Dean Anderson

I thought the usual apologetic for this was to say that whilst he didn't fulfil there prophecies physically, he fulfilled them spiritually (you know, like Adam and Eve died a spiritual death rather than a physical one, etc.)

The only sensible response to this apologetic technique that describes anything inconsistent as spiritually consistent (with no definition or explanation of what that actually means) is "Wat'ch'yoo talkin' about, Willis!" and a slap upside the head.

Chili

The second coming is for those who recognize his first coming as genuine and it will be the end of slavery for Catholics from Catholicism. Just as the first coming was the end of slavery and sin, so will the second coming be the end of slavery and sin. The secret here is to recognize the messiah as Messiah.

If condemnation follows the denial of the first there cannot be a prophetic second.

Sensei Meela

Indeed, the 2nd Coming stinks of so much ad hoc-ery; my archnemesis, James Madison, argues that since the Bible is completely silent on when those prophecies are to be fulfilled, a 2nd Coming "fits" and is not ruled out.

There is, however, one case of an OT prophecy explicitly employing the Second Coming of a prophet, and it is Elijah; he is supposed to return to announce the first coming of The Messiah. Madison claims this is all the Biblical precedent he needs to support the 2nd Coming of Christ.

What do the experts around here think?

newtype_alpha

Basically right, although chances are Jesus wouldn't even get to them all in the second coming... in which case we will have to wait yet another 2500 years for a THIRD coming. :thumbs: (trinity, you know? Three is a cool number to play with).

See, you can't loose with this. All you have to do is keep adding loopholes so no matter how many times he fails, he is STILL the Messiah. :devil3:

David Bowden

A few questions regarding this list:
Is this seven-part requirement given somewhere in scripture or Jewish lore?
Who named these as the criteria for identifying the messiah?
When were they laid out? Was it before the foundation of Christianity?

Finally, in addition to Jesus being Jewish, wasn't he also of the tribe of Judah? Obviously a traditional Christian denies Jesus' direct patrilineal bloodline through Joseph, but he was surely counted, in his lifetime, as the son of Joseph - and both the Matthew 1 and Luke 3 genealogies are clear about Joseph's membership in the tribe of Judah. Further, some apologists consider Luke 3 to represent Mary's genealogy (for whatever reasons they find convenient).

I'm not arguing for Christianity, by a long shot (nor even for a historical Jesus!) - I'm just curious to know the origin of the seven criteria you list, and your reasons for not including the Jesus of scripture as a member of the tribe of Judah. (You allow that he was a Jew - which tribe do you think he belonged to?)

-David

Diogenes the Cynic

It's all from the Hebrew Bible. Here's a rundown on the specific scriptural references from the Jews for Judaism website:
It wouldn't matter if Jesus wasn't Joseph's blood son. Tribal lines could not be counted through adoption. The geneologies in Matthew and Luke are mytholofical constructions anyway. It's not like there were any actual records tracing the bloodline of David down to the time of Jesus.
Such a conclusion is not supported by the text but it wouldn't help them even if it was. Matrilineal lines meant nothing.
I have no idea what tribe Jesus belonged to, that is not a recoverable piece of information. The Nativities are of no help because they are mythological in their intent not historical. I suppose it's possible that Jesus (if he existed) was of the tribe of Judah). That in itself means very little. I would point out, though, that the Nativities do not actually claim he was of the tribe of Judah, only that Joseph was.

David Bowden

Thanks, Diogenes; that was very helpful, and I'll keep the list you put together for reference.

One question remains in my mind: were these criteria gathered together, and recognized as the special set of necessary conditions for messiah-hood, prior to the time of Jesus?

The reason I ask: one would think that if Jewish tradition had ever made it an important point to fulfill exactly these, and all of these, seven criteria, then the gospel writers would have done everything they could to demonstrate their fulfillment.

The fact that Jesus is portrayed as meeting so few of these criteria makes me wonder if Jewish thinkers, in reaction to Christian claims, selected these criteria from the unsystematic alleged prophecies of the messiah scattered throughout their scriptures, and then formalized them in order to draw lines around the messiah that the gospel accounts of Jesus, having already been written, couldn't cross. In short, I'm wondering, might Judaism have generated this definition of the messiah in response to the story the Christians told about him (which Christians claim has plenty of prophecy to back it up), in order to exclude Jesus and further organize their case against Christianity?

I guess what would be helpful, and I don't know if anybody can provide it, is the answer to the question: What is the earliest record of this formulation (since obviously it's not together in any one place in the Bible)?

(Okay, I guess that's at least three questions, not one...)

