sschlichter

I do not have a phone number but it seems more relevant to ask ancient jews about the relationship of Isa 53 and the Messiah.

Babylonian Talmud: "The Messiah --what is his name?...The Rabbis say, The Leper Scholar, as it is said, `surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows (Isa 53:4): yet we did esteem him a leper, smitten of God and afflicted...'" (Sanhedrin 98b)

Kabbalah Zohar: "There is in the Garden of Eden a palace called the Palace of the Sons of Sickness; this palace the Messiah then enters, and summons every sickness, every pain, and every chastisement of Israel;...and this is that which is written, `Surely our sicknesses he hath carried.'"(Isa 53:4)

Ruth Rabbah: He is speaking of king Messiah; `Come hither,' draw near to the throne; `and eat of the bread,' that is, the bread of the kingdom; `and dip thy morsel in the vinegar,' this refers to his chastisements, as it is said, `But he was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities'" (Isa 53)

Rabbi Moses Maimonides: " And Isaiah speaks similarly of the time when he shall appear, without father or mother or family being known, He came up as a sucker before him, and as a root out of dry earth (Isa 53:2)

follow the logic,

1) many ancient jews interpret the passage as messianic
2) the passage predicts the rejection of the servant by his people
3) his people have a phone number dedicated to re-interpretting the passage

this element of the prophecy is fulfilled every time you point out that modern jews do not accept jesus as messiah.

~Steve

sschlichter

the example is not analogous to the passage.

I just posted a response to johnny on the subject. the questions I posted seem like reasonable ones. If you think the servant is a metaphor then you should be able to assign meaning to the elements used.

Elijah

The whole movement is political if it’s meant to have political ramification in everyone worshiping a dead king instead of living ones.

What makes it an anti-kingdom is that usually empires are built around the many/poor serving the few/elect. In Christianity the few and the elect are supposed to serve the many and the poor. The whole last will be first bit you know I’m sure. Also unlike an actual kingdom there is nothing to build and no boarders to expand. The growth and survival of your standard empire depends on the labor of the multitude. Christianity is initially an ideological movement that just required faith and could exist within in any empire.

As long as regular empires are the standard then we will have a populace that is enslaved like we see today. This is what makes Christianity an anti-empire because it’s trying to replace or fix this type of empire, in order to free the people by getting them to worship a new kind of king that sets a serving example.

Are you getting the anti king aspect with Jesus serving the people or are you still not seeing that either?
I’m not sure what you are saying the point of the story is here. It’s hard to imagine that removing the sermon on the mount and there is no other message since the sermon isn’t in Mark or John. What is the message in those two since they lack it?

But yea if Judas was expecting a military type messiah he would have been disappointed with getting the opposite but that shouldn’t be throwing you off 2000 years later in understanding what he is attempting.
God having sovereignty is supposed to replace a king or emperors sovereignty… in theory.

Why don’t the subjects of the kingdom care who is in charge? What kind of not caring are you talking about? Not respecting their authority or just apathetic towards what the rulers could do to them?

rob117

Seems very plausible; I just have a couple of nitpicks (apologies if others have pointed this out; it's 3AM and I'm not reading the whole discussion).

1) Jesus did not adopt the concept of hell directly from the Greeks. It existed already in Hellenistic Judaism, and was likely derived from both Greek and Zoroastrian concepts, superimposed upon the pre-existing Israelite belief in Sheol as the abode of the dead. The majority of Jews (including the Pharisees and Essenes, as well as the uneducated masses) probably accepted some form of the heaven-hell duality at the time of Jesus, although the "official cult" of the Sadducees denied the existence of an afterlife until it was extinguished in AD 70.

2) Josephus says that many Jews blamed a defeat suffered by Herod in AD 36 on his execution of John the Baptist; this would place John the Baptist's beheading in AD 36 or shortly before, after the death of Jesus, in contradiction to the gospels ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Baptist#Josephus ). This would indicate that Jesus must have split off from John's cult and founded his own before the death of John. The Gospels' placing of John's death before that of Jesus is probably theologically motivated, to keep John in line with his role as the "forerunner" of the messiah.

I do, however, like your reconstruction of the origins of the resurrection myth.

bacht

Well I didn't think you wanted to hear a skeptic analysis. Maybe I wasn't clear enough: there are no other dimensions, no spirits, no miracles, no afterlife as far as I can see. But we're talking about what those people believed.

What were the gospels writers attempting? There's still debate about this (see Joe Wallack's excellent series about Mark) but the general idea seems to be providing an historical backstory for an originally mystical/mythical Christ. I see the apocalyptic theme as central in the early stages, the first Xtians expecting the end very soon (eg. Revelation). By the mid-2nd C this trend was out of favour with predominantly gentile Christians, who preferred a romanticized/nostalgic picture of pre-70 (or pre-135) Palestine.

The kingdom of heaven by this time was either in the hearts and minds of believers or in the future when God finally wraps everything up in this cosmos. But the promise of afterlife was still there, so in that sense the Pharisees won the metaphysical argument after all.

