What Does Acts 5:36 Mean?

(36) **Before these days rose up Theudas.**—An insurrection, headed by a leader of this name, is mentioned by Josephus (*Ant.* xx. 5, § 1). He, however, places it, not “before the taxing”—i.e., circ. A.D. 6—but in the reign of Claudius, and under the procuratorship of Cuspius Fadus, A.D. 44, ten or twelve years after this speech of Gamaliel’s. The Theudas of whom he speaks claimed to be a prophet, and promised to lead his followers across the Jordan. Fadus sent a troop of horse against him, and he was taken and beheaded. It has accordingly been inferred by some critics that we have here a blunder so portentous as to prove that the speech was made up long years after its alleged date by a writer ignorant of history, that the whole narrative of this part of the Acts is accordingly untrustworthy, and that the book requires to be sifted throughout, with a suspicious caution. On the other side, it is urged (1) that the circumstances of the two cases are not the same, Josephus speaking of a “very great multitude” as following his Theudas, while Gamaliel distinctly fixes the number of adherents at “about four hundred”; (2) that the name Theudas, whether considered as a form of the Aramaic name *Thaddœus* (see Note on Matthew 10:3), or the Greek *Theodorus, *was common enough to make it probable that there had been more than one rebel of that name; (3) that Josephus mentions no less than three insurrections of this type as occurring shortly after the death of Herod the Great (*Ant.* xvii. 10)—one headed by Judas (a name which appears from Matthew 10:3, Luke 6:16, to have been interchangeable with Thaddaeus or Theudas), the head of a band of robbers who seized upon the fortress of Sepphoris; one by Simon, previously a slave of Herod’s, who proclaimed himself king and burnt Herod’s palaces at Jericho and elsewhere; one by Athronges and four brothers, each of whom ruled over a band, more or less numerous, of his own—and adds further, that besides these there were numerous pretenders to the name of king, who murdered and robbed at large, and that one of these may well have been identical with the Theudas of whom Gamaliel speaks; (4) that it is hardly conceivable that a writer of St. Luke’s culture and general accuracy, writing in the reign of Nero, could have been guilty of such inaccuracy as that imputed to him, still less that such a mistake should have been made by any author writing after Josephus’s history was in the hands of men. A writer in the reign of Henry VIII. would hardly have inverted the order of Wat Tyler and Jack Cade. The description given by Gamaliel, *saying that he was some one*—*i.e., *some great personage—agrees with the sufficiently vague account given by Josephus of the leaders of the revolts on the death of Herod, especially, perhaps, with that of Simon (who may have taken the name of Theudas as an *alias* to conceal his servile origin) of whom he says that “he thought himself more worthy than any other” of kingly power.