Diogenes the Cynic

The concept of the Messiah was first formulated during the Baylonian exile and was conceived as the king who would return the Jews to Israel, rebuild the Temple and restore the Kingdom of David. In the first century there was some variation in how the Messiah was perceived (some may have perceived him as being a supernatural entity akin to an ange) but the essential expectations were the same about what he would accomplish. At root, the Jewish "Anointed One" was still the heir to the throne of David who would restore the Kingdom. That was his primary role- to restore the Kingdom. There was no pre-Christian expectation that he would be a redeemer of sins or that he would die and be resurrected or that he would be God. It was Christians who found it necessary to reformulate the role of the Messiah as an apology for the cross. It was not an act of Jewish apologetics to devise a post facto definition of the Messiah to combat Christianity. The Hebrew scriptures support the Jewish definition explicitly, they don't support the Christian definition without a whole lot of squinting, selective inference and a priori assumptions.

David Bowden

Thanks Diogenes. I don't dispute the idea that Christians used the concept of the messiah and altered the biography of Jesus in order to make them line up better. It does take some squinting to read Jonah as prophesying the length of time Jesus spent in the tomb! And obviously they couldn't go so far as to make him bring about lasting world peace... But they did have Jesus restore the kingdom (something that's oddly not explicitly listed in the Jews for Judaism list of criteria, but only given in the Ezekiel passage), albeit in a spiritual, not geopolitical sense.

What I'm wondering, though, is whether the seven points highlighted by modern Jews were really exactly what Jews in Jesus' day and age looked for in a messiah. Did Jesus, for instance, grow up hearing these seven points listed by his synagogue teachers?

If so, then how could Jesus and Christianity ever have got any kind of foothold in Judea? If nothing else, why didn't Christian writers do more to make Jesus pass muster among Jews (by, for instance, showing Jesus explicitly denying this seven-point formulation)?

If not, then when did this seven-point formulation come to be accepted as the Jews' litmus test for the messiah?

Thanks for putting up with my continued pressing on this point, Diogenes; you've gone out of your way here. By way of explanation, I raise these questions (for anybody to address) not simply to belabor a point, but because I'm very much interested in how early Christianity may have affected Judaism's later evolution. I have no hard and fast position on this issue, but I do wonder that the Jews for Judaism site does not refer to, say, Rabbi Hillel or some other pre-Christian Jewish scholar, when laying out these particular criteria.

Much that is recounted or prophesied in the Jewish scripture is interpreted by Jews in different ways that do not require a literal interpretation be the right one (for instance, the creation story). So I wonder whether there was a consensus back then on all of the messianic points listed by Jews for Judaism. Perhaps there was not (e.g., perhaps world peace is not something everybody would have expected Jesus to bring, literally), and so the fame of Jesus provoked an effort to consolidate Jewish teaching on the messiah, about what specifically and literally must occur in order for a candidate messiah to be accepted.

While I could believe that certain Jews probably accepted a reading of their scriptures that included some or all of the points listed, I almost wonder if, like Christians, they picked what especially suited them after Jesus' story was over (though obviously they didn't have to do as much distorting since they didn't have a person to shoehorn into the definition), and among the things that suited them was excluding Jesus from consideration.

What I have said is speculative, I admit, but it would be nice to have it wiped away by anyone with a citation of a single source from before Jesus' time listing those seven criteria as the essential messianic traits.

Diogenes the Cynic

Well, it's almost redundant to say that he'll restore the kindom. In Judaic expectation, the Messiah is the King of Israel by definition. Talking about what the Anointed One will do is the same as talking about what the King of Isreal will do. If there is another King of Israel it presupposes that there will be a restored kingdom. It pretty much goes without saying.
It wouldn't have been formulated as such. I think the criteria for the Messaih really got fleshed out after the diaspora. In the first century, different rabbis probably would have given a few different answers. There wouldn't have been a "list" as such and at least a couple of those things (Jews back to Israel, rebuilding of the Temple) had already been accomplished since the Captivity. In Jesus' day, what would have been considered necessary was that the presumptive Messiah would get rid of the Romans and restore a unified kingdom. He would have had to also be a direct descendant of David, of course, but there was no real way to assertain such a thing in the first century. I should also point out that if a presumptive Messiah (and there were many of them) died before he restored the kingdom it was considered to be ipso facto proof that he wasn't the Messiah.

Moreover, there were no pre-Christian expectations that the Messiah would be born of a virgin, that he would die for anyone's sins, that he would be resurrected or that he would be God.
If Jesus claimed to be the Messiah (which is not a given...in fact, I personally don't believe that he did) then he would not have been proven wrong until he was killed. Afterwards, the Jesus as Christos movement was far more of a gentile phenomenon than a Jewish or Palestinian one. There was some attempt by Christians to read some Messianic expectations allegorically (he would "rebuild the Temple" with his body, e.g.) or to say that he would fulfill everthing after the Second Coming but the fact that he didn't fulfill specifically Jewish expectations is a lrge reason that Christianity did not especially take hold in Jewish communities.
The sources are the passages from the Hebrew Bible. The concept was further refined by Talmudic authority and by Maimonides but the core expectation of a Davidic heir who would restore the kingdom is explicit in the Tanakh. It was not a retroactive interpretation of decontextualized passages as is so often resorted to by Christians. In order to make your question more pertinent you would have to find some sort of pre-Christian documentation that the Messiah was ever conceived of as anything other than what is explicit in the HB.