Challenge to Maimonides account of Moshiach: Was Bar Koziba a better candidate than Ben Miriam?

ABSTRACT SUMMARY

With gratitude for Maimonides mishna Torah, this essay corrects a few fundamental errors regarding Yehoshua Ben Miriam, and another few regarding Bar Koziba. Maimonides lacked access to the primary sources, and thus erred in assuming that the version of "Jesus" Christ offered by the church was an accurate representation of this historical Nazarene, although its not. There is not evidence that Maimonides ever read the new testament, therefore he doesn't know what he's talking about when discussing the inquest of Jesus before Caiaphas and the "trial" before the sanhedren. These questions should be investigated by every diligent student, and Maimonides erroneous conclusion should be disavowed by the Jewish community as a whole, in order to disavow his unnecessary and unwarranted assumption of inter-generational bloodguilt. Instead of complicitly affirming the verdict of with that illegal show trial, renounce it. The trial was a disastrous injustice that was caused by an apparent apostasy from Torah on the part of the corrupt Roman-appointed Sadducee priesthood. Analysis below, and corrections offered.

Divrechem zichram. Their words are their memorial

Although performance of miracles and wonders such as resurrecting the dead are not required of a Jewish king, they are also not prohibited to him. If he has such extraordinary supernatural powers, he should use them, and should use them within the bounds of Torah law and ethics.

Rav Akiva may be reliable on other matters, but on the question of Moshiach he is not a reliable source, insofar as he was deceived and actively fomented a delusion on the matter, as everybody knows. Maimonides himself admits this, by using the pejorative nickname "Koziba", the "deceiver", for Akiva's messiah, implying that Akiva was himself deceived.

Whereas one candidate is said to have multiplied the healed and whole among Israel, the other candidate is said to have multiplied the maimed. Which of these traits would be more fitting for candidate to the office of king of the Jews? Which better reflects the will of the Almighty, blessed be he, toward his people, and which attribute would He be more likely to endow his chosen?

Both candidates led resistance movements, and both died at the hands of Roman soldiers. One candidate died for sanctification of the holy name of the God of Israel, blessed be he, in a direct protest action against imperial Roman occupation and colonization of Jerusalem, and against desecration of its holy temple and corruption of its priesthood, but did so in a non-violent action that respected and saved his followers from dying in war.

The second candidate died in a revolutionary war of national liberation against imperial Rome, and presumably also for sanctification of the holy name. But he did so without first atoning for his own sins, and for the sins that had led to God's decree against his holy city and sanctuary. He and his rabbinic enablers apparently did not respect their disciples enough, or did not have the wisdom to forsee this result, leading tens of thousands of them to premature death, in vain. Which of these two candidates brought greater disaster on the Jewish people?

He who exalts himself shall be humbled, but he who humbles himself shall be exalted. For humility comes before honor, and before ruin, pride.

Which of these two candidates are less suitable for a presumptive "King of the Jews"? And which failed king was less righteous than the other? And does not history actually record this?

And of whom does the prophet Daniel allude in his prophecies, ibid. 11:14 which state: 'The vulgar among your people shall exalt themselves in an attempt to fulfill the vision, but they shall stumble.' And between Shimon Cephas (the apostle Peter) and Rav Akiva, who was more and who was less deceived?

Who and what should we be mourning during the first 32 days of the counting of the Omer, after Pesach? Joshka is recorded to have said to the women who followed him, while carrying his cross to mount Calvary, "Do not mourn for me; mourn for yourselves". Even if his Messianic status remains dubious, and even though church teaching is apostate lawlessness that we must categorically reject, he was himself evidently a tzaddik and a prophet, because mourning for ourselves after his yahrzeit, is exactly what we are in fact doing, and subsequent rabbinic decree has confirmed it.

And if we mourn for our loss, should we not also take the opportunity to mourn for our sins and repent of them? The scoffer suffers but never learns his lesson, and keeps scoffing at himself. But we should suffer, and confess, and return to God and to his holy Torah.

The historic Joshua ben Miriam, a hasidic Galilean pharisee who kept Torah and mitzvot and taught his talmidim to do likewise, is not equivalent to the Jesus or "Yeshua" of Church theology who abrogated the Torah, violated the mitzvahs in order to demontrate that, declared himself God, and replaced Israel and the Jews with an anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist church.

The latter is as Maimonides says a great stumbling block, and still is today, but the former was unknown to him and still is unknown to most Christians and Jews alike, today. By removing the theophoric prefix from his name, the Church has presented us with a "savior" who embodies salvation without the God of Israel, and who effectively replaces him as God. This is emblematic of an entire collection of hermeneutic perversions in church's reading of the new testment, which all support the unbiblical supercessionist theology, which as Maimonides correctly denounces, has caused "the Torah to be altered, and the majority of the world to err and serve a god other than the Lord." But Maimonides has neglected to distinguish, and like the church has neglected to critically and non-dogmatically read the new testament, and therefore he follows them in conflating the "Yeshua" of the church creeds formed in 4th century ecumenical councils, with the historic Joschka represented in the gospel accounts and believed on by the apostles. This leads him into a straw man fallacy, based on the same faulty premise used to support the anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism that are foundational in Christianity, and it falls upon our later generations to correct these disastrous errors.

Joschka was sentenced to execution by Pontius Pilate for treason against Rome, for the crime of being "King of the Jews", and this was the decree written against us that was nailed to the cross above his head. But according to Torah law, it is not a crime to be king, and the Jews who indicted him on this charge were, ipso facto, sinners who betrayed both Jewish nationalism and Jewish Torah religion. If they felt he was a bad king, they could have killed him themselves and taken matters into their own hands as Akiva and Bar Koziba later did, appointing one of their own, in his stead, to lead the resistance. But asking an idolatrous foreigner to come play to role of king for them and to execute a fellow Jew on their behalf, was a fundamental violation of the Torah law of kings, and also an act of despicable cowardice. This apostasy from written Torah is the probably cause for the destruction of Jerusalem and churban haBayit. And there was also an apostasy from Oral Torah.

If the committee of Sadduccees really did interrogate him at midnight in a private residence of the high priest on the day before a holiday - which is the unanimous account of the four contemporaneous witnesses we have - then this was an unlawful assembly which fundamentally denied the accused due process of law on all three points. See this source sheet for the full analysis: Caiaphas' illegal midnight inquest of Joschka, and arraignment before Pilate - what is the halakhah?

The four "gospel" witnesses may or may not by totally reliable, but they are certainly less unreliable on the question than Maimonides, who lived 1,000 years later and brings no proof from Talmud, Midrash, or other contemporaneous sources, to support his own imagination of what happened. And if no such proofs exists for Maimonides or anyone else to bring, then we must carefully consider Chazal's silence and this very salient point. They seem to effectively agree with the statement Gamliel HaZeken's is reported to have said before the Sanhedrin during the inquisition of Peter and James, as recorded in Luke's book of the Acts of the Apostles: "Leave these men alone. If it is from man, it will come to nothing. But if it is from God, you cannot stop it. Lest you be found, yourselves, to be fighting against God."

Maimonides erred in his assessment because he took church doctrine at face value, and apparently took church's erroneous interpretation of events to be historical accurate, which it is not. Like most Christians, he evidently had never read the primary source texts of the New Testament, these having been suppressed by the church under their dogmatic Latin vulgate translation, itself only available to clerics. Maimonides can be forgiven for the mistake - since the church is primarily blameworthy for misinforming him. But Jews alive today can not be so easily forgiven, since we have the primary sources available, and are therefore obliged to do the textual criticism before offering opinions on a matter of which Maimonides knew not.

The prejudiced and illegal judgement of the Sadducees should be rejected by Jews today. Maimonides cannot be brought as a reliable source on either the factual or legal basis for Sadducees indictment of him. Had he not made this cardinal mistake of believing the church, perhaps the Crusades, expulsions, and inquisitions would have been less destructive of Jewish communities (and of "christian" communities, eventually, as well). Insofar as Maimonides remains to this day an authority on so much other halakhah, his errors on the messianic question should be explicitly disavowed - along with those of christianity - by all Jewish communities, in order to fulfill the command of "Distance yourself from a false matter", and thus we should spare ourselves from future manifestations of divine wrath, which is the outgoing of God's righteous and retributive judgement.