Theudas meaning

Meaning

Flowing With Water

Gift Of God

Thanksgiving

Etymology

From the noun θευσις (theusis), a running or a flowing (of a river), from the verb θεω (theo), to flow.

From Θεοδωρος (Theodoros), from (1) θεος (theos), god/God, and (2) δωρον (doron), a gift.

From תודה (toda), thanksgiving.

Related names

• Via θεος (theos): Theophilus, Thessalonica, Timothy

• Via δωρον (doron): Zenas

• Via תודה (toda): Abihud, Abiud, Ahihud, Ammihud, Baale-judah, Ehud, Eliud, Hod, Hodaviah, Hodiah, Ishhod, Jaddai, Jedaiah, Jeduthun, Jehudi, Jehudijah, Jew, Judah, Judas, Jude, Judea, Judith, Ohad, Tidal, Vaniah, Yaudi

The name Theudas occurs only once in the Bible, namely in Acts 5:36, where the Pharisee Gamaliel averts the intention of the Jewish council to kill Peter and the apostles, by reminding them of the rebels Theudas first and then Judas of Galilee, whose efforts had come to nothing and whose movements had died out.

An often noted problem is that the historian Flavius Josephus also mentions revolts by Judas of Galilee (War.2.433, Ant.18.1-10, 18.23) and Theudas (Ant.20.97), but says that Judas came first and Theudas later. Many possible solutions to this conundrum have been proposed over the centuries — most commonly claiming that either Josephus or Luke was wrong, or these two authors are talking about different men named Judas and Theudas — but here at Abarim Publications we suspect that this discrepancy rather points to a failure of modern commentators to recognize the complexities of Jewish literary technology: because yes, Jewish literature, including the Bible, is a technological device (which is also why the New Jerusalem is a city and not some natural wilderness; see our article on YHWH).

In his novel Contact (1985), author Carl Sagan lovingly incorporated this failure of modern commentators, as Ellie Arroway and the other protagonists of the story are delivered tens of thousands of pages of extraterrestrial instructions for building just such a technological device, but find that the pages do not line up, or at least not by their own standards. Excentric airborne engineer (and see Exodus 31:1-11) S. R. Hadden (named after the 7th century BCE king Esarhaddon of Assyria), urges Ellie to stop thinking like a two-dimensional earthling and start thinking like a three-dimensional Vegan (someone from Vega), and shows that thus the pages line up perfectly (Genesis 15:5).

Everybody knows that Homer's Iliad is about the Trojan War, but it's not emphasized often enough that the Iliad covers a mere few weeks near the end of that ten year war, and barely discusses its reason (i.e. what made the Greeks and the Trojans so diametrically opposed) and ends with the funeral of Hektor and never mentions the Wooden Horse and the ultimate sack of Troy (see for a more elaborate discussion of the Iliad our article on Phoenicia).

Entirely likewise, the gospels and Acts, whose final chapters ostensibly follow the designs of the same Nostoi genre as Homer's Odyssey, were written long after the events they describe, and their primary function was not to inform the reader (or hearer) what had happened, because everybody knew what had happened (Luke 24:18), but rather to explain and comment on what everybody knew to have happened.

In the classical world, literally everybody and their dog knew that the Iliad was not designed to inform its audience about some historical event that may or may not have played out in some comparable way or form, but rather to discuss the great mystery of being human and having a human mind — Helen, you see, was legally married to the king of Sparta but in the heat of passion ran off with Paris of Troy. Perhaps terribly unfair, in the old world a marriage contract was a part of property law, and property law is the very fundament of all human civilization (hence the cycle told from Genesis 12:18 to 20:9 to 26:10). The Trojan war tells of the eternal battle between law & rationality, a.k.a. the eternal Logos, versus the temporal passions of the heart (compare Jeremiah 17:9 to John 8:44).

Entirely likewise, the evangelists were heavily invested in their effort to demonstrate that the piety and legality of the Pharisees were essentially matters of the lying heart, all "part of their enslavement" (in the slightly later words of Tacitus), and inspired by ignorance and foolishness rather than the wisdom of "the perfect law of liberty" (James 1:25, see Galatians 5:1). Hence, Matthew has Jesus exclaim: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness" (Matthew 23:27).

The idea that comedy may be a vehicle for truth is as old as the name Isaac (Romans 9:6-8, Jude 1:24). The gospel of John is the latest gospel and also the one most deliberately comedic. In John's gospel, Jesus facetiously asks the Pharisee Nicodemus: "Are you the teacher of Israel and do not understand these things?" (John 3:10). Right after a spectacular public miracle, Jesus slips away and the Pharisees have no idea where he went (5:13) and keep losing sight of him (7:34), and confidently declare that none of them believes in Jesus, while Nicodemus is standing right there (7:48-51)! Then, to top it all off, they assert that Galilee does not produce prophets (7:52), while the laughing-out-loud audience knew very well that the prophet Jonah was from Gath-hepher, which is a town in Galilee (2 Kings 14:25).