ApostateAbe

Thank you, I'll have to edit my gospel in light of that second point.

aa5874

But, how could Mary Magdalene and the other Marys go to the site where Jesus was SLAIN and not know anything about crucifixion?

This resurrection story just makes very little sense.

The body of Jesus is all rotten, mangled and bones scattered and some bones nailed, and perhaps hanging from the very cross right in front of the visitors, Magdalene and others, and they think Jesus resurrected!

The bare bones of a dead man's leg is nailed and attached to a cross and people are joyous believing he was raised from the dead!

And what would happen to those who claimed Jesus resurrected and was the Son of God?

They would be happily executed.

The resurrection myth story makes little sense.

Who in Jerusalem would dare claim Jesus resurrected when it would be obvious to those who are NOT mad, NOT in any delirium, and know crucifixion that the claim was false?

rob117

All of these references date to centuries after Jesus (many centuries, in the case of Maimonides and the Zohar). This is no evidence that this messianic interpretation of Isaiah 53 existed at the time of Jesus. They also amount to just four references in over 2000 years of rabbinic interpretation.
It's important to note that talmudic writings are prone to seeing the messiah in pretty much every single biblical passage; this tends to happen when you have a mystical interpretation of scripture. The conception of what the messiah will be like held by modern religious Jews is extremely detailed and elaborate, largely due to this continuous reinterpretation of scripture.

Additionally, Jewish and Christian translations of Isaiah 53 render the Hebrew differently; in my JPS Tanakh it is clear that the "wounds" suffered by the servant are sores of leprosy. Hence the term "leper scholar" in Sanhedrin 98b and the references to "sicknesses" in the Zohar.

The overwhelming thrust of Jewish messianism always has and still does identify the messiah as a warrior-king who will restore the Davidic monarchy and establish Israel's rule over the nations. The characteristic of suffering that these late Jewish texts give him based on Isaiah 53 is relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, and may well be influenced by Christian use of Isaiah 53.

rob117

The JPS translation:

"He was despised, shunned by men
A man of suffering familiar with disease
As one who hid his face from us*
He was despised, we held him of no account
Yet it was our sickness that he was bearing
Our suffering that he endured
We accounted him plagued
Smitten and afflicted by God"
(53:3-4)
*footnote here says, "As a leper, cf. Leviticus 13:45ff. According to the passage cited in Leviticus, a leprous man had to "cover his upper lip" (i.e. his face)

The poem continues:

"But he was wounded because of our sins
Crushed because of our iniquities
He bore the chastisement that made us whole
And by his bruises we are healed" (Emphasis mine)
(53:5)

The word "healed" here picks up the thought of the disease passages above.

"But Yahweh chose to crush him by disease
That, if he made himself an offering for guilt
He might see offspring and have long life
And that through him Yahweh's purpose might prosper"
(53:10)

The actual context of Isaiah 53 in line with the themes of Deutero-Isaiah as a whole and the other three "servant songs" seems to be referring to Israel's "righteous prophets," (explicitly identified with both Israel and those who "lead" Israel in 49:1-6) who suffered the exile (the "disease" and other afflictions here referred to) because of the sins of the "wicked" of Israel (the "we" of Isaiah 53). The prophet here is celebrating the immanent end of the exile and the restoration of Israel as a now religiously-pure nation (presumably led by prophets like himself), to whom he predicts all other nations will bow.

It is thus not a messianic prophecy per se, as it makes no Davidic references; however it has themes in common with messianic prophecies in terms of its prediction of the restoration of Israel as a powerful nation. It is thus easy to see how later Christians and Jews could reinterpret the prophecy in a messianic context.

One should note that the Tractate Sanhedrin's application of this passage to refer to the Messiah as does not seem to have much authority among Orthodox Jews because of its rare attestation; indeed the tractate presents it in the context of a debate about what the messiah's name will be, and the rabbis who quote this passage seem to pull it out of thin air to support their position against other rabbis. The identification of the Messiah as a "scholar" also points to this being a late interpretation of the passage, from a time when scholars (i.e. rabbis) were important in Jewish religious life. The earliest figures who would later be identified as rabbis were roughly contemporary with Jesus (predating him by about 40 years or so), but the rabbis did not become an establishment until after the destruction of the Second Temple, so this interpretation likely stems from after this period. The passage in question mostly references second and third century rabbis, however the "leper scholar" interpretation is unattributed, ascribed simply to "the rabbis." The final redaction of the text does not predate c. 500 AD. The final redaction of the Ruth Rabbah midrash that you cited similarly does not predate that time. These are thus not appropriate sources for determining how Jews at the time of Jesus or earlier interpreted the passage.

andrewcriddle

Unless people assumed that Divine Justice must come quickly, (See contra plutarchondelayofdivinejustice), the belief that a defeat in CE 36 is punishment for a previous killing does not require that killing to have occurred in 35/36.

Andrew Criddle