Messiah by Cohn-Sherbok

Dan (1) : In the Middle Ages, there were several occasions when Jews and Christians debated about Jesus as Messiah and Lord. Tonight Lavinia and I are going to do just that. I am going to give the Jewish view of the Messiah and the messianic age, and Lavinia is going to give the Christian view. And we are going to go into the vexed question of why Jews and Christians do not think the same on this subject.

So let me begin with the Hebrew Bible, what many of you will think of as the Old Testament. You may be surprised to learn that the biblical writers did not have a fully developed concept of the Messiah or the messianic age. Instead they simply thought that King David and his descendants would reign over Israel until the end of time, and would exercise dominion over all nations. The term ‘Messiah’ comes from the Hebrew ‘Ha-Mashiah’ which means ‘The Anointed One.’ It was the practice in many societies in the ancient world for rulers to be anointed with oil as part of the initiation ceremony. Those of you who saw the coronation of King Charles will know that the practice still exists. Thus in the early days, the Messiah was merely the anointed king and it was believed that the descendants of King David would rule forever.

With the emergence of the rabbis in the Hellenistic period and later, there emerged the idea of two Messiahs: the rabbis argued that the first Messiah (the Messiah, the son of Joseph), would engage in battle with Gog and Magog, the

enemies of Israel, and be killed. Subsequently the true Messiah, the Messiah the son of David, would usher in the messianic age, a golden era in which people would dwell together in a state of perfect justice and peace.

All Jewish exiles would then return from the corners of the earth; even non-Jews would look to Jerusalem for spiritual enlightenment and the dead would be resurrected. At the end of this era a final judgement of all humankind would be made.Those who were judged righteous would enter into Heaven. Meanwhile the wicked would be cast away from the presence of God.

In the first century AD, the Roman occupation of the Holy Land intensified Jewish longing for the coming of the Messiah, who would bring about the restoration of the Davidic kingdom. In this milieu, a Jewish sect emerged during the years following Herod's death in 4 BC, which taught that Jesus, a carpenter from Galilee, was the promised Messiah and would usher in the era of messianic redemption. Attracting adherents from among the most marginalised sectors of Jewish society, Jesus soon aroused hostility and ultimately was put to death by the Roman authorities. Nonetheless his disciples insisted that he had risen from the dead and would soon return to reign in glory.

As you know, mainstream Judaism rejected such claims. What exactly were their objections? First, it was obvious to Jews that Jesus had not fulﬁlled messianic expectations. He had not brought about the end of history, the resurrection of the dead, and the return of Jewish exiles to the Holy Land.

We still do not live in a golden age of justice and peace. Further the notion that Jesus was in some way divine, which was what his followers were soon claiming , was complete anathema. From Hellenistic times to the present, Jews have determinedly rejected Christian views about Jesus’ messiahship and divinity.

You might then ask what do contemporary Jews think about messianic deliverance? It will surprise you to learn that it is only the strictly Orthodox, the ones who wear black jackets and black hats, who continue to believe that the Messiah will come and will bring history to an end. The vast majority of modern Orthodox Jews may pray the traditional liturgy which mentions the messianic age, but it is unlikely that they actually expect a literal coming. And Reform and Liberal Jews have actually eliminated the concept of the Messiah altogether from the liturgy.

What then has taken its place? We Jews continue to live in the shadow of the Holocaust. The memory of the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis continues to haunt Jewry. And there is a determination that it should never be forgotten. Connected to this is the belief that the existence of the state of Israel is the only guarantee of Jewish safety and survival. Across the world Jews are united in their support of the Jewish state. Today for the vast majority of Jews, it is Israel which is at the centre of Jewish life. No longer do most Jews believe in divine salvation or the coming of the messianic age. In making this claim, I do not want to discuss the rights and wrongs of Israel’s current war against Gaza. My inten-

tion is to stress there has been a major shift in Jewish consciousness. In the modern world it is the state of Israel which is viewed as our saviour.

Lavinia (2) : So, if I could reiterate very brieﬂy what Dan has said about the expectations for the coming Messiah at the time of Jesus, it goes as follows. The Messiah would be an anointed King; he would be descended from King David; he would usher in an era of universal peace, which would ultimately involve all the peoples of the World. Finally the dead would be resurrected and there would be a universal judgement.

Now here I must utter a word of caution. This is painting with a very broad brush. Even today, it is said that where three or four Jews are gathered together, there will be at least ten opinions! We know that things were no different in the ancient world. For example, the New Testament describes how Jesus was approached by the Sadducees, They were a group who, unlike the Pharisees, did not believe that the dead would be resurrected. Obviously, if they had different ideas about a future resurrection, they cannot have been in complete agreement about the Messiah. Nothing much has changed. That is the way things work in the Jewish community.

However, , if we accept Dan’s general summary, we can see how the writers of the Gospels presented their material in such a way as to demonstrate that Jesus of Nazareth must have been the Messiah because he fulﬁlled these expectations. I am going to take my examples from St Matthew because that Gospel does particularly emphasise this point, but there are plenty of other easily-found instances throughout the New Testament.

So, the Gospel starts with a lengthy family tree showing that Jesus was directly descended from King David. This is the first proof. The Messiah had to come from the Davidic line. Then we are told that Jesus was born of Mary, a virgin, thus fulfilling the words of the Prophet Isaiah that a virgin would conceive and bear a son . Then we hear how the baby was visited by ‘Wise Men from the East’, who were looking for (I quote) ‘The King of the Jews’ -a classic title for the Messiah. While explaining their mission to King Herod, they informed him that the anointed one, would be born in Bethlehem because the prophet Micah had said that out of that city would ‘come a governor that would rule my people Israel.’ Well, Jesus WAS born in Bethlehem. In response Herod murdered all the local baby boys , thus fulfilling the words of Jeremiah that there would be lamentation of ‘Rachel weeping for her children.’ However Jesus escaped the carnage because Joseph was instructed in a dream to take his little family to Egypt. By so doing, the words of the Lord (spoken by Hosea) ‘Out of Egypt have I called my son’ came to pass. These six examples all come from the first two chapters of the Gospel, so you can see how densely

the writer uses the established scriptural texts to prove Jesus’s authenticity.

Now I must emphasise that I am in no way suggesting that the Gospel narrative is not factually true. Jesus may been born of a virgin. He may have been visited by foreign sages. The innocents of Bethlehem may have been slaughtered and Jesus may have spent his infancy in Egypt. What I am saying is that the story is set within the context of the messianic beliefs of the time. The writer of the First Gospel believed that Jesus was the promised Messiah and he frames his tale in such a way as to demonstrate this fact.

So now I want to ask the next crucial question. How did Jesus himself understand his own identity and mission? The short answer, of course, is we cannot know. Jesus left no writings of his own. We only learn about him through the words of his followers, but there are, I think, revealing glimpses.

Firstly we are told in the Gospels that the essence of Jesus’s preaching was ‘Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.’ In other words, God’s Kingdom was about to be established on Earth. Jesus not only proclaimed this, but he demonstrated it by healing the sick, by driving out demons and by showing his mastery over nature. It did seem as if evil was about to be overcome and that God’s will would be done on Earth as it was in Heaven. It was exactly what everyone wanted and expected of the messianic age.

Then we hear how, very near to the end of his earthly life, Jesus entered the City of Jerusalem riding on a donkey, deliberately fulﬁlling the words of the Prophet Zechariah. ‘thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass’. The gesture seems to have been generally understood as a deﬁnite declaration. We are told that he was publicly hailed as the Messiah, and that it caused a great stir. The crowds got bigger and bigger. Trouble was clearly brewing.

It was the time of the Passover festival and the city was very full. At the very least it was a matter of public order. Jesus was arrested. He was tried by the Roman Procurator; he was sentenced to death and he died by the Roman punishment of cruciﬁxion. It must have seemed to have been a clear demonstration that the whole thing was a dreadful mistake. If Jesus died before the messianic kingdom was established, then clearly he was not the Messiah. He had not brought in a transformed World.The Age of Gold was still to come some time in the future. The long wait would have to continue. And that should have been the end of it.

Dan (3) : And, as Lavinia said, for most Jews that WAS the end of it. Jesus died ignominiously as a criminal. He therefore was not the Messiah. QED

Now I want to say at the outset that I love living in the shadow of Canterbury Cathedral. The services there are truly wonderful. The music is uplifting and the liturgy is beautiful. I adored the children’s nativity service at Christmas. The donkey was a particular star. But I am not a

Christian. And I , like my fellow-Jews, cannot believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah.

Why not? The overriding reason is, of course, that Jesus simply did not fulﬁl the expectations of messianic deliverance. The world has not fundamentally changed since his death. There has been no general resurrection. The Jewish people in its entirety has not returned to Jerusalem. Peace does not reign throughout the world. There has been no ﬁnal judgement of the quick and the dead. Instead for two millennia there has been continued carnage and war. Life has gone on exactly as before.

In other words, I believe Jesus was one of the many false messiahs and there have been plenty of them. Throughout the centuries there has been constant Jewish speculation about messianic deliverance, and a number of Jewish ﬁgures—not unlike Jesus—have claimed to be the Lord’s Anointed.

For example, in 132 AD, one Simeon bar Kochba led a messianic rebellion against the Roman occupiers of the Holy Land. It ended in total disaster. The Holy City of Jerusalem was razed to the ground and the population was scattered. Again, obviously, that was the end of that.

In the ﬁfth century, there appeared in Crete another charismatic ﬁgure. His name was Moses and he traveled through the whole island in a year, and successfully convinced the Jewish population that he really was the Messiah. His dis-

ciples eagerly awaited the moment when they would miraculously be transported to the Holy Land. They neglected their daily affairs and abandoned their property. On the appointed day, Moses, followed by the whole Jewish population of Crete, marched towards the sea. When they arrived at a certain promontory Moses commanded them to jump, stressing that the waters would divide before them as when Moses had parted the Red Sea. They obeyed, and many of them were drowned while others were rescued by the local mariners. Moses himself was said never to have been seen again.

The most famous of later messianic claimants lived in the 17th century. During this period, the Jewish mystical schools had raised strong messianic expectations. In this over-excited milieu, the arrival of a self-proclaimed messianic king, one Shabbatai Zevi, brought about a transformation of Jewish life and thought. Born in Smyrna into a wealthy family, Shabbatai had received a traditional Jewish education and had become deeply involved in mystical study. In 1665 his messiahship was proclaimed by his disciple Nathan of Gaza who sent letters to Jewish communities throughout the world calling them to repent and to recognise Shabbatai Zevi as their redeemer. Shabbatai, he announced, would take the Sultan's crown, bring back the lost tribes and inaugurate the period of messianic redemption. After a brief sojourn in Jerusalem, Shabbatai went back to Smyrna, where he encountered strong opposition from

some of the local rabbis. In response, he denounced the disbelievers and formally declared that he was the Anointed of the God of Jacob. This action evoked a hysterical responsea number of Jews fell into trances and had visions of the new messiah on a royal throne crowned as King of Israel.

Then in 1666 he journeyed to Constantinople, but, on the order of the Grand Vizier, he was arrested and put into prison. Within a short time the prison quarters had became a messianic court; pilgrims from all over the world made their way to the city to join the messianic rituals and ascetic activities. Enough was enough. Eventually Shabbatai was brought in front of the secular authorities. He was given the choice between death or conversion to Islam. In the face of this stark choice, he became a Muslim.

Amazingly this was not the end of the story. After Shabbtai’s apostasy, his follower, Nathan of Gaza, visited him in the Balkans and then travelled to Rome, where he performed secret rites to bring about the end of the papacy. Shabbatai remained where he was and he lived as both a Muslim and a Jew. In 1672 he was deported to Albania where he disclosed his own mystical teaching to his supporters. After he died in 1676, Nathan declared that his master had ascended to the supernal world. For many years afterwards, a small number of groups continued to believe Shabbtai’s claims.

These are only three among the many messiahs. Like them, Jesus believed he had come in fulﬁlment of biblical expectation. Instead he died on the cross. In all these instances, these pretenders failed to bring about the transformation of earthly life. Lavinia has explained how the author of St Matthew’s Gospel sought to prove from the Hebrew Scriptures that Jesus is God’s anointed deliverer, but we Jews remain unconvinced. Along with a host of others, he simply did not bring about the transformation of history and the redemption of the world.

Lavinia (4): Dan has just shown how and why the Jewish World rejected Jesus merely as one of a long series of other failed messiahs. However, here we are in St Peter’s Methodist Chapel. There are several other churches within a mile’s radius and just down the road is one of the most magnificent Cathedrals in Europe. It is clear that despite Jesus’s death and crucifixion and despite the fact that the World is still a place of strife and difficulty, many, many people continue to believe that Jesus did fulfil the ancient prophecies and was and is the long-awaited messiah.

How can this be? You all know the answer as well as I do. Very soon after his death, it became accepted among Jesus’s followers that God had in fact resurrected him. Jesus was no longer dead. He was alive. He had been seen by some of his closest disciples and he had subsequently ascended into Heaven to be with God at his right hand forever and ever. This event was understood as the beginning of the promised general resurrection when all humankind, both the living

and the dead, would be brought before God for a ﬁnal judgement. All things would be put to rights and God’s Kingdom would be ﬁnally established.

There is no doubt that this was what the earliest disciples believed and this is the foundation on which the whole Christian Church is based. It is all there in the 15th Chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians.

And yet there was soon to be a major problem. Jesus’s resurrection may have been the beginning of the era of God’s Kingdom on Earth, but it was all too obvious that it was only the beginning. Much more needed to be accomplished if God’s Will was to be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Jesus, as the Messiah, really did have to return if the task was to be ﬁnished. Indeed Jesus seems to have promised his followers that he would come back within the lifetimes of many of them. He even gave them an indication of the signs to look out for so they could prepare themselves for his arrival. And, of course, when it did not happen, it was very disturbing indeed. In both Epistles to the Thessalonians, Paul had to reassure his correspondents that Jesus would deﬁnitely return and the writer of the Second Epistle of Peter had to resort to the argument that, I quote, ‘One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.’ In other words, God does not hold to a human time schedule and therefore, although we can be sure that the Messianic kingdom will be established, we cannot be certain exactly when.

And, as time went on, and the Christian Church was increasingly dominated by non-Jews who were not deeply versed in the expectations of the prophets and rabbis and the emphasis on Jesus’s messiahship lessened. We see this in the way the word Christ is used. Christ is simply the Greek translation of the Hebrew Mashiah, the anointed one, but increasingly it was treated as a proper name, not ‘Jesus the Christ’, but ‘Jesus Christ’, almost like a Christian name and a surname. The Church itself became less interested in Jesus’s immediate return and more preoccupied with such theological questions as to the exact relationship between the three persons of the Trinity or precisely how Jesus’s death effected reconciliation between God and humanity. Then there were practical problems such as determining the relationship of the Church with the secular authorities and with stopping the various groups within the Church quarrelling with each other. You only have to look at the Church of England’s recent difﬁculties with other churches in the Anglican communion, to know I am talking about.

Nonetheless, the conviction that Jesus was the promised Jewish Messiah remains embedded in the Christian faith. Today we may not hear so much about it from the pulpit, but we still sing about it in our hymns, particularly in the Advent season. ‘Lo he comes with clouds descending, Once for favoured sinners slain, Thousand thousand saints attending swell the triumph of his train….Oh come quickly, oh come quickly, Hallelujah, come, Lord, come’ or ‘God is working his purpose out, as year increase to year. God is working his purpose out, and the time is drawing near.

Nearer and nearer draws the time, the time that shall surely be, When the World shall be ﬁlled with the glory of God, as the waters cover the sea’ or even ‘Oh come, oh come Emmanuel, Redeem thy captive Israel…’ You see, we are still waiting….

Dan (5): Lavinia has explained in detail how Christians have reinterpreted the concept of the messianic age to ﬁt in with the fact that Jewish predictions about the end of time have not occurred. As you might expect, Jews are not convinced by such arguments. Previously Lavinia cited St Matthew’s use of Scriptural texts as proof that Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah. For Jews, such arguments are unconvincing. Most importantly, the fact that human history has continued as before clearly demonstrates to us Jews that Jesus is not the long-awaited Redeemer of Israel. The dead have not been resurrected. Peace does not reign on earth. Final judgement has not occurred.

Christians, however, have not come to the same conclusion. Why? Lavinia tells us that they believe that Jesus ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God. This is the beginning of the general resurrection when all humankind will appear before God for ﬁnal judgement. God׳s Kingdom will ﬁnally be established. Initially it was thought that the Second Coming would occur soon, but this did not happen. As a result Christians like Paul and Peter reassured believers that this would take place at some point in the future. In the meantime as the Christian message spread to the nonJewish world, traditional expectations about the messianic

age receded in importance, and the Church became preoccupied with theological questions about such topics as the nature of the Trinity.

As an outsider, it seems to me that such a shift in focus illustrates that, despite the fact that the Christian liturgy has retained references to traditional ideas about the coming of the Messiah, the vast majority of Christians no longer anticipate a cataclysmic end of history. In preparation for this talk, I thought I ought to check if I am right about this. So I phoned an old friend, who is a senior ﬁgure in the Anglican Church. We were research students together. He had a very successful career. He didn't get to be an actual Archbishop, but he wasn't far off. . I explained that Lavinia and I were going to give a talk about the Messiah in Judaism and Christianity. I wanted to know what he thinks Christians today believe. I said׳:"Do they expect Jesus will arrive in glory? Will peace reign on earth? Will all the dead be resurrected? Will the righteous go to Heaven, and the wicked to Hell? I told him to give me a yes or no answer for each question. I didn't get one. Instead there was a lot of verbiage about the elasticity of time.

Jews are much clearer. After twenty centuries of unfulﬁlled longing, Jews today with the exception of the strictly Orthodox have set aside messianic expectations altogether. Why? It is essentially for the same reason that Jews do not believe that Jesus is the Messiah. The messianic age has not materialised.

Throughout history, once a messianic claimant failed to produce the goods, there was no nonsense. He clearly was not the Messiah. Once the followers of Moses of Crete had drowned in the Mediterranean, he was recognised as a pretender. Once Shabbatai Tzevi had converted to Islam, it was generally accepted that he had failed to make the grade.

Distancing themselves from ancient convictions, the vast majority of Jews today have completely set aside the belief in the coming of the Messiah. We Jews, unlike the Christian community, now live in a post-messianic age. In Reform Judaism, for example, which has millions of adherents world-wide, the liturgy has omitted all references to the coming of the Messiah, the messianic age, and ﬁnal judgement.

In understanding this shift in perspective, it must be remembered that we Jews still live in the shadow of the Holocaust. Six million of us died during the Nazi period in the most terrible circumstances. If there had ever been a time when messianic deliverance was needed, it was then. But it did not happen. As a result the Jewish community has turned inwards. It is no longer the long-awaited Messiah that gives us hope for the future. In the modern world Jews look to themselves. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the state of Israel is perceived to be so crucial to Jewish survival.

Lavinia (6): So there you have it. Jews do not believe that Jesus was the Messiah because he failed to bring in an ideal

World. Christians do think Jesus was the Messiah, but they have to insert another stage in the programme. And it must be admitted that for many Church people today, the belief in Jesus’s return is not a central element to their faith. I will not embarrass you by asking you to raise your hand if you would personally be surprised to see Jesus leading a magniﬁcent procession of angels down through the clouds.

However, I do realise that this dialogue is sadly polite and middle-class. That of course is because Dan and I are in fact polite and middle-class. But, before we ﬁnish and can hear your views, there is another important aspect and we must be aware of it. We need to mention that there are places in the World, particularly in Africa and in Middle America, where there is still a very different take on the Messiah. And it is in these places, not in the Home Counties of England, that Christianity is actually growing. These largely fundamentalist Churches take the New Testament signs of the coming of the Messiah seriously. In particular, the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the return of the Jews to the Holy Land are perceived as deﬁnite signs of the Last Days.

From our point of view, some of their messianic convictions, seem very alien, not to say completely bizarre, but in some places they remain very inﬂuential. Donald Trump may well be an adulterer, a tax evader, a fantasist and a racist, but he commands a devoted following among these people. We will almost certainly see their inﬂuence in the November election. And, in any event, none of us know the future. It may be that we liberals will be very surprised

and that the Establishment of God’s Kingdom on Earth is just around the corner. Given the present state of the World, many of us hope so.