MESSIAH AND
GOD?
Chapter
22
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T |
he thought that Jewish writers might ascribe deity
to another human being has brought much criticism to the Gospel accounts. Ian
Wilson, in his book Jesus: Vie Evidence, has
one chapter called, "How He Became God." In it he claims that
"no Gospel regarded Jesus as God, and not even Paul had done
SO." According to Wilson, the
deifying of Jesus was primarily a product of the fourth-century Council of
Nicea, not the belief of early Christians.
It is therefore necessary to sort out the historical
details related to Jesus' alleged messiahship and deity. Did He think of
Himself as Messiah and Son of God? What did He mean by the term "Son of
God"? What did the people understand Him to mean? In order to answer these
questions, we first must understand what the people expected the coming Messiah
to be like.
Messianic Expectations
For about a hundred years, beginning in 164 B.C., the Jewish people tasted independence. Professor Jim Fleming, reflecting on the final loss of Jewish national sovereignty, states:
Although this period had found its abrupt
termination with the campaign of the Romans and General Pompey (63 B.C.), hope for its
restoration had never been given up completely. Jesus was born into a time when
the people anticipated the coming of the Messiah (cf. Song of Songs 17) and
freedom from the Roman yoke.
One of the best analyses of first-century messianic expectations has been done by Geza Vermes. He observes that at this time there was both a widespread popular belief about what Messiah would be like and a number of minority splinter opinions: "It would seem more appropriate to bear in mind the difference between general messianic expectations of Palestinian Jewry, and peculiar messianic speculations characteristic of certain learned and/or esoterical minorities."
In order to determine what kind of Messiah the Jewish masses generally expected, Vermes advises, "A reliable answer is to be found in the least academic, and at the same time most normative, literary form: prayer."
Therefore, one of the best surviving sources
regarding messianic expectation during this time is the Psalms of Solomon (a book of Jewish prayers), probably written just
after the Roman conquest of Judea in 63 B.C. These psalms (obviously not written
by Solomon) reflect the common view of a righteous, reigning Messiah who would
militarily reestablish Israel's sovereignty and restore a just government over
the nation:
Behold, O Lord, and raise up unto them their king,
the son of David ... And gird him with strength, that he may shatter
unrighteous rulers ... With a rod of iron he shall break in pieces all their
substance, He shall destroy the godless nations with the word of his mouth ...
And he shall gather together a holy people ... He shall have the heathen
nations to serve him under his yoke ... And he shall be a righteous king,
taught by God ... And there shall be no unrighteousness in his days in their
midst. For all shall be holy and their king the Anointed (of) the Lord.
Psalm of Solomon 18 speaks of God's Anointed who will "use His 'rod' to instill the 'fear of the Lord' into every man and direct them to 'the works of righteousness.' "
Vermes concludes:
Ancient Jewish prayer and Bible interpretation
demonstrate unequivocally that if in the intertestamental era a man claims, or
was proclaimed, to be "the Messiah," his listeners would as a matter
of course have assumed that he was referring to the Davidic Redeemer and should
have expected to find before them a person endowed with the combined talents of
soldierly prowess, righteousness and holiness.
It is therefore understandable why, especially in
view of the Roman occupation of Israel's land, most Jewish people would not see
in Jesus what they expected of the Messiah.
Millar Burrows of Yale wrote, "Jesus was so unlike what all Jews expected the son of David to be that His own disciples found it almost impossible to connect the idea of Messiah with Him."
And
finally, as the Jewish scholar Samuel Sandmel puts it,
Any claims made, during the lifetime of Jesus, that
He was the Messiah whom the Jews had awaited, were rendered poorly defensible
by His crucifixion and by the collapse of any political aspect of His movement,
and by the sad actuality that Palestine was still not liberated from Roman
dominion.
The popular concept of Messiah as a reigning military deliverer, then, was a natural deterrent for most Jewish people to consider Jesus as Messiah. The question is: Was the popular concept the correct concept?
It is clear that not all Jewish people of Jesus' day
held the majority opinion. Vermes observes,
In addition to the royal concept, messianic speculation in ancient Judaism included notions of a priestly and prophetic Messiah, and in some cases, of a messianic figure who would perform all these functions in one.
The important point is that not everyone held to the popular concept of the awaited Messiah. There was enough obscurity in what Messiah was to be that a number of the especially religious Jews found the charisma of Jesus to fit with their picture of the Messiah. The fact that they also expected Him to deliver Israel from Roman oppression made Jesus' primary mission more complicated.
The big problem was the Romans. They were completely aware of the popular messianic expectations of the Jewish people. Tacitus (writing at the beginning of the second century A.D.) reports: "There was a firm persuasion ... that at this very time the East was to grow powerful, and rulers coming from Judea were to acquire a universal empire."
At about the same time, writing about the decade
following the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, Suetonius wrote,
"There had spread over all the Orient an old established belief, that it
was fated at that time for men coming from Judea to rule the world."
It is obvious that the Romans were ready at a
minute's notice to squash any messianic uprising. No wonder Jesus did not go
around blurting out, "I am the Messiah." As we will see, He had much
more effective ways of making that announcement.
The Gospels often reveal the messianic expectations
of the people. From the beginning of Jesus' earthly life, when Simeon in the
Temple identifies Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah, to the end, when many
honor Him as Messiah at the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the Gospel accounts
accurately reflect these expectations.
The messianic expectations of the Jewish people
provide one of the strongest reasons for trusting the accuracy of the Gospel accounts as they describe Jesus'
activities. Skeptics often claim that the life of Jesus described in the
Gospels is too supernatural to be believed. What is often forgotten is that the
great cause of the disciples died on the cross. Jesus certainly did not fulfill
the messianic expectations of His disciples. Something had to happen, something
no less powerful than what the Gospel accounts record, in order to motivate
Jewish men and women to risk their lives to propagate this message which was so
diametrically opposed to the prevailing messianic opinion of the day.
Did Jesus
Think He Was Messiah?
Even as early as age twelve, Jesus refers to God as "My Father" (Luke 2:49). He continues to use the term throughout the Gospel accounts-a total of forty times! Jerusalem scholar, Dr. Robert Lindsey, explains the significance of this expression:
Synagogue prayers contain the expression, "Our
Father [Avinu] who is in heaven," many times, and Jesus taught His
disciples to pray a prayer which also begins, "Our Father who is in
heaven." The expression, "My Father [avi]," however, almost
certainly must have seemed improper to the Jews of that period. Only once in
the Hebrew Scripture is God referred to as "my Father," and that is
in Psalm 89, which speaks of the coming Messiah. Verse 26 reads, "He will
call to me, 'Avi ata'-'You are my Father! The Messiah has the right to call God
"my Father." I am quite sure that the rabbis of Jesus' day taught the
people to say "Our Father who is in heaven," because they say
"my Father" was reserved for the Messiah alone.
Second Samuel 7:14 also contains a prophecy about
the Messiah: "I will be to him a father, and he will be to me a son."
This verse marks the beginning of a coming Messiah who is the son of God.
It was known from Psalm 89:26, 2 Samuel 7:14 and
Psalm 2:7 that the Messiah would be the son of God, but these verses do not
contain the expression "son of God." What is used is, "He will
call to me, 'You are my Father' "; "I will be a father to him, he
will be a son to me"; and, "You are my son, this day I have brought
you forth." This is the Hebraic way of expressing messiahship -it is the
way the Holy Spirit spoke and the way Jesus spoke.
Jesus
also declared Himself Messiah by the things He did. Look at John the Baptist in
John 11. He sits in Herod's prison, and with free time on his hands he begins
to review the events of his life. He especially reflects on whether or not he
should have been referring his disciples to Jesus several months back (John
1:35-37). Having some doubts, he sends a question to Jesus by way of his
disciples: "Are you the coming one, or shall we look for someone
else?" (Matthew 11:3). Jesus tells John's disciples:
Go and report to John the
things which you hear and see: the blind receive sight and the lame walk, the
lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor
have the gospel preached to them (Matthew 11:5).
Jesus drew these words from two verses found in
Isaiah. The first, 35:5, occurs in
the midst of a passage speaking of the arrival of the kingdom of God in Zion.
The second, 61:1, is found in a context announcing the favorable year of the
Lord. John, therefore, would have understood Jesus as saying not only
"Yes, I am the Messiah," but also, "Here, I'm willing to give
you proof no one else can bring that my claims are true." In this sense,
every time Jesus healed someone or performed some attesting sign, He was
declaring Himself to be Messiah.
