The answer is actually quite simple. In the Jewish tradition, before the appearance of Christianity, there was no expectation of a suffering Messiah.
But doesn’t the Bible constantly talk about the Messiah who would suffer? As it turns out, the answer is no. Since the beginning, Christians have frequently cited certain passages in the Old Testament as clear prophecies of the future suffering Messiah, passages such as Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22, in which someone suffers horribly, sometimes expressly for the sins of others. These passages, Christians have claimed, are clear statements about what the Messiah would be like. Jews who do not believe in Jesus, however, have always had a very effective response: the Messiah is never mentioned in these passages. You can check it out for yourself: read Isaiah 53 or Psalm 22 (I’ll quote the relevant verses later in this chapter). The term “Messiah” never occurs in them. In Jewish tradition, these passages refer not to the Messiah but to someone else (or to lots of someone elses).
Before Christianity there were no Jews that we know of who anticipated a Messiah who would suffer and die for the sins of others and then be raised from the dead. What then would the Messiah be like? We know from Jewish documents written around the time of Jesus that there were various expectations of what the Messiah would be like. In none of these expectations was he anything like Jesus.
The term “Messiah” literally means “anointed one.” It was used of various figures in the Old Testament—for example, priests and kings—who were ceremonially anointed with oil as a symbol of divine favor, indicating that God had set them apart to perform their tasks (1 Samuel 10:1; Leviticus 4:3, 5). The classical Jewish view of the Messiah derived from the ancient Israelite view of kingship.
According to traditions found in ancient Israel, God promised King David that there would always be a descendant of David sitting on the throne of Israel (1 Samuel 7:14–16). But the vicissitudes of history created a disconfirmation of this promise. The nation of Judah, over which the Davidic monarch had reigned for over four hundred years, was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. There was no longer a Davidic king sitting on the throne. But God had promised that there always would be. How could the promise be reconciled with the historical reality?
Some Jews thought that God would make good on his promise by restoring an anointed king to rule Israel when he was finished punishing his people for their disobedience. This would be the Messiah, the newly anointed one, a great warrior-king like David who would overthrow the enemies of Israel and establish Israel once again as a sovereign state in the land. This hope ebbed and flowed over the years, as the Babylonians were succeeded by the Persians, then the Greeks, then the Egyptians, then the Syrians, then the Romans: all of them controlling the land of Israel, and no descendant of David on the throne, down to the time of Jesus.
In the days of Jesus, many Jews were probably not thinking much about a future Messiah, just as most Jews today aren’t. Those Jews who were expecting a Messiah, however, believed that God would fulfill his promise, a promise found in such messianic passages as Psalm 2:1–9 in the Hebrew Bible:
Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and his anointed [literally “Messiah”], saying, “Let us burst their bonds asunder, and cast their cord from us.” He who sits in the heavens laughs; the LORD has them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying, “I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.” I will tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to me, “You are my son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me and I will make the nations your heritage and the end of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.
The obvious expectation is for a great and powerful king in the line of David who will be the Son of God just as David’s successors were (see 2 Samuel 7:14). That this expectation of a future political Messiah was alive and well in the days of Jesus is evident from Jewish writings of the time. One particularly clear statement of the expectation of this Messiah comes from outside the Bible, in a book called the Psalms of Solomon, written some decades before Jesus’ birth. Notice what kind of person the Messiah would be:
See, Lord, and raise up for them their king, the son of David, to rule over your servant Israel in the time known to you, O God. Undergird him with the strength to destroy the unrighteous rulers, to purge Jerusalem from gentiles, who trample her to destruction; in wisdom and in righteousness to drive out the sinners from the inheritance; to smash the arrogance of sinners like a potters’ jar; to shatter all their substance with an iron rod; to destroy the unlawful nations with the word of his mouth…. He will gather a holy people whom he shall lead in righteousness…. And he will have gentile nations serving him under his yoke, and he will glorify the Lord in a [place] prominent [above] the whole earth. And he will purify Jerusalem and make it holy as it was even from the beginning…. And he will be a righteous king over them, taught by God. There will be no unrighteousness among them in his days, for all shall be holy, and their king shall be the Lord Messiah. (Psalms of Solomon 17:21–32)
That the Messiah would be a powerful warrior-king was the expectation of many Jews in Jesus’ day.
But there were other Jews who had other expectations about what the future deliverer of Israel would be. Especially in the apocalyptic tradition, within which Jesus and his followers stood, it was sometimes thought that the future savior would not be merely an earthly king. He would be a cosmic judge of the earth, sent from God to overthrow the forces of evil with a show of strength. This divine figure was called a variety of things in different texts, including “the Son of Man” (based on a reading of Daniel 7:13–14). Consider the two following Jewish texts, dating roughly from the time of the beginning of Christianity:
And they [the people of God] had great joy, and they blessed and praised and exalted because the name of the Son of Man had been revealed to them. And he sat on the throne of his glory, and the whole judgment was given to the Son of Man, and he will cause the sinners to pass away and be destroyed from the face of the earth. And those who led astray the world will be found in chains, and will be shut up in the assembly-place of their destruction, and all their works will pass away from the face of the earth. And from then on there will be nothing corruptible, for that Son of Man has appeared and has sat on the throne of his glory, and everything evil will pass away and go from before him. (1 Enoch 69)
As I kept looking the wind made something like the figure of a man come up out of the heart of the sea. And I saw that this man flew with the clouds of heaven; and everywhere he turned his face to look, everything under his gaze trembled…. After this I looked and saw that an innumerable multitude of people were gathered together from the four winds of heaven to make war against the man who came up out of the sea…. When he saw the onrush of the approaching multitude, he neither lifted his hand nor held a spear, or any weapon of war; but I saw only how he sent forth from his mouth something like a stream of fire, and from his lips a flaming breath…[which] fell on the onrushing multitude that was prepared to fight, and burned up all of them, so that suddenly nothing was seen of the innumerable multitude but only the dust of ashes and the smell of smoke. (4 Ezra 13:1–11)
A great and powerful warrior-king, or an even more powerful cosmic judge of the earth—this is what some Jews expected of the Messiah. Other Jews had yet different expectations of what a future savior might be like.1 But the one thing that all the Jewish expectations had in common was this: the future Messiah would be a figure of grandeur and real power, who would overthrow God’s enemies in a show of strength and rule over God’s people, and the other nations of earth, with a rod of iron.
And who was Jesus? A virtually unknown itinerant preacher from the hinterlands of Galilee who got on the wrong side of the law and was crucified as a political insurgent. Jesus did not overthrow the Romans. The Romans crushed him like a gna
t. Calling Jesus the Messiah was for most Jews beyond laughable; it was virtually (or really) a blasphemy against God. Jesus is the Messiah? The preacher who got crucified? That is God’s Messiah? Yeah, right.
When I try to explain to my students how absurd the claim sounded to most Jews, I often resort to an analogy. The gut reaction that many Jews had to the claim that Jesus was the Messiah is comparable to what your reaction would be if I insisted in all earnestness that the Branch Davidian leader David Koresh, who was killed by the FBI at Waco, is the Lord of the universe. David Koresh? Yes, he is the savior of the world and the Lord of all! Oh, sure—what are you, crazy? (I get in trouble for making this analogy every semester; at least one student will say on his or her course evaluation, “I can’t believe that Ehrman thinks David Koresh is the Lord of the universe!”)
The Basis for the Christians’ Claims
If there was no expectation among Jews that the Messiah would suffer and die for sins, why is it that Christians believe in a suffering Messiah? Here’s the way it worked historically. Prior to Jesus’ death some of his followers evidently thought that he was the Messiah; this conviction shows up throughout the Gospels. But obviously if they said “Jesus is the Messiah,” they meant it in a traditional Jewish sense, for example, that he would be the king who would establish the throne once more in Israel and rule over his people. (Remember, though, that Jesus himself appears to have understood the term in a different, apocalyptic, sense).
This hope that Jesus could be the Messiah was radically disconfirmed by the events of history: Jesus never did raise an army, never did drive the Romans out of the promised land, never did establish Israel as a sovereign state. Instead, he got crucified. This showed his followers that their faith in him had been unfounded.
But then they, or at least some of them, came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead. This reconfirmed their earlier notion: Jesus really is the one chosen by God! He is God’s own son! He is the one upon whom God has shown his special favor, God’s anointed one, our savior. He is the Messiah!
This reconfirmation forced the earliest Christians into a new understanding of what it meant to be the Messiah. Their logic was impeccable. Jesus is the Messiah. Jesus suffered and died. Therefore, the Messiah had to suffer and die.
But what was one to do with the fact that there were no Jewish prophecies that the Messiah would suffer and die? The earliest Christians began searching the Scriptures for hints of their new belief, and they found them, not in passages that referred to the Messiah but in other passages that describe the suffering of God’s righteous one. Christians concluded, and argued, that these passages were actually referring to the Messiah, even though the Messiah is never mentioned in them and even though no one had ever thought, before this, that they referred to the Messiah. But for Christians, such passages as Isaiah 53:1–6 were clear messianic predictions:
He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases. Yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray, we have all turned to our own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
Jesus’ suffering and death were foretold by the prophets. In fact, the first Christians were convinced that there were passages that described the actual crucifixion of the Messiah, such as Psalm 22:1–18:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?…I am a worm, and not human; scorned by others, and despised by the people. All who see me mock at me; they make mouths at me, they shake their heads…. I am poured out like water and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast; my mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death. For dogs are all around me; a company of evildoers encircles me. My hands and feet have shriveled; I can count all my bones. They stare and gloat over me. They divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots.
Originally this passage had nothing to do with a future Messiah, and Jews did not interpret it as a reference to one. But once Jesus’ followers came to believe that he was the Messiah, it was only natural that they saw in such passages references to what the Messiah would experience. The debates over Jesus’ messiahship ensued. Jews insisted these passages were not referring to the Messiah (and they had a point, since the Messiah is never mentioned in them); Christians insisted that they were. And so the fireworks began.
But what about all the other prophecies that Jesus was said to fulfill: that his mother would be a virgin, that he would be born in Bethlehem, that he would ride into Jerusalem on a donkey, and so on? It is important to remember that our accounts of what Jesus did and experienced have come down to us in Gospels written many years after the fact, based on orally transmitted stories about him that had been in circulation for decades. The people telling the stories of Jesus were not ignorant of the Jewish Scriptures. Some of them knew the Scriptures well, and they told the stories of Jesus in light of what the Scriptures predict. And so, accounts of Jesus’ birth, his ministry, his Triumphal Entry, his Passion, and his resurrection were often told with the predictions of Scripture in mind, by storytellers who believed that in Jesus all the promises had been fulfilled.
For example, both Matthew and Luke indicate that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but they have him born by means of different, contradictory plot devices. Why do they both want him to be born in Bethlehem? Because the Old Testament indicates that a savior will come from Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). But didn’t everyone know that he came from Nazareth? Yes, say both Matthew and Luke, Jesus actually grew up in Nazareth. But he was born in Bethlehem, and here is how it happened. The problem is their accounts contradict each other. What does this show? The Christians told stories about Jesus in light of what they believed about him, making sure that at every point, his life fulfilled Scripture, since he was, after all, the suffering Messiah.
In reality, the idea that Jesus was the suffering Messiah was an invention of the early Christians. It is no wonder that the apostle Paul, writing decades after Christians had come up with this idea, indicates that it is the greatest “stumbling block” for Jews (1 Corinthians 1:23). Even though this is the very foundation for all Christian belief, to many Jews it was a ridiculous claim.
Paul saw this claim as valid precisely because it was so foolish (1 Corinthians 1:1:18–25). God’s ways are not humans’ ways. God has saved the world through a crucified Messiah, as no one would have or could have expected. For Paul this was the central point and the key to the salvation that God had brought to the world (1 Corinthians 15:3–5; Romans 1–3). Through the death of the Messiah God had made salvation available to all people, Jews and gentiles. And Paul pushed this point a step further: it was only through the death of the Messiah that a person could be right with God—not, say, through the Jewish law.
But Paul did not make up the idea that the Messiah had to be crucified. The idea had been invented much earlier, as soon as Jesus’ original followers came to believe that God had raised him from the dead. Paul inherited this idea when he converted to become a follower of Jesus. It was this idea that eventually led Christianity to break off from Judaism to become its own religion, a religion that stood in direct opposition to Judaism, the religion of Jesus himself.
CHRISTIANITY AS A DISTINCT, ANTI-JEWISH RELIGION
One of the most pressing and intriguing questions that historians of early Christianity have had to face is how the thoroughly Jewish religion of Jesus so quickly transformed itself into a religion of gentiles. How did Christianity move from being a sect within Judaism to becoming a virulently anti-Jewish religion in less than a century?
The Religion of Jesus and His Earliest Followers<
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We have already seen that there was nothing about Jesus’ message or his mission that stood outside Judaism. He was a Jew, born to Jewish parents, raised in a Jewish culture; he became a teacher of the Jewish law, gathered around himself a group of Jewish followers, and instructed them in the essence of what he saw to be the true worship of the Jewish God.
Jesus was an apocalyptic Jewish prophet. He anticipated that the God of the Jews was soon to intervene in history, overthrow the forces of evil, and set up his good kingdom on earth. In order to enter this kingdom, Jesus told the Jewish crowds, they needed to do what God had commanded in the Jewish law. Specifically they needed to carry out the two greatest commandments of the law: love God with all their heart, soul, and strength (quoting Deuteronomy 6:4–6) and love their neighbors as themselves (quoting Leviticus 19:18). “On these two commandments,” urged Jesus, “hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:40).
When one reconstructs the actual sayings and deeds of Jesus, they all stand firmly within this Jewish apocalyptic framework. It was only his later followers who saw him as starting a new religion. He appears to have had no intent to start a new religion. His was the religion of the Jews, correctly interpreted (in opposition, of course, to other interpretations, such as those of the Pharisees and Sadducees).
Some of his later followers retained the Jewish character of his proclamation. As the Christian religion developed in other directions, however, these followers came to be labeled heretics. This is one of the real ironies of the early Christian tradition, that the original form of the religion came to be cast out and denounced.
Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible Page 25