that the Rebbe never died, that he remained alive in the full sense of the word.  In this reading, what happened on June 12, 1994 was an illusion."⁹  Bilu's apparitions come from "the radically messianic Hasidim (meshichistim) in Israel, who maintain that the Rabbi, the designated Messiah, has not died."³⁸  Some who accept the death expect a resurrection in the future, at the redemption.  Dale Allison, a New Testament scholar who doubts much of the Easter tradition, adds one more group:  "A few went even further, claiming that he had already been resurrected."  He cites Dein's book for it.¹²  Dein's pages were not available for this article, and his 2018 summary of the messianists' views, which runs "from the Rebbe is Moshiach, to the fact that he never died, to the claim that he is God himself," does not mention it.¹⁰  Kris Komarnitsky, who argues for a natural origin of the Easter belief, explains why the main body did not take that road:  in Lubavitch teaching the Rebbe "had to still be physically present in the grave."⁴⁰  Allison therefore reports an accomplished-resurrection belief within Lubavitch.  The sources read here do not establish its size, timing or precise meaning, and do not show it becoming the movement's shared proclamation.  Komarnitsky's doctrinal explanation concerns a physical departure from this world;  it does not establish that every conception of resurrection was excluded.

The Millerites, 1844

The Millerites failed on a date, not a death.  William Miller, a farmer and preacher from Low Hampton, New York, taught from Daniel 8:14 that Christ would return about 1843, and his followers finally fixed on 22 October 1844.  Nothing happened.  Leon Festinger's When Prophecy Fails, the book skeptics cite for how faith outlives disconfirmation, judged that this was the end:  "The disconfirmation of October 22 brought about the collapse of Millerism. … By the late spring of 1845 it had virtually disappeared."⁴¹  Miller himself refused to explain the failure away.  "We expected the personal coming of Christ at that time; and now to contend that we were not mistaken, is dishonest," he wrote, and he had "no confidence in any of the new theories that have grown out of that movement," including the claim "that it was a fulfilment of prophecy in any sense."⁴²

Festinger was wrong about the outcome, and the correction helps the skeptic.  The sociologist of religion J. Gordon Melton answered him in 1985:  "The several million present-day Millerites were not informed of this fact."⁴³  A minority found a way to keep the date.  Hiram Edson, a farmer at Port Gibson, New York, wrote that on the morning after the disappointment, while crossing a field, "Heaven seemed open to my view, and I saw distinctly, and clearly, that instead of our High Priest coming out of the Most Holy of the heavenly sanctuary to come to this earth … he, for the first time entered on that day the second apartment of that sanctuary."⁴⁴  On this reading the predicted event did happen on 22 October 1844, out of sight, in heaven.  "Those who agreed with Edson," Melton writes, "became what are known today as the Seventh-Day Adventists."⁴³  That church held its first General Conference in May 1863 with about 3,500 members,⁴⁵ and counted 23,684,237 members at the end of 2024.⁴⁶

Melton found the same move in other groups after a failed prophecy and named it:  "The prophesied event is reinterpreted in such a way that what was supposed to have been a visible, verifiable occurrence is seen to have been in reality an invisible, spiritual occurrence.  The event occurred as predicted, only on a spiritual level."  He calls this "spiritualization."⁴³

This is the skeptic's strongest later case:  a disconfirmed group, a reported vision the next morning, a reinterpretation no one could check, and a church of more than twenty-three million.  Two limits apply.  First, Edson's account comes from an undated manuscript.  Brian Strayer, an Adventist historian who has studied it, says scholars are "unsure as to when it was actually written: in 1844, in the mid-1850s, during the 1860s, or late in his life,"⁴⁴ and that of Edson's two pamphlets, twenty articles and twenty letters from 1849 to 1867, "not a single one of these refers to his October 23 cornfield experience."⁴⁷  The vision on the next morning is a late memory, not a record made at the time.  Second, the Millerite rescue has the shape Melton describes:  the failed event was moved to a place no one could see.  The Sabbateans did the same when they made Sabbatai "hidden, body and soul," and so do the Lubavitch messianists who say the Rebbe is alive but concealed.  A skeptic will read the Christian "raised" the same way, as an unseen exaltation to heaven;  whether the first Christians meant a body leaving a grave is argued in The Resurrection Belief:  Event or Process?.  What the earliest formula does not do is deny the death or move it out of view.  It lists the death and the burial as facts, and then makes a new claim about the man who was buried.³

What the later cases show

Put the later cases beside the ancient ones and two lessons follow, one for each side.