That's the context in which Luke has the celebrated Gamaliel mix up the chronology of Judas of Galilee and Theudas the rebel. To Luke's thigh-slapping audience, this was an obvious gimmick, designed to lampoon the arrogant ignorance of the supposedly wise. It was the old world equivalent of confusing the chronology of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination, or not knowing what came first, the moon landing or the Challenger disaster.

Luke links the birth of Jesus to the same census that he has Gamaliel tie the uprising of Judas of Galilee to (Luke 2:1, Acts 5:36), which was brutally beaten down by Quirinius. Everybody except Gamaliel remembered that this disastrous census had happened in 6 CE, and that far from died out, the movement of Judas had spawned the "fourth branch" of Jewish philosophy, sometimes called Zealotism and other times Sicarianism (it's unclear where one movement stops and the other begins, or in which ways the two differ, if they do).

The other three branches were the Sadducees, the Essenes and the Pharisees, and the practitioners of the fourth branch tended to mostly agree with the Pharisees but with such a radical demand for liberty that they would sooner resort to murder and mayhem than give any of it up. It's precisely that level of obtuse disagreeability that would ultimately result in the Great Revolt and the destruction of the Temple: Josephus even went so far as to write that neither general Titus nor his soldiers had destroyed the temple, or had ever intended to, but that the Zealots had first killed their own less-zealous brethren and then set fire to the Temple. That's probably not entirely historically accurate, but it rather well illustrates the variation of the character of Judas of Galilee in Josephus and the New Testament.

The Bible makes it clear that a human without knowledge of God is literally a mere animal (Psalm 73:22, Ecclesiastes 3:18, 2 Peter 2:12, Jude 1:10). In our article on Adam (whose name means "man", not some man but the man: humanity) we explain why the Biblical characters do not depict specific human individuals but rather kinds of humans, sorts or categories: schools of thought, levels of intellectual maturity or even the embodiments of certain technologies such as metallurgy (Tubal-cain) or international trade (Abraham).

Likewise, the phrase Judas of Galilee simply means the Galilean Jew, and may refer not so much to one single man but rather a sort of man. The Great Revolt of 66-70 CE started with the Galilean Uprising, of which Josephus had been a leader. Josephus was subsequently captured by general Vespasian, who was declared emperor of Rome by his legions while still in Galilee. His son Titus first succeeded him as general in Galilee, and later as emperor in Rome. Under their Flavian patronage, Josephus blossomed as a historian.

Theudas too was a well-known figure, or at least well enough for Josephus to remark on, forty very tumultuous years after his story had played. The joke here is that Theudas made his rebellious move in the mid-forties, about a decade into Gamaliel's future. That means that Gamaliel not only had his dates mixed up, he didn't even know the difference between a public memory and a private vision (Joel 2:28, Zechariah 13:4). A closely comparable time-jump, also tied to Josephus, is performed in Matthew 23:35 and Luke 11:51, where Jesus speaks of a murdered Zacharias whose murder would likewise happen forty years later (see our article on that name for a discussion of this).

Since Josephus is the only historian who reports on Theudas, it's not clear whether he was a single flesh-and-blood individual or again rather a category or kind of man, but here at Abarim Publications we would guess the latter. Regardless, Josephus tells that after the death of king Agrippa in 44 CE, a Roman named Cuspius Fadus became the first procurator of Judea. He managed what few had, namely restore peace among the Jews. That peace was briefly challenged with the arrival of some "howler" — Josephus wrote in Greek and used the word γοης (goes), howler, from γοαω (goao), to wail or howl, which is comparable to the noun μαντις (mantis), raving seer or prophet, from the verb μαινομαι (mainomai), to rave or rage. Another commonly cited equivalent is βοη (boe), a loud cry, from which comes the verb βοαω (boao), meaning to roar or cry out loud, as used in Matthew 3:3: "...the voice of one crying in the wilderness" , which translates Isaiah 40:3, which uses the Hebrew verb קרא (qara'), to call or name.

That howler, Josephus continues to explain, was Theudas, who had convinced a large number of people to accompany him to the Jordan, which would surely split on his command. But Cuspius Fadus wouldn't allow this excursion and sent his troops to kill them all — Theudas was decapitated, and his head was sent to Jerusalem as proof that the peace had been restored, which rather reminds of John the Baptist's head being given to Salome (whose name means peace).

In those days, human life may have been cheap but the whole reason why the Romans kept people alive was to levy taxes from them. Even if Theudas had been genuinely confused about his own prophetic powers, his followers would have been enlightened as soon as Theudas had commanded the Jordan to split, and in time would have found their way back to work. So why massacre them? The most plausible answer seems to be that Theudas was not a man but a popular movement, that wasn't planning to physically split the Jordan but rather the stream of Hellenization that came in from the north, had already saturated the Galilee and was increasingly threatening to overwhelm the purists of Jerusalem. Such considerations would have been incomprehensible to Josephus' paying Roman customers, and he may have resorted to literary code to cater to his better informed audience (Paul and Luke certainly wrote in literary code: see our articles on Sopater, Carpus and Aeneas).

Here at Abarim Publications we don't know either, of course, but if we were to guess, we would guess that Josephus spliced highly complex Jewish literary techniques into the linear fodder he fed his Roman patrons. Before becoming a Roman historian, he was a Galilean general, and before that he was a Pharisee called Yosef ben Mattiyahu, or Joseph son of Matthew — and, as we discuss below, the meaning of the name Matthew is closely similar to that of Theudas.

It's often suggested that Josephus and the authors of the New Testament were writing independently of each other and either didn't know about each other or else gave each other a wide berth. Here at Abarim Publications we would classify such suggestions as abject nonsense. Instead, we suggest that these two bodies of writing were in close communication with each other, and even dialogued at certain points. Like Moses and Homer, they both told of the same events, but from widely differing perspectives. For Moses and Homer, this had been the Bronze Age Collapse. For Josephus and the authors of the New Testament, it was the question of whether the Hebrew texts could and should be translated into other languages, and whether Jews should keep themselves alive by assimilating into the nations, or keep themselves in harm's way by staying segregated (hence, for instance, Romans 2:29, but also the curious hair-cut scene at Cenchrea, mentioned in Acts 18:18).

These concerns were deeply complex, and there are rarely two simple sides to anything complicated. But the evangelists were certainly Hebrew purists who understood that Hebrew has certain specific properties that other languages simply don't have, and that the Word of God assumed human form in the Hebrew language basin, and not in any other language. But they also understood that the Word, while never anything other than Hebrew, would certainly engage other languages and speak to the hearts of people whose lesser languages had made them blind, deaf, lame or otherwise compromised. This is why they wrote in Greek but very clearly conveyed the message that salvation comes via Hebrew (John 4:22), which stays the same while other language shift like sand (Matthew 7:24-27), makes crucial distinctions were Greek doesn't and vice versa (Matthew 22:41-46), and of which all legends, theologies and religions are either weak distillates or else impotent imitations (Luke 4:16-30).

Of course the whole world is supposed to be the same, with no difference between Jews and gentiles (Galatians 3:28, Colossians 3:11), but that's not because the whole world has become gentile and the Jews have been irreducibly dissolved into the nations, but rather because the whole world has come to know God and nobody is gentile anymore (Genesis 22:18, Deuteronomy 28:10, Isaiah 40:5, Zechariah 8:23, Habakkuk 2:14, Luke 3:6, Philippians 2:9-10, Revelation 21:24).

The Greek translation of the Bible was called the Septuagint (LXX), after the common Latin term septuaginta, meaning seventy. That name was popularly explained by a famous 2nd century BCE origin myth involving seventy-two translators, six from each tribe of Israel. But this myth did not explain why this Greek translation would hence not be called the Septuaginta-Duo (LXXII). Here at Abarim Publications we continue to not know either, but we suspect that the Septuagint was not named after seventy-two translators but rather the seventy elders whom the prophet Ezekiel had witnessed performing vile deeds, each in front of his own idol (Ezekiel 8:11-12).

The proverbial "seventy" had symbolized the world ever since the flood (see the table of nations, Genesis 10:1-32), whose existence demonstrated the very filth with which the earth had been stricken (Revelation 22:2, Matthew 18:22). The Revelator envisioned the world's armies converging upon the Holy City from the broad plain of the earth (Revelation 20:9), and used the same word for "broad" as Jesus did when he warned against the broad road to perdition: πλατος (platos), an obvious stab at the ignorant populism of Plato, who believed that a perfect society follows from the violent enforcement of human law. Contrarily, the law of God is the perfect law of liberty (James 1:25), and the purpose of the gospel is freedom (Galatians 5:1).

Josephus was a Pharisee, who advocated international compromise and adaptation into Greek and Latin, rather than faithfully continuing in Hebrew. He was one of the great many who had come before and who would follow: folk who believe that the Bible is about religion, and that its commands are ritualistic and largely arbitrary, and that its stories are historical and if they are true to begin with, then they are only true because they "really happened" that one time, long ago. Such people hold that the gospel is doctrinal, and that where the original authors failed, later theologians succeeded by summing it all up in lofty creeds and bumper-sticker slogans. Since such doctrines can be conveyed in any language, nobody needs to bother with Hebrew anymore and we can all keep blabbering in ever changing Greek, Latin, German, English and ultimately machine language.

