The Jewish Messiah
And He continued by questioning them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered and said to Him, “You are the Christ.” Mark 8:29 NASB
Who – Most of us realize that virtually all the followers of Yeshua in the early part of the first century were Jewish. That means Jews thought Yeshua was the Messiah long before any Gentiles or “Christians” ever believed it. That means that the “New Testament” view of “Jesus” is the view of a Jewish Messiah, not a universal Christian one that is so familiar. For most of us, Yeshua’s question is extremely relevant. “Who do you say that I am?” We quickly answer, like Peter, “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” But I wonder if we really know what that answer means. I wonder if our endorsement of Peter’s answer doesn’t brush aside all the pertinent Jewish issues because we answer from a Christian perspective. Oh, I don’t mean that we think of “Jesus” as the second person of the Christian Trinity, or the divine-human person (whatever that means), or the Savior of the world. If we’ve adopted any form of the Messianic correction movement, we know Yeshua is Jewish. We know that he has a real ethnicity, grew up in a real first century embattled and occupied land, and was a student of a conservative approach to the Torah. But I wonder if we really know what it means to say, “You are the Messiah.”
Consider the fact that virtually all Jews today reject Yeshua as the Messiah. This is astounding. In the first century, to be a follower of Yeshua HaMashiach meant, probably, that you were Jewish. Today it means that you aren’t Jewish. Certainly, the anti-Judaism of the Church through the centuries contributed to this. So did Akiva’s declaration in the Bar Kokhba revolt. But that can’t be the whole story. Sommers offers some telling commentary:
For most of the late Persian and the early Hellenistic periods, we find no indications that Jews hoped for the renewal of the Davidic monarchy: Deutero-Isaiah’s viewpoint over those of Haggai and Zechariah. But at some point during the Hellenistic period, this hope suddenly reemerged, leading to the various forms of messianism so well known from late Second Temple period Judaism. Belief in a Davidic messiah had become a Jewish standard in the first and second centuries C.E. The Talmudic rabbis pay considerable attention of the messiah, speculating on the timing of his arrival, debating whether it is even advisable to predict this timing, and discussing ways Jews can hasten it.[1]
Sommers’ remark helps us realize that the idea of a personal Messiah emerged during the Second Temple period. It wasn’t always a biblical (Tanakh) idea. Political and social circumstances pushed the population in this direction. But political and social events can push back too.
Some rabbinic statements glorify the messiah to an extraordinary degree, attributing magical or godlike powers to him (e.g., Midr. Tehillim 2:3; the opinion of R. Yobanan in b. Sanhedrin 98b). Nevertheless, as Reuven Kimelman shows, the Amidah prayer (the so-called “Eighteen Benedictions”), recited thrice daily in rabbinic Judaism, downplays messianism. This is highly significant, since the Amidah is the single summary of central beliefs the rabbinic movement produced; as Daniel Leifer pointed out to me, the Amidah functions as the rabbinic credo. Consequently, it is of great import that the daily Amidah never use the word messiah and never refer to the future Davidic ruler as a king. It does, however, pointedly include the phrase “May You [God] rule over us as our king” in its eleventh blessing, which articulates the hope for the restoration of Jewish political sovereignty without even alluding to the Davidic monarchy. True, the future Davidic ruler is mentioned (without the term “messiah”) in the first, fourteenth, and fifteenth blessings. But Kimelman astutely notes that the Davidic king’s appearances in these three blessings are even more revealing, for they never make him the subject of an active verb. In the Amidah the Davidic monarch’s role is entirely passive: he is brought by God and placed on the throne so that he can be seen by the people as a symbol of the new era. This central rabbinic document, then, reduces the messiah as much as possible without actually jettisoning the concept altogether. Rabbinic Judaism, then, includes voices that emphasize the Davidic monarch’s role in the eschatological future and voices that minimize his role.[2]
This same tension reemerges more strongly in modern Judaism. While orthodox forms of Judaism continue to hope for a personal Davidic messiah, Reform Judaism has for well over a century renounced belief in this man. This difference is made clear in the liturgies of the various Jewish movements. Orthodox and most Conservative liturgies continue to use the classical rabbinic Amidah, which, we have seen, refers to God as bringing a redeemer to the Jewish people, even though it never makes that redeemer the subject of an active verb and assigns him no specific redemptive role. The Amidah prayers of Reform and (more recently) Reconstructionist prayer books go even further in the direction the classical rabbinic prayer began. In the first blessing of these versions, God brings redemption (ge’ulli), not a redeemer (go’el). The modern dispute between the liberal and traditional versions of the Amidah, like the tension involving rabbinic texts that mention the messiah, is not a new one.[3]
By the end of the second century C.E., Jewish thinking was changing. It wasn’t simply the influence of the Church. That wasn’t strong enough yet (just wait until Constantine). Other things were happening within the rabbinic communities, things that shifted the focus of the messianic idea away from an active person who initiated God’s reformation. Rabbinic opinion divided, and it continues to be divided to this day. The Amidah reflects the thinking of orthodox Jews before the destruction of the Temple. What this means is that it was already in place during the time of Yeshua. How it was interpreted affected the society’s view of the messiah. Peter answered according to one tradition, but only one. There were other traditions and interpretations. Perhaps one reason why more Jews didn’t become followers is an issue of interpretation, not personal denial. Perhaps our endorsement just follows the tradition of the ones who wrote the Gospels. We never really knew there was any other Jewish view. We just followed along one path. Others followed a different path. Perhaps neither one was inevitable nor obvious.
Topical Index: Messiah, Amidah, Mark 8:29
[1] Benjamin D. Sommer, Dialogical Biblical Theology: A Jewish Approach to Reading Scripture Theologically in Biblical Theology: Introducing the Conversation, eds. Perdue, Morgan and Sommer (Abingdon Press, 2009), p. 48.
[2] Ibid., pp. 48-49.
[3] Ibid., p. 49.