The skeptic's lesson:  a messianic movement can survive its leader's death, and can even grow after it.  Berger, a historian of Jewish messianism, gives the general picture:  "Jewish history is strewn with several dozen identifiable, mostly inconsequential messianic figures whose followings dissipated almost immediately after their deaths.  The only two significant exceptions—until recently—were Jesus and the 17th-century messiah Shabbetai Tzevi."⁹  "Several dozen" is an impression, not a count, "significant" is a judgment, and large movements are the ones most likely to be remembered, so these words give no rate of survival.  They convey Berger's judgment that substantial survivals are exceptions.  Without a comparable census they do not establish a frequency.  The documented survivals show that survival alone requires no inference to a miracle.  Leon Festinger's classic study of a failed prophecy, When Prophecy Fails, used the Sabbateans as its example of how "clear disconfirming evidence may simply result in deepened conviction and increased proselyting."⁴¹  The Millerite remnant shows that a failed prediction can even be the seed of a large church.  Festinger and his co-authors did not, however, count the first Christians as a case of their theory.  Whether the crucifixion disconfirmed what the disciples believed, they wrote, "We do not know and cannot say.  But this one unclarity makes the whole episode inconclusive with respect to our hypotheses."⁴¹

The defender's lesson concerns the form of belief documented in each case, rather than survival alone.  The Dositheans said their leader "had not tasted death."  The Sabbateans said Sabbatai was "hidden, body and soul" and made it a sin to say he died, and their empty-cave story served that denial.  The Millerite remnant moved its failed date into an unseen heavenly sanctuary.  The Lubavitch responses documented above include concealment and an expected future resurrection, as well as Allison's reported accomplished resurrection.  The first Christian formula instead combines death and an accomplished reversal.  They insisted that Jesus died, by crucifixion, and was buried, and they said that God had already raised him "on the third day."³  An accomplished resurrection is explicit in the earliest Christian formula.  No other movement examined is documented as making it a founding proclamation.  The Lubavitch minority Allison reports is nevertheless a parallel to belief in an accomplished resurrection;  it cannot be excluded merely because it is described as small.  This is a claim about the surviving record.  Most ancient followings are known only through Josephus and hostile Christian or rabbinic writers, so a small group that said its dead leader had been raised could have existed without leaving a trace.

Part 6: What this shows, and what it does not

It shows that Jesus fits his time.  A Galilean who drew crowds, spoke of God's coming kingdom, entered Jerusalem at a feast and was executed by the Roman governor as "King of the Jews" is exactly the kind of man the period produced.  Nothing in the Gospels' picture of him is out of place among Theudas, the Egyptian and Simon of Peraea.  That is evidence that the Gospels describe a real first-century Judea, and the skeptic who uses the claimants to argue that Jesus never existed has the evidence backwards.  Tim O'Neill, an atheist historian, makes the same point against mythicists:  "We know about them from one writer:  Josephus.  And he does mention Jesus - twice."⁴⁸

It shows that "one of many messiahs" overstates the record.  The table contains eighteen Jewish entries across 139 years, including an unnamed group and a lone prophet.  Only one besides Jesus, Bar Kokhba, is called messiah by any of them, and only in a source three centuries later.  The label belongs to modern writers.

It distinguishes the recorded outcomes.  The Jewish cases in the table include suppression, dispersal, new leadership and simple gaps in the record.  None is known to have kept its dead leader as messiah.  Wright says this of the Jewish leaders of the period he lists, and he words it as a claim about the record:  "In not one case do we hear of any group, after the death of its leader, claiming that he was in any sense alive again."²  Bart Ehrman, who does not believe in the resurrection, agrees on the premise:  "Ancient Jews had no expectation—zero expectation—that the future messiah would die and rise from the dead."⁴⁹  He draws the inference that the title must go back to Jesus's lifetime:  "The only plausible explanation is that they called Jesus this after his death because they were calling him this before his death."⁴⁹

It does not show that the resurrection happened.  The later cases prove that faith in a messiah can survive the messiah's death.  Wright's thought experiment, in which followers who said their dead leader "really was the Messiah" would have met "the verdict of madness,"¹⁴ is contradicted in part by Lubavitch, where thousands said exactly that and were not treated as mad by their own community.  A skeptic can fairly say that the first Christians did what the Sabbateans, the Millerites and the Lubavitchers later did:  they refused to let the death falsify their hope.

