In Isaiah 50-something, which serves as a prefiguring of Christ's sufferings

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I believe he talks about he himself suffering those things. If those wounds and humiliations didn’t happen to the prophet (unless he was persecuted likewise or was given a grace to mystically feel these things as if he were suffering what Christ would later), what would the people at the time have thought of that? Why was it written in the 1st person?
 
Hello foolishmortal,

**Jesus tells us that the prophets were persecuted and murdered also. **

NAB MAT 23:23
"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You pay tithes of mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier things of the law: judgment and mercy and fidelity. (But) these you should have done, without neglecting the others. Blind guides, who strain out the gnat and swallow the camel! "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You cleanse the outside of cup and dish, but inside they are full of plunder and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee, cleanse first the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may be clean. "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and every kind of filth. Even so, on the outside you appear righteous, but inside you are filled with hypocrisy and evildoing. "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the memorials of the righteous, and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have joined them in shedding the prophets’ blood.’ Thus you bear witness against yourselves that you are the children of those who murdered the prophets; now fill up what your ancestors measured out! You serpents, you brood of vipers, how can you flee from the judgment of Gehenna? Therefore, behold, I send to you prophets and wise men and scribes; some of them you will kill and crucify, some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and pursue from town to town, so that there may come upon you all the righteous blood shed upon earth, from the righteous blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Amen, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.
 
Thanks for the passage, but Isaiah said the tortures he seemed to have endured in the way it happened to Christ? The Romans weren’t around in his time to do crucifixions, right–or were they? Was Isaiah writing descriptively or verbatim something God was showing him or telling him?
 
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foolishmortal:
I believe he talks about he himself suffering those things. If those wounds and humiliations didn’t happen to the prophet (unless he was persecuted likewise or was given a grace to mystically feel these things as if he were suffering what Christ would later), what would the people at the time have thought of that? Why was it written in the 1st person?
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I would say that most of the folks in Isaiah’s time thought his cheese had slipped off its cracker. As to his suffering prefiguring Christ’s, this passage is part of the four Servant of the Lord oracles in Isaiah. It makes more sense when taken as part of that whole. I just did a quick Google search and found this site which actually does a decent job summarizing this. geocities.com/catholicthoughts/IsaiahServant.htm
 
I think the passage you are looking for is Isaiah 53, the suffering servant.

There are many interesting things about this passage. First, as many scholars have pointed out, Jesus seems to have really understood is life and mission rooted in this passage. More the Apostolic Church and the Church Fathers took this passage so strongly in their understanding who Christ is that if this passage was lost, that is it wasn’t found in the OT, practicually there entire passage could be reconstructed for the writings of the early Church.

But it must be remembered that this passage is so influencial, that we find through out Jewish writings and teachings, which is always communal by nature, that the Suffering Servant of Isaiah symbolizes Israel itself.
 
there is a good book called something like Isaiah 53 according to Jewish interpretators, In short, they are not unified in their understanding of this text. Some think that the suffering servant is isreal and others think it is one of the two messiahs.

do a search for interlibrary loan. It is two volumes about 600 pages each volume. One volumen is the english translation, the other are the orginal texts of the intertators.
 
Daniel, Thanks for your post, I should have been more exact with my post that the identification of the Suffering Servant with Israel, while often taught and widely believed it is not the only understanding in Jewish thought.

Thanks again for helping me realize this short coming in my post!
 
I was thinking of whether Isaiah was dictated what Jesus was going to experience directly from God and it got me thinking how some saints were dictated things from Jesus or Mary and they wrote it down verbatim. Still, some little details differ. Some small things differ in the Gospels as well. I heard the reason is or could be that God did not want them to be biographies of Christ’s life. Maybe they were meant to be taken alltogether eventually. So many say about something “Jesus didn’t say…”, but he didn’t say the exact same thing in all Gospels at the Last Supper.
Still, despite the small stuff or differences in quotes that are not meant to be taken as quotes–at least using one Gospel alone, could the 4 Evangelists have been given visions like Bl. Anne Catherine Emmerich or verbatim info like St Faustina designed by God to address a particular audience and, if verbatim, the material just sounded like it came from a doctor, someone living closer to Christ’s time or one of Christ’s Apostles? If they had visions they transcribed, that might better explain how it came out sounding in context with where the writers were coming from and to whom they were writing.
Of course, maybe some just researched the matter using eyewitnesses and such because people can’t remember every detail. Apostle-Evangelists like John, would have remembered quite a bit more of at least that which he was with Jesus to witness or learn from Jesus himself. It may be that they just wrote like a Pope who writes a dogma definition and it just came out, by the grace of God that makes the Pope’s writings on these things inerrant, innerrant.
What do you think? Does the Church know? It’s fun to imagine anyway if you know you’ll probably be wrong or you’ll never know if you were right about any of it til death…
 
One thing to ponder is that the Gospels were in many respects written versions of the sacred tradition that had been circulating since the ressurrection of Christ. This is evident by Paul’s writings which happened before the Gospels were written. It also explains why John left some details out of his Gospel as he was the last to write his, and he didn’t need to restate what was already obvious to the followers of Christ. Even after the Gospels were written, it took several hundred years before the early Church fathers assembled the texts. This sacred oral tradition continued during that time. Most people couldn’t read back then.

A purely secular example of this might be Homer’s The Odyssey. This story was passed down for many generations until Homer got the bright idea to write it down.

The Gospel writers were inspired by the Holy Spirit to write the living words of God that had been circulating among our first people.
 
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