The rabbinic sources report the deaths of Akiva's students as a plague and do not connect them to the revolt. A reading that treats the plague as a veiled account of wartime losses is in circulation, and the counter-reading takes the sources at their word. This pass found no source it could verify on either side, so it wrote no relation between the holiday and the revolt.
What would resolve this A study of the talmudic and geonic witnesses to the Akiva tradition set against the documentary and archaeological record of the revolt, establishing whether the connection is ancient or a later harmonisation.
OpenRabbinic literature; Roman-period Jewish historyDivinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition