By Bart D. Ehrman, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Jews who were hoping for a messiah had various expectations. Some Jews expected the messiah would be a latter-day David, a great warrior-king, who would destroy the enemy with a Jewish army and establish Judea once again as a sovereign state that ruled all the lands surrounding it. On the other hand, others anticipated that the messiah would be a cosmic figure sent from heaven.
Expectations about the Messiah
The apocalyptically minded Jews expected that the messiah would be a divine judge sent from heaven to destroy God’s enemies with a supernatural show of power. It wouldn’t be a human warrior, but a kind of divine warrior that God sends from heaven; some kind of great angel who wipes out his enemies.
There were yet other Jews who were more focused not on wiping out the enemy, but on establishing the ways and customs of Judaism as the only things that ultimately mattered. Some of these Jews maintained that the powerful ruler to come would be a priest who would interpret God’s law and enforce interpretations by making everybody obedient.
Some Jews thought there were going to be two messiahs: a king messiah and a priest messiah, with the priest messiah superior to the king messiah.
So, there were various expectations about the coming messiah in the days of Jesus. But the one thing that all of these expectations had in common was that the messiah would be a great and powerful figure who would overwhelm the enemy and bring about God’s great kingdom on Earth with a show of force.
This article comes directly from content in the video series The Triumph of Christianity. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Jesus: Not the Messiah Expected
Before Jesus’s arrest and execution, his followers may have believed that he would be the future warrior-king. After his death, they became quite outspoken—Jesus was indeed the powerful messiah predicted by God. And so, it’s no great surprise that most other Jews thought this view was ridiculous. Everyone knew who Jesus was; he was a lower-class self-styled preacher who got on the wrong side of the law and was executed for crimes against the state.
Was Jesus a powerful figure who destroyed God’s enemies? Quite the contrary, he was crushed by the enemy, unceremoniously arrested, publicly humiliated, and tortured to death.
It’s not just that he was a bit different from what any Jew expected the messiah to be. He was precisely the opposite of what the messiah would be. Paul himself originally thought that the claim that Jesus was the messiah was absurd and blasphemous. He changed his mind because he claimed Christ appeared to him living years later. The vast majority of Jews never had any such experience, and if they had ever heard of Paul, they didn’t believe he had had that experience either. For them, Jesus was a weak, pathetic, crucified criminal, maybe he was the victim of a grotesque miscarriage of justice, but he wasn’t the messiah, he was nothing like the messiah.
Violent Confrontations between Christians and Jews
Yet the Christians persisted in their claims. They started saying that Jesus would fulfill what people thought of the messiah because Jesus was coming back a second time to fulfil those prophecies about the powerful ruler of Israel. In this view, Jesus’s suffering was simply part of the picture that others had not recognized.
When most Jews rejected this claim, it led to some very violent confrontations. Paul himself says that he violently tried to destroy the church. After Paul converted, he himself was violently attacked repeatedly by Jews. He says himself that he was flogged five times with the 40 lashes minus one. It was thought that 40 floggings was too much, and so if one wanted the supreme punishment, one would be flogged 39 times.
Success among Pagans
Christians did start to have success among pagans, even when they didn’t have much success among Jews. Pagans were converted during the missionary activities of Paul obviously, but also through the preaching of others like him.
When pagans converted into the fold, they were taught the Jewish scriptures that predicted the coming of the messiah. These pagans of course had almost no way of knowing how Jews had interpreted these passages, and so they had no reason to doubt that they were about Jesus. They were told that Isaiah 7 is about the messiah being born of a virgin and Isaiah 53 is about the messiah being crucified.
Once the pagans were convinced, they, along with Jewish Christians, started appealing to the Jewish scriptures to support their faith in Jesus the messiah.
Differences within Jews
Other Jews found these interpretations seriously offensive and flat out rejected them. In return, the followers of Jesus were offended by Jews, who in the Christian opinion, rejected their own messiah. This led to heightened tensions between Jews who did not follow Jesus and those who did follow Jesus. These tensions only got worse over time.
When the empire converted to Christianity, Jews were seen as the enemies of the truth because they rejected God’s messiah and therefore, they rejected God himself. They were treated accordingly. It was not a happy outcome for those who believed that they were remaining true to their own ancestral traditions rooted in the law of Moses.
Common Questions about Conversion to Christianity and the Fate of Non-believer Jews
The apocalyptically minded Jews expected that the messiah would be a divine judge sent from heaven to destroy God’s enemies with a supernatural show of power. It wouldn’t be a human warrior, but a kind of divine warrior that God sends from heaven; some kind of great angel who wipes out his enemies.
After Paul converted, he himself was violently attacked repeatedly by Jews. He says himself that he was flogged five times with the 40 lashes minus one. It was thought that 40 floggings was too much, and so if one wanted the supreme punishment, one would be flogged 39 times.
When pagans got converted due to the missionary activities, they were taught the Jewish scriptures that predicted the coming of the messiah. These pagans had almost no way of knowing how Jews had interpreted these passages, and so they had no reason to doubt that they were about Jesus. Once they were convinced, they, along with Jewish Christians, started appealing to the Jewish scriptures to support their faith in Jesus the messiah.