Jesus declared Himself to be Messiah by His
triumphal entry into Jerusalem. A verse in the Babylonian Talmud Menahoth has Rabbi Yohanan explaining that
"outside the wall" of Jerusalem means not further than the wall of
Bethphage. When Jesus mounts the donkey foal in Bethphage and rides into Jerusalem,
He is making a very definite statement that He understands Himself to be the
Messiah. He clearly intends to fulfill Zechariah 9:9:
Rejoice greatly, 0 daughter
of Zion! Shout in triumph, 0 daughter of Jerusalem! Behold your King is coming
to you; He is just and endowed with salvation, Humble, mounted on a donkey,
Even on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
The people clearly understood Jesus' intentions. Fleming states:
The palm became a symbol of Jewish nationalism. But on
Palm Sunday the poor population of Jerusalem was feeling the heavy arm of Rome
over them. There was a popular understanding by Jews of Jesus' day that Messiah
would come during the Passover season. (Do you remember in John's Gospel that,
after Jesus fed the 5,000, the people "wanted to make Him king because it
was Passover"?) The role Messiah would play in the hopes of the populace
was that He would deliver the people from oppression ... as in the days of the
exodus from Egypt. By bringing the palm branches the people were in a way saying,
"Jesus, we are all with you ... you see you have enough of a following to
do something about the Roman garrison in Jerusalem."
In John 4, Jesus spoke with a Samaritan woman
outside the city of Sychar. In the course of their conversation,
the woman said to Him,
"I know that Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ); when that one comes, He will
declare all things to us" (John 4:25).
Jesus probably felt more freedom in Samaria about
disclosing His identity. Messianic expectations were quite subdued since the
Samaritans believed only in the Pentateuch. Jesus therefore revealed to the
woman, "I who speak to you am He" (John 4:26).
There was no question about it. Jesus clearly
declared Himself to be the Messiah.
Another declaration of Jesus that He was the Messiah
occurred at His trial before the high priest Caiaphas, the chief priests, and
the elders and scribes (Matthew
26:57-68; Mark 14:53-65). In Mark's account, the high priest finally asked
Jesus directly, "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?" and
Jesus responded, "I am; and you shall see the Son of Man sitting at the
right hand of power, and coming with the clouds of heaven." Notice that
Jesus clearly spoke of Himself.
The term "Son of Man" was the way He
usually referred to Himself. Son of Man occurs 81 times in the Gospel accounts.
Notice also that Jesus clearly identified Himself as the one about whom Daniel
prophesied when He revealed,
I kept looking in the night
visions,
And behold, with the clouds
of heaven
One like a Son of Man was
coming,
And he came up to the Ancient
of Days
And was presented before Him.
And to Him was given dominion,
Glory and a kingdom,
That all the peoples,
nations, and men of every language
Might serve Him.
His dominion is an
everlasting dominion,
Which will not pass away;
And His kingdom is one
Which will not be destroyed
(Daniel 7:13,14).
In this passage Daniel reveals this coming one, and
Jesus claims for Himself. (1) that He will come with or on the clouds of heaven;
and (2) He will be given supreme authority over all mankind for all eternity.
For the Sadducees, who controlled the Sanhedrin at this time and for whom
"the Messianic hope played no role," 37/n.p. this claim was
tantamount to blasphemy. (Blasphemy meant not just a claim to be God, but also
slander against God or even against other persons.) Though the concept of
Messiah would have been interpreted differently by Jesus, the scribes,
Pharisees and Sadducees, there can be no doubt that Jesus clearly claimed He
was that Son of Man to come, the Messiah.
That Jesus claimed to be Messiah is confirmed by the
report, which the Sanhedrin must have delivered to Pilate in view of that
claim. Norman Anderson explains:
The crucifixion, however, does seem to provide
convincing proof of one point about which New Testament scholars have been much
divided-and to which passing reference has already been made: namely, that
Jesus Himself did believe that He was the Messiah. It is true that He did not
make any such claim explicitly in His public preaching- partly, no doubt, for
political reasons, but largely because of the mistaken expectations this would
have aroused among His hearers. But it was clearly as a potential threat to
Rome that Pilate and his minions delivered Him to a death largely reserved for
the armed robber and the political insurgent. This is explicit in the
inscription on the cross: "JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS"
(John 19:19), which would seem to echo the Evangelists' report that part of the
conversation between Pilate and Jesus had been about this very point (Matthew 27:11; Mark 15:2; Luke 23:3; John 18:33-37). And this,
in its turn, must have been prompted by the fact that the "blasphemy"
for which the Sanhedrin had condemned Him was His reply to the question (put to
Him on oath by the high priest), "Are you the Christ, the Son of the
Blessed One?" with the words: "I am ... And you will see the Son of
Man sitting at the right hand of the mighty one and coming on the clouds of heaven"
(Mark 14:61-64) -an affirmation that had naturally been reported by the chief
priests to Pilate in explicitly political terms.
