Apikorus

That many of the early Christians were Jews, and that they and the tradents among them were steeped in contemporary Jewish messianic beliefs is quite clear. Modern Jewish "antimissionaries" who taunt Christians with the claim that the New Testament is purely Hellenistic, that it is antisemitic, that Christian exegetical traditions about messiah had no basis in Judaism, etc are either dishonest or ignorant. But from a more scholarly point of view, I would add:

• Jewish messianism began to flower during the Hellenistic and Roman eras. The relevant documents suggest a diverse set of messianic models. John Collins, in his nuanced study, The Scepter and the Star, identifies four such messianic paradigms: royal, priestly, prophetic, and divine/heavenly. At times these distinctions would blur, as in the expectation of the (priestly and prophetic) eschatological teacher at Qumran. At any rate, there is no uniquely "correct" messianic model, and the Essenes, the Christians, and the Rabbis ultimately went in rather different directions as far as messianism was concerned.
  
• The authors of these Hellenistic and Roman era Jewish documents often engaged in fanciful reinterpretation of biblical passages so as to apply them to their own times. This approach is amply demonstrated in the pesharim from Qumran. It is also what underlies the expansive and paraphrastic approach of the authors of the Targumim.
  
• Traditional Jewish exegesis often strays wildly from the plain sense of the text of the Hebrew Bible. That the early Christians, most of whom (likely) were Jews, should have plied an "authentic" contemporary Jewish hermeneutic is quite natural. That does not, however, mean that they, too, are not also guilty of "misinterpreting the Scriptures."