What remains is the form of the claim.  The Dosithean, Sabbatean and Lubavitch accounts prominently feature denial of death or a future reversal;  the reports of John's disciples do not specify either response.  The first Christians affirmed the death and said the reversal had already happened, to one man, in the middle of history, which Jewish expectation reserved for all the righteous at the end.  The claimant record cannot say why they did this.  It can say that no movement around them is known to have made the same claim, although the idea that a particular prophet had been raised was in the air:  Mark reports people saying that John the Baptist "has risen from the dead."³  Allison reports that some later Lubavitchers did make an accomplished-resurrection claim.  Their timing and exact wording remain unresolved here.  Whether the cause was an event, visions, or something else is the subject of The Historical Case for the Resurrection, Hallucination Theories of the Resurrection and The Resurrection Belief:  Event or Process?.  The revolts themselves, and how they separated Christians from other Jews, belong to The Jewish Revolts and the Parting of the Ways.

Objections and responses

1. "Josephus hid the messianic claims, so the claimants may all have been called messiah by their followers." Possibly. This article does not claim that the rebels of 4 BC or AD 66 were not seen as messiahs, only that no source says so. Horsley and Hanson's case that Josephus suppressed the language is plausible, and Collins's caution that "we have no real evidence of their aspirations" is also correct.⁷ If all eight royal claimants were hailed as messiahs, the count of "would-be messiahs" rises to eight in 140 years. The outcome comparison remains limited by the same source: Josephus reports deaths, captures, some dispersal and some continuity, but does not record every follower's later beliefs.
2. "Acts 5:36 gets Theudas wrong, so Gamaliel's speech is a Lukan invention and cannot be used." The chronology problem is real. Josephus puts Theudas about AD 45, a decade after the speech's setting, and puts Judas the Galilean in AD 6, before Theudas, not after. Mason judges that "the coincidence—that Luke would just happen to mention another rebel with the same name as one of Josephus's featured figures—would be uncanny," and that Luke more likely reversed the two.²⁹ The defence that Gamaliel meant an earlier, unknown Theudas is possible but has no direct evidence. Its best support is Josephus's own remark that in 4 BC whoever gathered a band "pressed on as king,"⁴ so unnamed leaders of that period did exist; no source names a Theudas among them. One detail cuts against simple copying from Josephus: Josephus says Theudas persuaded "the greater part of the crowd" (τὸν πλεῖστον ὄχλον) and gives no number,⁴ while Acts says "about four hundred." If Luke knew Josephus, he did not take that figure from him. This article therefore does not rest anything on the speech being Gamaliel's own words. Josephus independently reports Theudas's beheading and many followers killed or captured. Acts supplies the stronger claim that all his adherents dispersed and came to nothing; Josephus does not establish permanent cessation.
3. "Survivals like Sabbatai, the Millerites and Lubavitch show the Christian survival needs no special explanation." They show that survival alone needs no miracle, and this article agrees. The Millerite remnant even grew into a church of more than twenty-three million after a reported vision reinterpreted its failure.⁴⁶ They weaken any argument from survival alone. The documented Christian proclamation is more specific: death, burial and an accomplished raising. The Lubavitch minority Allison reports parallels the last element, even though the sources read here do not show it becoming that movement's shared proclamation. These differences require explanation; they do not establish a supernatural explanation.
4. "The first Christians also denied the death in effect, by saying Jesus was alive." The earliest formula insists on the death and burial before the rising: "Christ died for our sins … he was buried … he was raised on the third day."³ The Sabbatean doctrine made it "a grave sin" to say Sabbatai "died like all men." These are opposite responses to the same problem.
5. "The Lubavitch apparitions are just like the resurrection appearances, so the Christian appearances were visions of the same kind." The apparitions are a real parallel and the strongest one available. Bilu found 76 reports over sixteen years, rising over time and mostly brief: "just long enough to afford eye contact with the Rabbi, followed by a nonverbal gesture of encouragement."³⁸ Paul's list closes with "last of all … he appeared to me also."³ Whether that difference matters is argued in The Resurrection Belief: Event or Process?. The point here is narrower: the Lubavitch believers who report apparitions do so while denying the Rebbe died, and Bilu traces the doubts that surround the apparitions to that denial.³⁸
6. "The Christians had a family dynasty, just like Judas the Galilean, so their survival is the ordinary dynastic kind." The family succession is real: James, then Simeon son of Clopas. But in Judas's family each heir made his own bid, and Menahem entered Jerusalem as king. In Jesus's family the heirs made no royal claim of their own and called their dead brother "Christ." When Domitian questioned Jude's grandsons as Davidic heirs, on Hegesippus's report, they pointed to a "heavenly and angelic" kingdom that Christ would bring "at the end of the world."²⁴ That report is Christian and late, but it is the only one that records what the family said when asked.
7. "Dositheus shows a Samaritan movement doing exactly what the Christians did." In part it does. The Dositheans outlived their founder for centuries, kept his books, and held him to be the prophet Moses foretold, a closer comparison to continued Christian attachment than the reports of the other Jewish figures in the table provide. But Origen's account says they believed he "had not tasted death." That is the Sabbatean response, not the Christian one. Origen's claim that they had dwindled to under thirty is a polemicist's; a Dosithean faction was still arguing its case in Alexandria about 588.
8. "John the Baptist's followers called him the Christ after his death, so Jesus's followers were not unique." The Recognitions do report this, in a Christian novel written two or three centuries later. If true, it is a second case of a dead prophet called "Christ" by his followers. Neither the Recognitions nor any other source says John's followers claimed he had been raised, and the earliest source on them, Acts 19, shows a small group that knew only "John's baptism." Mark does report people saying John "has risen from the dead," but they said it of Jesus, and Mark puts it in the mouths of Herod and others, not John's disciples.³