Though a number of Jewish scholars in the past have attempted to deny that Jesus thought of Himself as the Messiah, others now support His messianic consciousness. One is Samuel Sandmel, recognized as the leading U. S. Jewish authority in the New Testament and early Christianity. He was a professor at Yale, then at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati up to his death in 1979. Sandmel concluded, "I believe that He believed Himself to be the Messiah, and that those scholars who deny this are incorrect."
David Flusser, professor of comparative religion at
Hebrew University in Jerusalem, like other Jewish scholars, sees
"inauthentic" passages in the Gospel texts. Still he maintains that
"other apparently authentic sayings of Jesus can be understood only if it
is assumed that Jesus thought Himself to be the Son of Man." For Flusser,
Jesus' concept of "Son of Man" was both messianic and divine.
Was Jesus
the Messiah?
In the Old Testament, there are hundreds of
prophesies alluding to the coming Messiah. The brilliant nineteenth-century
Oxford professor, Canon Henry Liddon, found 332 "distinct predictions,
which were literally fulfilled in Christ." [See Evidence That Demands a Verdict, pp. 145-175, for specific
prophecies.]
For example, Daniel 9:25,26 indicates that the Messiah had to come before the second Temple was destroyed (A.D. 70). Micah 5:2 speaks of the Messiah's birthplace as Bethlehem Ephrathah, the town where Jesus was born. Isaiah 35:5,6 speaks of the blind, deaf, lame and dumb being healed. Isaiah 42:6 and 49:6 speak of the Messiah as a light to the Gentiles. Zechariah 9:9 predicts that the Messiah would come humbly, "mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey." Psalm 22 provides a graphic description of one undergoing crucifixion (even though crucifixion was unknown to the psalmist), and Jesus quoted its opening verse as He hung on the cross. Zechariah 12:9,10 even mentions in one passage the two separate comings of the Messiah:
And it will come about in
that day that I will be about to destroy all the nations that come against
Jerusalem [second coming]. And I will pour out on the house of David and on the
inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they
will look on Me whom they have pierced [occurred at the first coming]; and they
will mourn for Him, like the bitter weeping over a first-born.
But the Christian must be careful not to overstate
the case. There are hundreds of additional messianic prophecies in the Old
Testament, which have not yet found
their fulfillment in Jesus. This is by
necessity, for if it is prophesied that the Messiah had to suffer and die and
yet is also to subsequently reign
over an eternal kingdom (at least part of which is established on earth) then it follows that Messiah must somehow
rise from the dead and come again. The most important and overlooked question
is: Does the Old Testament predict that
the Messiah must first suffer and die?
Christians and critics alike today are often so
focused on the issue of Jesus'
resurrection that they forget the other half of the apostles' preaching. Peter
preached in the Temple, "But the things which God announced beforehand by
the mouth of all the prophets, that His Christ should suffer, He has thus fulfilled" (Acts 3:18).
Paul reasoned with the Thessalonians in their
synagogue. He was "explaining and giving evidence that the Christ had to suffer and rise again from the
dead, and saying, 'This Jesus whom I am proclaiming to you is the Christ'
" (Acts 17:3). Before King Agrippa Paul reported:
And so, having obtained help
from God, I stand to this day testifying both to small and great, stating
nothing but what the Prophets and Moses said was going to take place; that the
Christ was to suffer, and that by reason of His resurrection from the dead He
should be the first to proclaim light both to the Jewish people and to the
Gentiles (Acts 26:22,23).
The apostles were saying nothing new. Jesus Himself
repeatedly stated that He had to go to Jerusalem to suffer, die and be raised
from the dead (Matthew 16:21; 17:12; Mark 8:31; 9:12; Luke 9:22; 17:25; 22:15;
24:26,46). But where in the Old Testament was this prophesied?
Many Jewish people today are surprised to find the following passage in the Jewish Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament: