revising the entire timeline...

Given that we have evidence of the severity of Hadrian’s retaliation against the Judean uprising called the bar Cochba revolt, and that our only known sources for the existence of Jesus are contemporaries of that war, it may be a good idea to revise our theory of events.

The accepted history is:  Jesus was born, preached/healed/etc, was crucified.  Rose.  Went up to heaven.  His disciples went out and told people about it.  Paul, a Pharisee who believed in Torah and did not believe that non-Jews should be accepted into Jewish praxis without surgery, “converted” to “believe” in “Christ,” and went out preaching about it.

The problems: 

·      The only known documents that confirm the existence of a “Christ” are from writers who either lived at the time of the bar Cochba revolt (Tacitus and Suetonius) or who had offspring who lived at that time and had an investment in making their forbear look like he was on top of everything that happened in Jerusalem/Judea:  Josephus and his offspring.

·      There are no extant copies of any Pauline letter before the bar Cochba revolt.

It is reasonable, therefore, to infer that rather than assuming Paul assisted Greco-Romans who wanted to be received as fully functioning members of the Judean Temple cult BEFORE the revolt, Paul underwent his “conversion” AFTER the revolt,  and that a part of that “conversion” included the realization that the Judean population needed to be increased, since Hadrian’s retaliation had decimated it.

This accounts for the burgeoning of “Christian” communities after the bar Cochba revolt, a burgeoning that had not been noted previously, despite the bizarre reference in Suetonius.  This also explains why the Greco-Romans who wanted to be accepted into Judean praxis did not come rushing to assist Judeans who were resisting Hadrian—it was not the case, as has been hypothesized by scholars, that they stayed out of the revolt because they had already “found” a messiah. They stayed out of the revolt because at the time of the revolt, they were still considered marginal Greco-Romans who thought Judean writings were a “philosophy” that they could only follow from a distance, since they did not want to have the surgery necessary to be fully accepted into its praxis. 

Thus if we adjust the timeline so we understand Paul to be “preaching” after the bar Cochba revolt, we find that his “conversion” has a basis:  to increase the population of Judea, even if it is by including people who would not have been considered acceptable to join Judean Temple praxis before the Temple was rededicated to Jupiter. 

We also find that he has something to hang his preaching on:  the documents written by Judeans to incorporate bar Cochba into the Judean canon, which, it would seem from Tacitus and Suetonius, had already begun to circulate and be misinterpreted.

Those Greco-Romans who had already been reading the Judean canon (via the LXX) would almost certainly have heard of and read the new (gospel) texts written to incorporate the bar Cochba revolt into the Judean canon.  They would be ready to receive someone who could claim to have been near the action.  They would be ready to be taught how to adapt their praxis so that it would be acceptable to Judean Temple praxis when it was again possible.  They would be ready to receive Paul.

This would explain why there are no extant Pauline letters that pre-date the bar Cochba revolt.  It would explain why, at the end of the 2^nd century CE, Tertullian made the suggestion that Judean praxis was a “religio licita,” a claim that makes no sense at all in light of the three Jewish Wars:  given that the Romans destroyed the Temple, rededicated it to Jupiter then destroyed Jerusalem and expelled its population, there is no way Judean praxis could be considered a “religio licita.”  Unless, of course, the “legality” of the praxis lay in the fact that Paul travelled outside of Judea to teach non-Judeans how to make their praxis acceptable to Judean Temple worship.

If we accept that this is the case, we have to find Paul’s interpretation of law radical—not for his application of the Deuteronomic “circumcise your heart” to non-Judeans, but in his refusal to condemn homosexuality in the face of the demolition of his city, his country and his people by an emperor who was grieving the loss of his male lover.