God said: "these words will be on your heart" (Deuteronomy 6:6), and with that invited his people to learn his language and so partake in his divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). But the folks rather liked their own nature and hated to part with it and instead demanded that God's nature be pulled down to match theirs and his words be forged into theirs. Unfortunately, someone who doesn't know God also doesn't know that such a thing cannot be done (John 1:5).

The authors of the New Testament were not religious but understood that the stories of the Bible are not true because they really happened that once, but because they tell of law and happen always, anytime and everywhere continuously. They understood that the Hebrew of the Tanakh reflects the same natural law that upholds the physical earth, that had produced DNA and all of life and finally mind and language, and that any language other than Hebrew is out of synch with the universe, and that any religion or system of belief that is out of synch with the Tanakh is out of synch with reality and will succumb to madness first and then go up in a heaving billowing cloud of inert smoke.

People like Josephus use a lot of fancy talking to convince others of their superiority, but ultimately, fancy words are all they produce, and no river ever splits on their command. Paul did not preach; he demonstrated: "my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God" (1 Corinthians 2:4-5). Entirely likewise, when the disciples of John came to Jesus to ask if he were the One, or whether the One was still to come, Jesus did not whip out his résumé or call for fire and brimstone, but told them to look around and see with their own eyes what was going on in actual reality: "Go and report to John what you hear and see: the blind receive sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them" (Matthew 11:4-5). Then he said: "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do" (John 14:12).

And there's the difference between authors like Josephus and authors like the ones who wrote the Bible: the former use lots of words to achieve nothing at all, whereas the latter quietly restore, repair and create (Isaiah 58:12).

It's not specifically clear how the name Theudas was formed, but commentators over the centuries have embraced three excellent candidates — and note that in Hebrew literary art, nothing ever has one meaning and every word or name comes with all the meanings one can reasonable shoehorn that word or name into:

Some say that our name Θευδας (Theudas) may derive from the rather uncommon noun θευσις (theusis), a running or a flowing, from the verb θεω (theo), to run or flow (of a river). This verb is not used independently in the New Testament but it does show up coupled to the verb we already mentioned, namely βοαω (boao), to roar or cry out loud, to form the verb βοηθεω (boetheo), meaning to run upon hearing a cry or call. This verb is used eight times in the New Testament: see full concordance, and comes with a few derivations. A Stoic philosopher named Lucius Annaeus Cornutus, whose school flourished during the reign of Nero, proposed that our noun θευσις (theusis), a running of flowing, was the source of the familiar term θεος (theos), god. That view is now largely abandoned but it merits to note that in Hebrew, the verb נהר (nahar) means both to flow (what a river does) and to shine (what a lamp does).

A second group of commentators insists that our name Θευδας (Theudas) is a compressed version of the common name Θεοδωρος (Theodoros), and that name comprises two elements, the first being the aforementioned θεος (theos), god:

The second part of our name Theodoros would then derive from the noun δωρον (doron), a gift, from the verb διδωμι (didomi), to give:

A contraction from Theodoros to Theudas is not unthinkable as it was relatively common to contract names: think of the name Zenas which contracts Zenodotus or Silas which contracts Silvanus.

Thirdly, perhaps most spectacularly, and the favorite of us here at Abarim Publications, Theudas could be seen as a Hellenized version of the common Hebrew word תודה (toda), meaning thanksgiving:

For a meaning of the name Theudas, the Hitchcock Bible Names Dictionary evidently goes with θευσις (theusis), a running or a flowing, and reads Flowing With Water.

The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia declares Theudas a contraction of Theodorus, meaning The Gift Of God. NOBSE Study Bible Name List has a comparable God Giving. And Smith's Bible Dictionary goes with God-Given.

The American Tracts Society Bible Dictionary points out that Theudas might be considered a translation of the name Matthew, but that's not entirely correct. The name Matthew indeed comes from מתת (mattat), gift, from the verb נתן (natan), to give, its theophoric element is יה (yah), short for YHWH, rather than אל ('el), the equivalent of θεος (theos), god. Instead, Theudas would be a translation of Nethanel or Nathanael. A name that also means God Given but by using a different verb for to give, is Zabdiel. The Yahwist variant of this name is Zebadiah, whose name in Greek is Zebedee, whose sons were nicknamed Boanerges, from the aforementioned term βοαω (boao), meaning to roar or cry out loud.

Easton's Bible Dictionary and Spiros Zodhiates (The Complete Wordstudy Dictionary) consider our name Theudas to derive from the Hebrew noun תודה (toda), and read Thanksgiving.