9. "The numbers prove nothing, because most claimants are lost. Josephus mentions only the famous ones." Scholem says the same of later messiahs: "for some contemporary chroniclers or letter writers not even an echo of many of these movements would have reached us."¹¹ The true number was surely larger than eighteen. A lost claimant's movement left no trace in the surviving sources, which fits dissolution but does not prove it. A small group that kept its leader could be missed too: the Dositheans are known almost entirely from hostile Christian writers, and a few lines in Origen are the only early report of their belief. So the comparison in this article is with what the record preserves, and it should be read that way.
10. "Jesus was killed as King of the Jews, so he must have claimed to be the messiah, just like the others." The charge shows how Pilate classed him. Whether Jesus himself claimed the title is disputed among historians, and Ehrman thinks he did, privately: "The easiest explanation is that Jesus told them that he was the messiah."⁴⁹ Either way the comparison in this article holds. It concerns what his followers did after his death, not what he claimed before it.
11. "Israel Knohl showed that a messiah before Jesus was believed to have risen after three days." Knohl argued in 2000 that a Qumran leader killed in 4 BC was believed by his disciples to have "arisen after three days and had ascended to heaven."⁵⁰ He later read the Gabriel Revelation, a Hebrew text inked on stone, as a call to a slain messiah to "live" in three days, and identified that messiah with Simon of Peraea, row 2 of the table. In 2011 he withdrew the key word: "I now accept the reading האות ('the sign') of the third word of line 80."³⁰ This revises the later argument from the stone, not the distinct reconstruction published in his 2000 book before the stone was known. That earlier argument still requires assessment on its own evidence: hymns and later texts, rather than an explicit ancient report naming Simon or another contemporary as risen. The parent article, Second Temple Messianic Expectations, examines the case in full.
12. "This all assumes the Gospels and Acts are reliable." The case does not need them. Paul's letters, written within about twenty-five years, give the formula of death, burial and rising, and name James as the Lord's brother. Josephus gives James and "Jesus who was called Christ." Tacitus gives the execution under Pilate and the movement breaking out again. The Gospels and Acts add detail, but the outcome is fixed by sources that are not Christian narratives.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. Josephus is almost the only source. Every count in this article is a count of the men Josephus chose to name, with a few additions from Acts, Tacitus, Eusebius, Dio, Origen and the rabbis. Josephus wrote for Romans and had reasons both to hide messianic language and to blame the war on "deceivers." A different historian might have named more leaders, or described them differently.
2. The Samaritan of AD 36 and Dositheus are Samaritans. They are included because skeptics include them, but the Samaritans expected a prophet like Moses rather than a son of David. Dositheus's date is unknown; Origen places him only "after the times of Jesus."
3. The Dositheus passage is read here in Greek only. Origen's Commentary on John 13 is quoted in this article's own translation from Preuschen's edition. A published English translation (Ronald Heine's, 1993) exists but was not consulted.
4. No rate of survival can be computed. Berger's "several dozen" is not a census, "significant" is his judgment, and the later survivors are known partly because they were large. The article therefore states no ratio.
5. The accomplished-resurrection report is known at second hand. Allison's report that "a few" Lubavitchers claimed the Rebbe already resurrected cites pages of Dein's book that were not read for this article, and Dein's own 2018 summary does not list that view. Its size and wording are unknown here.
6. The table leaves out Simon of Samaria. Acts says the Samaritans called him "that great power of God,"³ and Justin Martyr, about 155, says "almost all the Samaritans, and a few even of other nations, worship him."²³ Justin attests a following in the mid-second century. Without a secure death date this does not measure a century of survival after Simon's death. Simon is reported as a divine figure rather than a royal or sign-prophet claimant, so the table leaves him out; that classification cannot exclude him from broader comparisons of religious movements. Hippolytus, about 230, tells a hostile legend that Simon had his disciples bury him alive, saying "he would rise the third day," and that "he remained (in that grave) until this day, for he was not the Christ."⁵¹ No source says his followers claimed he had risen.
7. The John the Baptist evidence is thin and late. Whether some of John's followers called him the Christ, and whether the later Mandaean veneration of John descends from them, is debated. The Recognitions report is the only explicit ancient statement found, and it is hostile and two or more centuries later than John.
8. Lukuas's title is uncertain. Eusebius calls him "their king" once,²⁴ Dio only says the Jews of Cyrene "had put a certain Andreas at their head,"⁵² and Collins calls him a "messianic pretender," but no source reports what the rebels called him or what became of him. A papyrus that may mock him as "king of the scene and the mime" was not read.⁷
9. Bar Kokhba's acclamation rests on texts compiled three centuries later. The letters and coins, the only documents from his own hand, say "prince," not "messiah." The Akiva tradition may be accurate, but it cannot be checked against a contemporary source.
10. The dates of most governors and revolts (Fadus, Tiberius Alexander, Felix, Festus) are standard chronology and were not re-derived here.
11. Carrier's own treatment of the claimants, in On the Historicity of Jesus (2014), was not obtained, so his position is not stated in his words.
12. The Millerite vision rests on a late memoir. Hiram Edson's cornfield account survives only in his undated manuscript, now a dozen pages, and his writings of 1849–1867 never mention it. That some Millerites read 22 October as a fulfilment is not in doubt, since Miller rejected such "new theories" in print in his Apology and Defence. How soon after 23 October 1844 Edson reached it, and whether a vision prompted it, is not settled by the sources read here.
13. The 4 BC count is a floor. Josephus says that "whoever" gathered a band in 4 BC made himself king, but names only three. How many unnamed "kings" there were in that year is unknown.

