Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

Yet what else did “optimism” mean in first-century
     Palestine but confidence in God? See “Going to War Against Rome: The Motivation of
     the Jewish Rebels,” in
The Jewish Revolt Against Rome: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
, ed. M. Popovic,
Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism
154 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2011), 129–53.
    It should be noted that while “the Samaritan” called himself “messiah,” he did not
     mean it exactly in the Jewish sense of the word. The Samaritan equivalent of “messiah”
     is
Taheb
. However, the Taheb was directly related to the messiah. In fact, the words were
     synonymous, as evidenced by the Samaritan woman in the gospel of John who tells Jesus,
     “I know that the messiah is coming. When he will come, he will show us all things”
     (John 4:25).
    Josephus is the first to use the Latin word “Sicarii” (Josephus,
Jewish War
2.254–55), though it is obvious he borrows the term from the Romans. The word “Sicarii”
     appears in Acts 21:38 in reference to the “false prophet” known as “the Egyptian,”
     for whom Paul is mistaken. Acts claims the Egyptian had four thousand followers, which
     is a more likely figure than the thirty thousand that Josephus claims in
Jewish War
2.247–70 (though in
Antiquities
20.171, Josephus provides a much smaller number).
    Although Josephus describes the Sicarii as “a different type of bandit,” heuses the words “Sicarii” and “bandits” interchangeably throughout
The Jewish War
. In fact, at times he uses the term “Sicarii” to describe groups of bandits who do
     not use daggers as weapons. It is likely that his reason for differentiating the Sicarii
     from “the other bandits” was to keep all the various bandit gangs distinct for narrative’s
     sake, though a case can be made that after the rise of Menahem in the first year of
     the war, the Sicarii became a recognizably separate group—the same group that seized
     control of Masada. See Shimon Applebaum, “The Zealots: The Case for Revaluation,”
Journal of Roman Studies
61 (1971): 155–70. In my opinion, the best and most up-to-date study of the Sicarii
     is Mark Andrew Brighton,
The Sicarii in Josephus’s Judean War: Rhetorical Analysis and Historical Observations
(Atlanta: Society of Biblical Scholarship, 2009).
    Other views on the Sicarii include Emil Schurer,
A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ
, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1890), for whom the Sicarii are a fanatical offshoot
     of the Zealot Party; Martin Hengel,
The Zealots
(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), who disagrees with Schurer, arguing that the Sicarii
     were just an ultra-violent subgroup of the bandits; Solomon Zeitlin, “Zealots and
     Sicarii,”
Journal of Biblical Literature
81 (1962): 395–98, who believes the Sicarii and the Zealots were two distinct and
     “mutually hostile” groups; Richard A. Horsley, “Josephus and the Bandits,”
Journal for the Study of Judaism
10 (1979): 37–63, for whom the Sicarii are just a localized phenomenon, part of the
     larger movement of “social banditry” that was rife in the Judean countryside; and
     Morton Smith, “Zealots and Sicarii: Their Origins and Relation,”
Harvard Theological Review
64 (1971): 7–31, whose view that labels such as Sicarii and Zealot were not static
     designations but rather indicated a generalized and widespread yearning for the biblical
     doctrine of zeal is wholeheartedly adopted in this book.
    In the
Antiquities
, written some time after
The Jewish War
, Josephus suggests that it was the Roman proconsul Felix who spurred the Sicarii
     to murder the high priest Jonathan for his own political purposes. Some scholars,
     most notably Martin Goodman,
The Ruling Class of Judea
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), continue to argue this point, viewing
     the Sicarii as little more than hired assassins or mercenaries. This is unlikely.
     First of all, the explanation given in the
Antiquities
contradicts Josephus’s earlier, and likely more reliable, account in
The Jewish War
, which makes no mention of Felix’s hand in the assassination of Jonathan. In fact,
     the description of Jonathan’s murder in the
Antiquities
fails to mention the role of the Sicarii at all. Instead, the text refers to assassins
     generally as “bandits” (
lestai
). In any case, the account of Jonathan’s murder in
The Jewish War
is written deliberately to emphasize the