Reconciling Jewish teachings on the Messiah with the NT

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IdiNaPut

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This proved to be one of my biggest stumbling blocks when it came to my previous Christian journey and despite my best attempts to find answers, I’m not getting anywhere and am finding little better than wishy-washy nonsense.

My understanding from reading and listening to various Jewish sources is that the Messiah:
  • Is to be an earthly King who will restore the tribes of Israel to full Torah observance. This never happened.
  • Is to be a direct descendant of King David. The Jewish law of the time would have disqualified Jesus in this instance as he was not a blood descendant of Joseph and adoption did not confer this special messianic status on the adopted child in any case.
  • Will achieve this in a single lifetime as per the Messianic requirements. This is not true of Jesus and it would seem that the messianic prophecy as per orthodox Jewish requirements does not allow for a ‘second coming’.
Can anyone care to help me out here?
 
Most of the jewish requirements for the Messiah were formulated A.D. in the days of the Talmud. They contradict the fact that Jesus was the Messiah on purpose to ‘prove’ christianity wrong.
 
Got sources for this?

Also, if this is true, then what WAS the Jewish expectation of the messiah prior to Jesus’ arrival?
 
The Jews before Jesus’ coming was varied.
Reading the Babylonian Talmud can give you some idea of early ideas around the time of Jesus, but this too is after Jesus was born.
 
As @Le_Bonvivant said, a lot of the requirements Jews looks for today were formulated in the centuries following the destruction of the second temple. If we go back to Jesus’s time, we see many different ideas about what the Messiah would be. The Pharisees thought he’d be a military leader that would defeat their enemies and restore Israel, the Essene’s believed in two Messiah’s, one that would be a triumphant King like David, and another who would be a suffering priest, and then we have the Sadducee’s who didn’t believe there even would be a Messiah at all. Furthermore, we also have works of literature like the Book of Enoch which portray the Messiah a powerful divine angel.

But we do believe Jesus fulfilled most (if not all) of the Messianic requirements. He is King, and completely fulfilled the Torah. He is a direct descendant of David through Joseph. He’s called “Son of David” multiple times in the New Testament. And he also did achieve everything the Messiah had to achieve. He also did things that were not expected of the Messiah like rise from the dead. This is the foundation of our faith, the resurrection, and the apostles direct witness to it. They saw him alive again, and that’s what counts most.

Some of the reasoning against Jesus not fulfilling these roles is not well put together, and really just a product of much later Jewish anti-missionary attacks. I mean, if you’re going to argue against Jesus having a legitimate Davidic line because Joseph wasn’t his biological father, then are you acknowledging the virgin birth? Also, it completely overlooks the context of the Gospel writers, and especially Matthew, who was writing to a strict Jewish community who were very well aware of Jewish laws and customs and prophecies. Matthew goes at great lengths to show Jesus is the Messiah, and one of the ways he does that is by showing Joseph’s line stretching all the way back to David. Clearly, there was no concern here of Joseph having to be Jesus’s biological father, and as said, the author of Matthew was most certainly a well educated Jewish Christian writing to a Jewish Christian community. For Matthew, and the Jewish community he was writing to, Jesus going through Joseph’s line was completely legitimate. There was no concern over this for second temple Jews.
 
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@IdiNaPut

I heard that they thought the Messiah was a bringer of freedom from opporession. Oppression was and is sadly the theme of Jewish history. Jesus wasn’t worried about the Empire. He knew that oppression was anything that robbed a person of their status as favored ones of God, the Chosen people. The Empires that oppressed them all throughout their history could not stop them from being who they were. They always regrouped, and were always led back to God. This time we believe the threat was more dire because they were being led astray from within. Their leadership and direction in the eternal desert of life on earth threatened to make a dump of their existence and there was real danger.
In one of the gospels they say that no one will know where the Messiah comes from.
And indeed it was true, he came from Heaven.
That is why I said there was danger. The implication would be that if he didn’t come, no one would ever go to heaven. SO there must have been few if any people righteous enough to achieve heaven.
Of course it might have been possible, but any body who says that needs to know why they didn’t recognize the signs, and recognize that the kingdom was at hand?
wishy-washy as you call simply means there was alot of things hidden from them by the scrutiny of a very long, weary history
 
The view of the Messiah in Jesus days was vague. If you look in the old testament (still the main book for the jews in Jesus days) the description of the Messiah is not very clear. But the idea of a suffering Messiah that we know from Jesajah (by His wounds we are healed etc) is of course one of them. After the temple period and when christians were using this text as a description for Jesus the jews changed their view because they saw the christians had a good point. According to the jews now, this text js not about the Messiah but about the jewish people.
 
