Messianic?

“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; and they will mourn for Him, as one mourns for an only son, and they will weep bitterly over Him like the bitter weeping over a firstborn.”  Zechariah 12:10  NASB

Me – If you Google Messianic prophecies in the Bible, you will come to the Jews for Jesus website.  It lists 40 Messianic prophecies.  Wow!  That’s impressive.  Except not a single one of these comes from the Tanakh.  They are all from the apostolic writings.  Now that might not seem like a problem.  After all, the apostles were reinterpreting many texts to fit their experience and since it is the experience that is primary, their use of the texts from the Tanakh is shaped by that experience.  Since we have inherited their work as “Christian” apologetics, what they did is rarely challenged.  It fits our experience too.

But that doesn’t mean the verses in the Tanakh can be read directly as Messianic prooftexts.  Notice the comments of Joseph Klausner (who wrote a seminal work on the idea of the Messiah in Jewish thought):

“Yet the word ‘Messiah,’ to designate the expected redeemer, does not occur either in the Holy Scriptures [Old Testament] or in the books of the Apocrypha.  We find it in this sense for the first time in the Book of Enoch, and precisely in that part of this Pseudepigraphic book which was composed, in the opinion of all the best scholars, in the time of Herod the Great.”[1]

“Thus we can determine with certainty that the idea of the savior and redeemer was not originally connected at all with the idea of ‘anointing,’ but with the idea of king and high priest.”[2]

“In fact, the idea of political and spiritual redemption was not always connected with the idea of a personal Messiah.  This expectation—redemption without a human redeemer—resides in the nature of the Jewish view of the Deity and the control of the world.”[3]

“Hence we find in the period of the prophets many words of prophecy which without any doubt refer to the expected redemption, yet contain no hint of a personal Messiah.”[4]

“It is Christianity which has attempted to remove the political and nationalistic part which is there, and leave only the ethical and spiritual part.”[5]

What are we to say about this?  If Klausner is right, then it appears that the idea of an individual person as Messiah is very late, perhaps an invention of the first century.  Furthermore, Klausner’s research shows that it is Christianity (a term he uses for both the Christian Church and the apostles) that promoted a personal Messiah as the proper interpretation of biblical texts.  Of course, this is based on the experience of those authors.  We do not discard their interpretation, but we must be very careful about claims that anachronistically portray texts from the Hebrew Bible as if they can only serve to support the claims of the apostles.  This helps explain why so many orthodox Jews do not accept Yeshua as Messiah.  It is not merely rejection of the historical record.  It is the fact that “Messiah” is not a personal term.  But it is for us because we have adopted a paradigm that reads the text according to the experience of the first century believers.  This is a critical and crucial part of the equation.  We can understand Klausner’s work, not as a contradiction but as the perspective of another paradigm.

Topical Index:  Messiah, prophecies, Zechariah 12:10

[1] Joseph Klausner, The Messianic Idea In Israel From Its Beginning To The Completion Of The Mishnab (The Macmillan Company, New York, 1955) Scholar’s Choice edition, p. 8.

[2] Ibid., p. 8.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., p. 10.