This is an excellent point, John2, although as you know I disagree with you about the authorship of gMark.John2 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 07, 2018 3:24 pm At this point then I'm looking at it this way. Maybe Mark (being, in my view, a follower of a moderate Fourth Philosophic faction) is maligning later and more radical elements of the Fourth Philosophy (who would be fresh on his mind if he was writing c. 70 CE) by portraying the person who betrayed Jesus (whether he is fictional or not) as being associated with "those guys." And maybe even the choice of the name Judas (or the choice of an actual disciple who was named Judas) as the one to betray Jesus is another swipe at "those guys," i.e., the archetypal one, Judas the Galilean. In any event, I don't buy the Judas-being-a-swipe-at-Jews idea anymore since Mark strikes me as being a "Jewish Christian" writing and I buy what Papias says about Mark being a follower of Peter.
As I was looking over Antiquities 18.1.1, in response to all of your posts about the fourth philosophy, I noticed how completely Josephus pins the blame for 70 AD and everything before it on Judas the Galilean. This Judas raided the armory in Sepphora in 6 CE, launching a rebellion against the census under Quirinius, and particularly against anyone in Galilee who would pay taxes to Rome. They raided wealthy homes and torched the farms of anyone loyal to Rome, and their message was that Jews/Israelites should have no king but Yahweh.
I have suggested elsewhere that gMark might have been commissioned/sponsored by the Flavian court, to be used as propaganda that would rebut Jewish zealotry with the story of their true messiah, a peaceful and holy tax-payer. If so, it makes perfect sense that the disciple of this messiah from Galilee who betrays him to the chief priests, thus causing the death of the messiah, an event which foredooms the Jewish temple to destruction as symbolized in gMark by the rending of the Temple curtain, would be called Judas. Both Jews and Romans would associate this Judas with Judas the Galilean, the initiator of all their conflict. On this reading, for the original intended audience of gMark, Judas Iscariot would be a symbol not of the Jewish people being wicked (as in Christianity), but rather of the zealous insurgency against Rome launched by Judas the Galilean, and blamed by Josephus (the Flavians' expert on all things Jewish) for all that befalls the Jewish people in the first century.