Martin Luther made the mistake of going to those who reject Christ for his canon of the Old Testament. You risk making the same mistake in listening to anti-Christian forces for information on the Messiah.

Read the prophets, Isaiah being chief among them.

BTW, Jesus is in the blood line of David via His mother, who is from the same tribe as Joseph. Hebrews married within their tribe. Read the Book of Tobit.
 
Read Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist, by Brant Pitre. He uses Jewish scripture (Old Testament) and Jewish tradition (Mishnah and Talmud) from the first century and explains them in terms of first century Jews and their understanding…It is primarily about the Eucharist but as the Messiah is part of that, it gets explained also. Scott Hahn did the Forward for this book.

Patrick
AMDG
 
Can you give a summary of his thesis?
How does he know what first century Jews understood if not by inferring from theory?
Also, please address the concern that what is written will not always reflect what was,
but what people want to put forward to others, and to the models for future thinking in
philosophy they want to make popular.
 
Just ordered this book and also ‘The Case for Christ’ also, which I’ll read as soon as they both come. Hopefully it will be useful.
 
Jews were looking for a new Moses; a military type leader who would cast out the Roman occupiers. And this is understandable; given that Moses led the Israelites from bondage of Egypt.

It was Simeon who prophesized when he said to Mary and Joseph (and probably St. Anne and her husband) in the temple, “This child is destined for a sign which will be contradicted”. THis occurred at the presentation in the temple.

So, from a human understanding perspective; the death of Jesus (Israel’s Savior) was contrary to what was understood at the time. For this reason, it was hard for Jews at the time to accept that their Savior was crucified by the Romans.

Ultimately, his death was a sign to us. It is contrary to how we think because we think in a selfish manner. Our role models are not like Jesus; they are like star baseball players. But the cross represents sacrifice; and we too are called to carry the cross as co-redeemers with him. The cross is the way to God; which is love.
 
Agree on Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist. There’s a bunch more about the Jewish ideas about the Messiah in Jesus the Bridegroom and in Jesus and the Last Supper, also by Brant Pitre.

Basically, there were and are various Biblical and extra-biblical Jewish traditions about the Messiah, and they weren’t all about him being a secular war leader or king. A lot of them died out over time, because if you believed the ones that sounded like Jesus, you became a Christian; and if you didn’t want to become a Christian, you were more interested in traditions that didn’t sound like Jesus.

But they were around, and some of them still persist.

There are some Jews today who believe in not one, not two, not three, but four different Messianic figures or Messiahs… (Each representing a different Scriptural strand of Messianic prophecy: the Son of Joseph, the Son of David, the Righteous Priest, and Elijah. There’s also the idea that the Messiah will be a great rabbi and scholar, and that he will be “the prophet like Moses, who sees God face to face”, or “the prophet” for short. This is why the Gospels have various people asking John and Jesus if they are the prophet. The Samaritans are also very concerned with the prophet coming, since he is supposed to come to Samaria. (Which is part of what the Samaritan woman at the well story is all about.)
 
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He uses the Bible and Jewish traditions, drawn from the Babylonian Talmud, a Talmud close to the time of Jesus.
 
You can read all the books you want. I have personally witnessed a
Monsignor declare in a homily that the Jews were looking for a military
type leader like Moses.

Read the book of Judges. It describes Jewish leaders. How about Samson?
He lead Israel for 20 years.
 
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One of the main themes in the Gospels is that the ideas about Messiah which the Jews hold is far from the truth of Messiah.

Some of the 12 Apostles clung to these erroneous ideas right up till Christs Resurrection.
 
So what you’re saying is that, if the Gospels said, “The problem with X people is that they were looking for X interpretation of the prophecies,” that means that nobody else had a different interpretation? Everybody was a Pharisee?

And as for “the Jews,” you need to remember that there’s a difference between “the Judaeans” and “the Galileans;” but it’s only “the Judaeans” that usually gets translated as “the Jews.” This can be very very confusing, if you don’t keep going back and checking the original language.

Jesus was Jewish, and he was “king of the Judaeans,” but he wasn’t written down as one of “the Judaeans” in most of the Gospels. This would have been clear enough in Greek or Latin, but it’s squooshed away in English.
 
I’m not sure how you read that into what I said.

I simply said many Jews then and now had false conceptions of Messiah.

Not that there was only one single version of those false ideas.
 
The reason I referenced the book is that his thesis is involved. Check the book out; the author addresses these concerns of yours. Hopefully to your satisfaction. The problem I have with this type of thing, is that I do not read the original languages so I have to trust other peoples translations. Of course, I have the same problem with the Bible. All you can do in this case is to read a number of view points and make a decision. The only real way to study history is to immerse yourself in original documents, many of which are only to set background understanding of the time and often these documents are in other languages.

Patrick
AMDG
 
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