The Man who believed he was Messiah

THE LAST TIMES

But it is by no means easy to relate the life of Jesus and the activities of his original followers to the contemporary situation. This is largely due to the character of the New Testament and the paucity of external eviences about the beginnings of Christianity. To reach conclusions which can fairly be regarded as corresponding as nearly as possible to the reality entails a vast amount of analysis and comparison, the patient piecing together of a host of hints and scraps of tradition, and in particular a sympathetic involvement in the affairs of the Jewish people and detachment from considerations of Christian theology.

Because of what the Church has taught for so many centuries it has been extremely difficult for christian scholars to undertake such an investigation objectively. Those who have embarked upon it and produced most valuable resuls merit the highest praise. One pioneer, Professor F.C. Burkitt of Cambridge, whom the writer was privileged to know personally, advisedly used these cautionary words: "We must be prepared to find the whole drama of the rise of Christianity more confused, more secular, in a word more appropriate to the limitations of its own age, than we should gather from th epic selectiveness of the Creeds and the theological manuals." Such language is necessary, and shold be heeded by those theologians who feel quite at liberty to expound Christianity as if it owed little or nothing to its original background of thought. The Bishop of Woolwich, to quote a recent instance, can freely employ key words like Christ and Gospel without apparent concern for their primary meaning and implications. Christ is the Greek translation of the Hebrew term Messiah, meaning the Anointed One, and the Gospel, from the Greek Evangel, translting the Hebrew word for Good News, was initially the information that the Messiah expected by the Jews had appeared.

It makes all the difference ot our understanding of Christianity if we are enabled to apprehend that it did not begin as a new religion but as a movement of monotheistic Jews who held Jesus to be their God-sent king and deliverer. Here, in sentence, is what it is imperative to know about the origins of Christianity. Here we have the essential clue to the activities of Jesus and his first followers which helps to compensate for many material facts which are beyond recovery. Armed with this information we can get Christianity in correct perspective, and trace clearly and simply in the light of what is ascertainable how it was transformed into what it afterwards became.

It is often said that christianity is founded upon a person. That is true. But it is only part of the historical truth. What, so to speak, was the person founded upon? The answer is that he was founded upon an idea, a strange idea current among the Jews of his time, an idea alien to Western thought which many non-Jewish theologians still find very inconvenient, the idea of Messianism. It was Messianism which made the life of Jesus what it was and so brought Christianity into being. it was Messianism, as accepted by Gentile believers, which contributed towards making the deification of Jesus inevitable. It was Messianism which provided the spiritual impulse behind the Jewish war with Rome which broke out in A.D. 66, resulting in the destruction of much authoritative testimony about Jesus and the substantial separation of Gentile from Jewish Christianity.

The fundamental teaching of Christianity, then, was that in Jesus the Messiah (the Christ) had come. There can be not the shadow of a doubt about this. It is the ultimate conviction on which the whole edifice of Christianity rests, the historical fact on which all the Gospels are agreed. This teaching was the gospel, underlying all the Gospels, the one thing which gave them the right to be so called. The faith of the earliest believers in Jesus was that which voiced itself in the declaration of Peter, as recorded in Mark, "You are the Messiah" (Mark 8:29), simply this without any qualification. The persuasion they had was built upon what Jesus had said and done. It was he who had given them cause to conclude that he was the Messiah, and he had done so quite deliberately. But what the Gospels do not tell us is what in the first instance had persuaded him. Unless we can discover why jesus held himself to be the Messiah, what current teaching about the Messiah he applied to himself, we are not in possession of the key to the mystery of his life and death.

We have no right to say that while Jesus accepted the designation of Messiah he did so in a sense quite different from any expecatations entertained in his time. It would be unthinkable for him to do this, firstly because being the Messiah meant answering to certain prophetic requirements which for him were divinely inspired, and secondly because he would consciously have been depriving his people of any possibility of acknowledging him: he would be inviting them to reject him as a false Messiah.

We have to take the view that Jesus believed it to be his calling and destiny to fulfil the Messianic Hope, and to do so in a manner which would conform with the predictions he accepted as authoritative. Our business is to find out the conditions with which Jesus felt he had to comply, and on this basis to follow the course of his actions. Obviously we have to divorce the issue altogether from the paganised doctrine of the incarnation of the godhead with which for Christians it has become intermingled, since expectation did not identify the Messiah with God, and, indeed, the nature of Jewish monotheism wholly excluded such an idea. jesus as much as any other Jew would have regarded as blasphemous the manner in which he is depicted, for instance, in the Fourth Gospel.

