jjramsey

Which is irrelevant to these characters' names being used as evidence that the name "Judas" was common.

So? Fictional people don't always have meaningful names. If Judas Iscariot were doing things analogous to what Judah the Hammer did, then we'd have a series of coincidences that could be more credibly be claimed as an intentional allusion to history. As it stands, Judas Iscariot is some character (maybe real, maybe not) who in the Gospels plays the role of betrayer, and for all we know, his first name could have been picked simply because it was a plausible Jewish name.

LogicandReason

And there is no chance that it was picked because of its synonymous relationship to Jews in general...then and now?

jjramsey

I wouldn't say no chance, but the evidence for your contention is so slim, and there is a far more boring, mundane explanation that explains the evidence more simply. I see no great reason to seek out an exotic explanation when a trivial one is quite sufficient.

LogicandReason

Your thinly-veiled apologetics and attempt to apply Occam's razor fail to answer the larger accusation here...that early Christians (really sectarian Jews) wrote anti-Temple system language into their Gospels reflecting the conflict between 'Christians' and the Rabbinical Judaism at the end of the 1st century. The results have produced genocide.

Judah or Judas are common names...as was Joshua/Jesus. I would have no theory if the bad guy in the Gospel stories was a man named John.

bacht

So that's 490 years after Daniel in Babylon? How does that work out to 70 CE? Wouldn't it be closer to the middle of the 1st C BCE?

LogicandReason

is there any scholarship as to calendars in those days portraying girls in skimpy swimsuits?:Cheeky:

Sheshbazzar

Don't want to spoil a good joke, but different sects used different calandars back then, with differing numbers of days in their years, which multiplied over a 490 "year" span of time, would result in widely differing dates.

LogicandReason

One might speculate the 70x7 speculation as another exegesis attempting to make a circle fit into a square hole that came long after the fact.

aa5874

Your assumption may not really be true.

If you read the OT you would realise that there was a calender that was being used.

And do you realise that a year is likely to be the same regardless of the calender used at any time, even if the amount of months or days in a month are not the same, since a year can be calculated using seasons or the position of the sun?

And if you read the writings of Josephus, it would be noticed that there was a calender already in use.

sharrock

I've been reading Temple Theology by Margaret Barker and she has this to say...

The seventy weeks of years, 490 years, were ten Jubilees, and the alternative way of reckoning this
period was as ten Jubilees. Jewish tradition remembered that the 490 years ended in 68CE; calculation
from the second temple Jubilee sequence beginning in 424BCE gives 66CE. A two year discrepancy
is hardly significant in the light of what this implies, namely that the tenth Jubilee began in 17/19 CE.
In other words, tenth Jubilee fervour and expectations were the context for the ministry of Jesus.

http://www.margaretbarker.com/Papers...TheJubilee.pdf