The Messiah cannot die before reigning

Some Christians answer this objection by turning the kingdom into a purely spiritual reign in the heart. That gives up the prophets. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah speak of a son of David ruling over a restored Israel, and Jesus’ earliest followers expected exactly that. According to Acts, the last question his disciples asked him was, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6). They thought in your categories because they were Jews who had read the same books.

Christians do not claim that the throne promises were fulfilled at the crucifixion, or that they mean something other than what they say. The claim is that the King has come once and will come again to reign in the way the prophets describe.

That leaves one real question: is there room in Israel’s Scriptures for a Messiah who suffers, or even dies, before he reigns? If there is none, your objection holds. If the Tanakh itself speaks of an anointed one who is rejected and cut off, the question becomes how the suffering and the reigning fit together.

Daniel 9 sets out seventy “weeks” of years for Jerusalem. After sixty-two of them, Daniel says, “[the] anointed one will be cut off, and he will be no more” (Daniel 9:26, in Chabad’s translation). Then the people of a coming prince destroy the city and the sanctuary.

Rashi identifies that destruction: “That is Titus and his armies.” On his reading, the anointed one is King Agrippa, cut off around the time of the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70. A widely read Orthodox treatment on Aish.com likewise places Daniel 9:26 at the Roman destruction. Modern critical scholars often read the passage of the high priest Onias III, murdered in 171 BC.

Two cautions apply. The Hebrew mashiach here has no article, and it can mean any anointed king or priest, so the verse does not say “the Messiah.” The seventy weeks are hard to calculate, and people of every tradition disagree about them. The narrower point stands anyway: the Hebrew Bible contains an anointed figure whose story ends in being cut off, and in the verse’s own order that comes before the city and sanctuary are destroyed. Rashi places both in the years of the Roman war. Jesus was executed about forty years before Titus burned the Temple.

Isaiah 53 describes a servant who is “cut off from the land of the living” and given a grave “with the rich, in his death” (53:8-9). Then the poem turns: the servant will see offspring and have long life, and the LORD’s purpose will prosper through him (53:10). Many Jewish interpreters, following Rashi, read this servant as the people of Israel, and that reading deserves a full hearing; it has one in the suffering servant is Israel. On any reading, Isaiah describes a righteous sufferer whose story does not end at his grave.

Zechariah 12:10 speaks of the house of David and the people of Jerusalem mourning bitterly over one who has been pierced, as one mourns an only son. The Hebrew can be read as “they shall look to Me, the one they pierced” or as “they shall look to Me concerning the one they pierced,” and Jewish translations generally take the second; that question is real. Either way, there is a pierced one and a nation’s grief.

The Talmud records how some of the sages read that verse. In tractate Sukkah (52a), one opinion holds that the mourning in Zechariah 12 is for the Messiah son of Joseph, who is killed.

The Messiah son of Joseph appears in the Talmud and grows in later midrash: a figure from the tribes of Joseph who fights for Israel and falls, before the Messiah son of David reigns. Elsewhere the Talmud describes the Messiah as a sufferer. In Sanhedrin 98b, the sages apply Isaiah 53:4, where the servant bears the sicknesses of others, to the Messiah, and Sanhedrin 98a pictures him sitting among the poor and sick at the gates of Rome. A suffering, even a dying, messianic figure is not an idea Christians brought into Judaism from outside.

The Tanakh’s stories of deliverance often run the same way. Joseph is rejected by his brothers, sold, and counted as dead, and when he is raised to power they do not recognize him (Genesis 37 to 45). Moses is rejected by a fellow Israelite, “Who made you chief and ruler over us?” (Exodus 2:14), and returns decades later as Israel’s deliverer. The psalmist sings of a stone the builders rejected that became the chief cornerstone (Psalm 118:22).

Some rabbinic traditions held the two pictures together by giving them to two figures. Jesus’ followers held them together by giving both to one person in two stages: he suffers and dies, is raised and enthroned with God, and returns to reign. You may judge that reading wrong. It is an answer to a tension in your own Scriptures, and your own tradition felt that tension too.

Deuteronomy 21:23 concerns a man executed for a capital crime: his body must not remain on the tree overnight, because one who is hanged is qilelat Elohim, “a curse of God.” Rashi reads the phrase as an affront to God, since a human being is made in his image. Jesus’ first followers did not argue the verse away. Paul wrote that the Messiah redeemed his people from the curse of the law “by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). Their claim was that the curse was real, that Jesus bore it for others, and that God overturned the verdict by raising him.

Maimonides’ test is the right test for a claimant who dies and stays dead. Bar Kokhba fell, and his followers rightly concluded he was not the Messiah. Jesus’ followers drew the opposite conclusion only because they said he did not stay dead. Paul, writing in the 50s, passes on a list of named Jewish witnesses who said they had seen him alive (1 Corinthians 15:3-8), and Acts reports that the announcement began in Jerusalem within weeks.

So the question cannot be settled by the test alone, because the test assumes the very thing in dispute. If Jesus was not raised, your objection stands, and he is one more executed hope. If he was raised, “he died before reigning” becomes “he died, was raised, and reigns, and will be seen to reign.” The case for the earliest resurrection reports is set out in the witnesses to the resurrection.