Verdict

Jesus was one of a type.  Between Herod's death and the fall of Bar Kokhba, the table records eighteen Jewish royal, prophetic or rebel entries, including an unnamed group and a lone prophet, and Rome executed Jesus under the same charge it pinned on the crowned men:  King of the Jews.  The skeptic is right about that, and it is evidence that the Gospels describe a real time and place.

The claim that Jesus was one of "countless" or "dozens" of messiahs goes beyond what these sources establish;  the surviving list also cannot rule out lost claimants.  The named list is short, most of it clusters around 4 BC and AD 66–74, and almost nothing is known of the forty years in which Jesus lived and his movement began.  Josephus never calls any of these men "anointed," and uses the word only of Jesus.  The one other Jew called messiah in any source is Bar Kokhba, in the Talmud, three centuries later.

The real difference is in what happened when the leader died.  The other Jewish cases in this table include suppression, dispersal, succession and gaps in the record;  none is reported to have kept its fallen leader as messiah.  Survival after a leader's death is possible:  the Dositheans, Sabbatai Zevi's movement and Lubavitch prove it, and the Millerite remnant shows a failed prophecy can found a large church, though Berger's "several dozen" gives no measured rate.  So survival alone proves nothing supernatural.  Death-denial and future reversal are prominent in the Dosithean, Sabbatean and Lubavitch reports, while the later reports of John's disciples do not specify either response.  The first Christians affirmed a shameful public death and made it their message that God had already raised the dead man.  Allison reports that a few Lubavitchers also claimed an accomplished resurrection, many centuries later.  The sources read here do not establish when that belief began or exactly what its adherents meant.  The claimant record cannot explain the Christian claim.  It shows that no movement around them is known to have made it, and it can show no more than the thin and partial sources allow.

Sources