Jesus and messianic prophecy

If you are Jewish, you may have met Christians who line up a list of verses and announce that Jesus fulfilled them all. You may have looked up a few and found that they do not say what you were told. You are right about that. The word in Isaiah 7:14 is almah, a young woman, and the verse first speaks to King Ahaz about his own day. Hosea 11:1, where God calls his son out of Egypt, looks back to the Exodus of the nation. Read on their own, neither verse predicts anything about Jesus.

You also hold a clear picture of what the Messiah will do. He is a king from David’s line who leads Israel in the Torah, rebuilds the Temple, gathers the exiles, and brings an age of peace. Maimonides set those criteria out in his code of law, and Jesus did not meet them before he died. That objection is real, and this page comes back to it.

This page does not ask you to accept the New Testament as Scripture. It reads the Hebrew Bible, in Jewish translation where possible, and asks whether a pattern runs through it that one person fills out.

Set side by side, several passages describe two kinds of figure.

One suffers on behalf of others:

• A servant of the LORD who is “wounded because of our transgressions” and “crushed because of our iniquities,” who dies and is then given life and offspring (Isaiah 52:13-53:12).
• A pierced one in Jerusalem, mourned “as one mourneth for his only son,” after God pours out “the spirit of grace and of supplication” (Zechariah 12:10).

The other reigns:

• A ruler from Bethlehem “whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting” (Micah 5:1; 5:2 in Christian Bibles).
• David’s “lord,” seated at God’s right hand until his enemies are subdued (Psalm 110:1).
• One “like unto a son of man,” coming “with the clouds of heaven” to receive an everlasting kingdom (Daniel 7:13-14).

Behind both stands a promise as old as Abraham, that through his offspring all the nations of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 22:18).

Each passage has its own setting and its own Jewish interpretation, and the next sections take up the hardest ones. For now, look at the shape: suffering and vindication on one side, an everlasting reign on the other.

Isaiah 53 is the center of the question, so the strongest Jewish reading comes first. Rashi and many Jewish interpreters after him read the servant as the people Israel, suffering among the nations, with the nations themselves speaking in amazement. Isaiah does call Israel God’s servant (Isaiah 41:8; 49:3). This is a serious reading, set out in modern Jewish commentaries as well, and the page on the claim that the suffering servant is Israel treats it at length.

Several features of the text strain it.

• The servant suffers “for the transgression of my people” (Isaiah 53:8). If the speaker is God or the prophet, “my people” is Israel, and the servant suffers for them.
• In Isaiah 49, the servant named Israel in verse 3 is given a mission in verses 5 and 6 to bring Jacob back to God and restore the tribes of Israel. The servant is in some sense Israel and also sent to Israel.
• The servant of chapter 53 is innocent, silent, and willing; he “had done no violence,” and he goes to death without protest. The prophets do not describe the nation that way.

Jewish tradition did not read the passage in only one way. The Aramaic Targum renders the opening line, Isaiah 52:13, as “my servant the Messiah,” and the Talmud applies the servant’s sufferings to the Messiah (Sanhedrin 98b). Reading the servant as an individual, and as messianic, is an old Jewish reading, not a Christian invention.

Daniel 7 is the other pillar. In a night vision Daniel sees “one like unto a son of man” brought before the Ancient of Days and given “dominion, and glory, and a kingdom,” so that all peoples “should serve him.”

Many modern interpreters, Jewish and Christian, read this figure as a symbol of the faithful of Israel, since the angel’s explanation gives the kingdom to “the saints of the Most High” (Daniel 7:18, 27). That is a fair reading of the interpretation. Yet in the vision itself the figure is distinct from the people, comes with the clouds, an image the Hebrew Bible otherwise uses for God, and receives service from every nation. The Aramaic verb for “serve,” pelach, is the word Daniel uses elsewhere for serving a god (Daniel 3:12, 18).

The rabbis also read the passage messianically, and Rashi identifies the figure as the King Messiah. The Talmud sets Daniel 7:13 beside Zechariah 9:9: if Israel is worthy, the Messiah comes “with the clouds of heaven”; if not, he comes “lowly, and riding upon an ass” (Sanhedrin 98a). The same tradition knew two very different pictures of the Messiah’s coming, one in glory and one in humility.

Jewish tradition sometimes held the two pictures apart by speaking of two figures. The Talmud records the view that the mourning of Zechariah 12:10 is for Messiah son of Joseph, who is killed (Sukkah 52a), alongside Messiah son of David, who reigns. The Christian claim is that these are not two people but two stages in the life of one: the same Messiah suffers and dies, and is then raised and given the kingdom.

That is the order Jesus’ first followers, all of them Jews, said they found in the Scriptures. Luke records Jesus asking, “Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and then to enter His glory?” (Luke 24:26). Whatever you make of the New Testament, it shows that this was their reading from the beginning.

One part of the pattern can be checked against history. Abraham was promised that the nations would be blessed through his offspring. Through Jesus’ followers, the God of Israel and the Hebrew Scriptures came to be known across the nations. Maimonides rejected Jesus as the Messiah and held his followers responsible for great harm to the Jewish people. Even so, he wrote that Christianity and Islam had helped prepare the world for the true Messiah by spreading knowledge of the Torah and the commandments among the nations.

A pattern is suggestive, not decisive. Several people could be fitted to parts of it, and a skilled reader can find echoes almost anywhere. What would turn the pattern into a claim about Jesus in particular is the event his first followers proclaimed: that the man who was pierced and cut off was raised and enthroned. That is the argument of the resurrection as messianic vindication, and the historical evidence for it is in the resurrection witnesses.

The strongest objection remains. The world is not at peace, the exiles were not gathered in Jesus’ lifetime, and the Temple was destroyed rather than rebuilt. Christians agree that the reign the prophets describe has not yet been completed, and hold that it will be when the Messiah returns. That is a claim about the future, and you may find it a convenient one. It is also what the pattern itself predicts if the suffering comes first and the reign after: there would be a time between them.

One more passage presses the question of timing. Daniel 9 places an anointed one who is cut off before the destruction of the city and the sanctuary, which happened in AD 70.