The Other MessiahThese are just excerpts; there's more in the article.
Dr. Richard Freund: 'Extraordinary story.'
In Israel, unearthing the tale of a Jesus rival named Simon bar Kokhba.
By Michael McKinley
Published: April 18, 2008
[...]
But Dr. Richard Freund, the running-shoed, ball-capped American archeologist and rabbi whom we so fortuitously met in Beit She'an pointed us in the direction of another messiah, a man whom most people have never heard of, but whose deeds and their consequence resonate around the globe.
"Come with me to Yavneh," said Freund. "I'm doing excavations there. It's an extraordinary story."
[...]
His birth name was Simon bar Kozeba, but the great Jewish sage of the day, Rabbi Akiva, christened him "bar Kokhba," meaning "Son of the Star," a Hebrew wordplay on a verse from the Book of Numbers that says "A star (kokhba in Hebrew) has shot off Jacob."
[...]
Did Jesus of Nazareth and Simon bar Kokhba fit the bill, each in their own way? But why did the name of Jesus survive, and inspire a new religion, while Simon bar Kokhba disappeared from history?
The answer to this question lies in a dark forbidding cavern in the blistering desert east of Jerusalem, and it's at the heart of the Jewish-Christian divide. In the 1960s, an Israeli archeologist found a trove of letters -- the largest cache of ancient correspondence ever uncovered in Israel -- that included messages from Bar Kokhba.
Four decades later, convinced that more evidence of Bar Kokhba's reign was overlooked, Richard Freund returned to the desolate area with the latest in modern equipment, including ground-penetrating radar. And he discovered much more about the mighty Simon bar Kokhba.
The big split
The cave mouth is high up a craggy cliff face, and rare birds nest in the cool darkness, protected today by strict laws that mean wildlife officials must keep a lookout to prevent the archeologists from entering whenever a bird is spied bringing food back to the nest.
Despite the obstacles, Freund's team found yet another cache of artifacts and produced a sharpened new view of Bar Kokhba's revolt and place in Jewish history -- including evidence of Judaism's final breach with the religion founded by the first messiah, Jesus.
"I think the split occurred right in the middle of the Bar Kokhba rebellion," Freund told us, "when the Christians said 'This is not our Messiah' and the Jews said 'This is going be the liberation we have been praying for all these years.'"
Bar Kokhba's letters show him warning his followers not to trust the "Galileans" -- a common name for the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. The Galileans, who already were being called Christians, were in the ascendancy. While the Romans were fighting the Jews, the Christians were gaining power and influence and converts in the heart of the Roman Empire.
This was not their war with the Romans, for the Christian messiah was the Prince of Peace, and they would win in the end, with history-changing results. And without the support of the Galileans, Simon bar Kokhba's revolt was doomed.
[...]
We now know from his letters that his name was actually Shimon bar (son of) Kosiba. His followers came up with the title Bar Kokhba, as the article explains. And much later, in the Talmud, he was known as Bar Koziba, "son of a liar," since it had become clear that he was not the Messiah after all.
Judas the Galilean was killed a few years later than the article indicates: around 6 C.E.
I have commented on Richard Freund's work in one of the Judean Desert Caves here. But I haven't been following his more recent work.
I am skeptical about the supposed connection between the Galileans in Bar Kosiba's letter and the early Christians. There's nothing in the letter to indicate that they were anything more specific than just Galileans.