The resurrection as messianic vindication

If you are Jewish, you have good reasons to think a crucified man cannot be the Messiah. The Messiah, the anointed king the prophets promised, is a son of David who reigns. Maimonides set out the test in his code of law: a king from David’s house who leads Israel in the Torah and fights its battles, and “if he succeeds in the above, builds the Temple in its place, and gathers the dispersed of Israel, he is definitely the Mashiach” (Mishneh Torah, Kings and Wars 11:4). Jesus did none of that before he died. He was executed by Rome, the death given to rebels and slaves.

The Torah adds a harder word. A man hanged on a tree is qilelat Elohim (Deuteronomy 21:23). Rashi reads it as an affront to God, since a human being made in God’s image is being degraded; the old Greek translation reads it as “cursed by God.” Either way, the sight was a disgrace.

Jesus’ first followers felt all of this. They were Jews who had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel, and when he was crucified they scattered. Paul, a Jew trained as a Pharisee, admits that a crucified Messiah was “a stumbling block to Jews” (1 Corinthians 1:23). This page does not ask you to accept the New Testament as Scripture. It reads it as the record of what those first Jewish followers came to believe, and asks whether their reasoning grows out of the Hebrew Bible.

What changed Jesus’ followers was their conviction that God had raised him from the dead. The historical evidence for that conviction is set out in the resurrection witnesses. This page asks what they took it to mean.

In the earliest sermons recorded in Acts, it works less like a marvel meant to impress than like a court verdict being overturned. Peter, speaking to a Jerusalem crowd, puts the two judgments side by side: you “put Him to death by nailing Him to the cross. But God raised Him from the dead” (Acts 2:23-24). Paul, writing in the AD 50s, says Jesus was “declared with power to be the Son of God” by “His resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4).

The logic is a Jewish one. Jesus had been condemned by the priestly leadership and executed by Rome, and the manner of his death seemed to say that God had abandoned him. If God then raised him, God had taken the opposite side. His followers did not deny the disgrace of the cross; they said God had answered it.

Peter does not rest on an empty tomb alone. He also argues from two psalms that you can read in Hebrew for yourself.

Psalm 16 ends with David’s confidence:

“For Thou wilt not abandon my soul to the nether-world; Neither wilt Thou suffer Thy godly one to see the pit.” (Psalm 16:10, JPS 1917)

Peter points out that David died and was buried, and “his tomb is with us to this day” (Acts 2:29). So, he says, the words reach beyond David to the descendant God promised to set on his throne. The Hebrew shachat means “pit,” and Peter’s wording follows the Greek translation, which reads “decay.” Jewish interpreters have read the verse as David’s trust that God would rescue him from death, and that is a natural reading. Peter’s question is what the promise means if David himself, in the end, went down to the grave.

Psalm 110 opens with an oracle of the LORD to “my lord”: sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool. Rabbinic tradition has read “my lord” as Abraham or as David. Jesus’ followers read it as a king enthroned beside God, and the text itself contains a period of waiting. The lord sits first; his enemies are subdued later. They saw the resurrection and exaltation as that enthronement, and the visible reign the prophets describe as still to come.

The order that seems impossible, death first and then reign, has precedent in the Hebrew Bible.

• Isaiah 53. The servant is “cut off out of the land of the living” and given a grave, and then, after his soul is made an offering, “he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days” (Isaiah 53:8-10). The passage describes life on the far side of death. Rashi and many Jewish interpreters read the servant as Israel, a serious reading taken up in the claim that the suffering servant is Israel. The Talmud also applies the servant’s sufferings to the Messiah (Sanhedrin 98b).
• Daniel 9:26. After the sixty-two weeks, “[the] anointed one will be cut off, and he will be no more,” and then the city and sanctuary are destroyed. The page on Daniel 9 looks at it closely.
• Zechariah 12:10. Jerusalem looks to the one it pierced and mourns “as one mourneth for his only son.” The Talmud (Sukkah 52a) records the view that this mourning is for Messiah son of Joseph, who is killed.

These traditions usually keep the suffering figure apart from the reigning son of David. That is where the Christian reading differs: it holds that the two belong to one person, who suffers first and reigns after. Jewish tradition did not teach this. The claim is only that it already knew an anointed figure could die, and that the order of suffering and then glory is in the texts.

You might grant that something extraordinary happened and still say: a resurrection would show only that God approved of a righteous man, not that he was the Messiah. That is a reasonable objection. Three features of the case speak to it.

• Jesus died for a claim about himself. The charge fixed to his cross read “The King of the Jews” (Mark 15:26), a detail historians widely accept, since his followers would hardly have invented a charge of sedition. To raise this man, executed for that claim, would be to side with the claim, not only with his character.
• The first followers spoke of enthronement, not survival. Peter’s conclusion is not “Jesus lives again” but that God “has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36). “Christ” is the Greek word for Messiah, the anointed one.
• The order fits the texts. Suffering, being cut off, and then vindication is a pattern already found in Isaiah, Daniel, and the Psalms, as the page on Jesus and messianic prophecy sets out.

Two things are not settled here. Whether God raised Jesus is a historical question with its own evidence. And Christians agree that the world peace, the gathered exiles, and the rebuilt Jerusalem the prophets describe have not yet come; they hold that the Messiah’s reign began with his enthronement and will be completed when he returns. You may find that answer unpersuasive. It is the answer the first Jewish followers of Jesus gave.