Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart Ehrman (read book .TXT) 📕

of Israel’s conquerors, was said by the prophet Isaiah to have been God’s instrument, and is explicitly called his “messiah” (anointed one; Isaiah 45:1).

Most commonly, however, the term was applied to the king of Israel. Within the ancient Israelite traditions there developed the notion that God would always favor the nation by constantly ruling them through his chosen king. A prophecy was given to Israel’s greatest king, David, in 2 Samuel 7:11–14, that he would always have a descendant on the throne—that in perpetuity an anointed one would rule the nation. That promise, however, did not come to fruition. In the year 586 BCE, the Babylonian armies under King Nebuchadnezzar invaded the land of Judah, destroyed the city of Jerusalem, burned the Jewish Temple, and removed the king from the throne. For the next several centuries the Jewish people were ruled by foreign powers: the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, then the Syrians.

Some Jewish thinkers, however, recalled the original promise to David that an anointed one, a messiah, would always sit on the throne, and they came to think that the promise would be fulfilled in days to come. In some future time, possibly soon, God would remember his promise and bring a future king like David to rule his people. This future ruler was naturally enough referred to simply as the “messiah.” He would be a human, like David, Solomon, and the other kings. But he would be raised up by God to overthrow the enemies of the Jews and establish Israel once again as a sovereign people in the land God had promised them.

Around the time of Jesus there lived some Jews who expected such a messiah. At that period the Jews in Palestine were ruled by the Romans. But it was sometimes thought that God would intervene and raise up a great warrior who would destroy these pagan enemies and reinstate the kingdom of Israel. One of the clearest expressions of this kind of messianic expectation is in a Jewish writing known as the Psalms of Solomon, written probably during the first century BCE. Its powerful expectation of what the coming messiah would be is worth quoting at length:

See, Lord, and raise up for them their king,

the son of David, to rule over your servant Israel

in the time known to you, O God.

Undergird him with the strength to destroy the unrighteous rulers,

to purge Jerusalem from gentiles

who trample her to destruction;

in wisdom and in righteousness to drive out

the sinners from the inheritance;

to smash the arrogance of sinners like a potter’s jar;

to shatter all their substance with an iron rod;

to destroy the unlawful nations with the word of his mouth;

at his warning the nations will flee from his presence;

and he will condemn sinners by the thoughts of his heart….

And he will have gentile nations serving him under his yoke….

And he will purge Jerusalem

and make it holy as it was even from the beginning….

And he will be a righteous king over them, taught by God.

There will be no unrighteousness among them in his days,

for all shall be holy,

and their king shall be the Lord Messiah.10

Obviously we are not dealing here with the expectation of a messiah who would be tortured to death by his enemies the Romans. Quite the opposite: the messiah would destroy the enemy and set up his throne in Jerusalem, where he would rule his people with power, grandeur, and justice.

Is that what Jesus was said to have done? If not, how could he be the messiah?

Other Jews at the time of Jesus held yet other expectations of the future ruler of Israel. Some Jews had come to think that the messiah would not be a mere earthly king. He would be a cosmic figure, a powerful angelic being sent from God to destroy the enemy and set up God’s kingdom on earth. This figure was often modeled on the “one like a son of man” in the book of Daniel (for example, 7:13–14). In an apocryphal writing known as 1 Enoch, probably from about the same time, comes this prediction about the future messianic Son of Man:

[The Son of Man] shall never pass away or perish from before the face of the earth. But those who have led the world astray shall be bound with chains; and their ruinous congregation shall be imprisoned; all their deeds shall vanish from before the face of the earth. Thenceforth nothing that is corruptible shall be found; for that Son of Man has appeared and has seated himself upon the throne of his glory; and all evil shall disappear from before his face. (1 Enoch 69)11

Yet other Jews from about the time of Jesus expected that the future anointed one would be a powerful priest who would rule over the people of Israel with authority given him by God, as he interpreted the sacred laws of Israel and enforced their obedience in the good kingdom to come. The community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls expected two messiahs, one who would be a ruler-king and over him the priestly messiah.12

In short, ancient Jews at the turn of the era held a variety of expectations of what the future messiah would be like. But all these expectations had several things in common. In all of them the messiah would be a future ruler of the people of Israel, leading a real kingdom here on earth. He would be visibly and openly known to be God’s special emissary, the anointed one. And he would be high and mighty, a figure of grandeur and power.

And who was Jesus? In all our early traditions he was a lower-class peasant from rural Galilee who was thought by some to be the future ruler of Israel but who instead of establishing the kingdom on earth came to be crucified. That Jesus died by crucifixion is almost universally attested in our sources, early and late. We have traditions of Jesus’s bloody execution in independent Gospel sources (Mark, M, L, John, Gospel of Peter),