Taking the Gospels together, and these are the chief source of our information about Jesus, we have in them an epitome of the process by which the traditions about him grew and expanded with the changing needs and fortunes of succeeding generations of believers, Jewish and Gentile, so that Jesus as he appears in them is a composite and somehwat contradictory figure. His image is like the idol of Nebuchadnezzar's dream in the book of Daniel, part gold, part silver, part bronze, part iron and party clay. The gold is there to be extracted, but we cannot take hold of it unalloyed without knowlede of the influences an circumstances to which Jesus himself had responded. it is not enough to look bck to him through the minds of much later bleivers not of Jewish origin: we have imperatively to look forward to him through the pre-Christian development of Messianism.

The coming of the Messiah was not something fortuitous: it was closely linked with a period of history prophetically anticipated, the Last Times or End of the Days, which would precede the inauguration of the Kingdom of God. The Messiah could not appear at any time, but only at the End of the Days, at a time of testing and great tribulation for Israel.

The conception of the Last Times drew upon Biblical predictions relating to the Latter Days and the Day of the Lord, which became combined with Babylonian and Persian ideas of a succession of Ages. During the Ages the forces of Good and Evil would contend with one another, and the struggle would reach its climax in the penultimate Age, being followed by the final Age of peace and bliss, the Kingdom of God. The Last Times would thus be the closing period of the old order, when the assaults of Evil would reach their most malevolent intensity, bringing great misery to humanity and persecution and suffering to the elect of Israel. When these signs appeared then the Messiah was to be expected.

According to those who studied these matters, it could not be known how long the Last Times would endure, but it could be known approximately when they would begin. For this a basis of calculation had to be available, and it was found in the book of Daniel inhe prophecy of the Seventy Weeks (Daniel 9:24-7), later understood to mean seventy weeks of years (490 years). The Last Times could be expected to begin after the lapse of 490 years "from the going forth of the commandment [of Cyrus] to restore and build Jerusalem", that is to say, after about 46 B.C. Those who believed in this interpretation, and were living in the reign of Herod the Great (37-4 B.C.), could accept that the Last Times had now begun, and that therefore before very long the coming of the Messiah was to be expected. This explains why a strong messianic excitement manifested itself among the Jews from this time onward, and why no one before this had claimed to be the Messiah.

The part of the book of Daniel in which the preophecy occurs had been dated about 164 B.C. The author is assuming the name of a man supposed to be living near the end of the sixty century B.C. From other visions of his he appears to have expected the Era of Righteousness would come not very long after his actual time. Some thought it had come in the reign of John Hyrcanus I (137-3 B.C.). We do not know much about earlier calculations, and the one to which we have referred was worked out later when the opes entertained of the Hasmoneans had been grievously disappointed. It is after 100 B.C. that the literature we have reveals a mounting interest in the Last Times and in the advent of messianic personalities. By the first century of our era it had become quite feverish, and had engendered a state of near hysteria among the people. It was wholly in keeping with the circumstances that a figure like John the Baptist should now appear proclaiming the Kingdom of God was at hand, and calling upon the people to repent and save themselves from the Wrath to Come. It was no less appropriate that a man like Jesus should be convinced he was the Messiah and announce that "the Time is fulfilled". The calculations of pious scribes confirmed the time, but what was more the conditions of the time reinforced the calculations.

Messianism was a product of the Jewish spirit. It was inspired by the Hebrew reading of the riddle of the creation and destiny of mankind. Though some of its features did not originate with the Hebrews, they absorbed them and brought them into relationship with a great vision of the ultimate Brotherhood of Man under the rule of the One God and Father of all men. The vision was not simply a cherished ideal: it was associated with a plan for its realisation. According to this plan God had chosen and set apart one nation among the nations of the world, neigher numerous nor powerful, to be the recipient of his laws, and by observing them to offer a universal example. The Theocracy of Israel would be the persuasive illustration of a World Theocracy: it would be "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" witnessing to all nations. Manifestly, according to this view, the redemption of umnity waited upon the attainment by Israel of a state of perect obedience to the will of God. By so much as Israel failed to meet the Divine requirements, by so much was the peace and well-being of mankind retarded.

The history of Israel, seen in this light, was a prolonged schooling, national disposition to go astray having to be corrected by the infliction of appropriate punishments, conquest and oppression by foreigners, pestilence and famine, exile. Internally much depended on the guidance of rulers, priests and kings. These too were judged by whether they "did right in the sight of the Lord". Their failures called for an additional activity by messengers of God in a succession of prophets.

Eventually, it began to be despaired of that the whole people could be brought to the necessary state of perfection. Hopes were pinned on an elect remnant of faithful souls, by wholse obedience the redemption would be hastened. They would be the élite of the final World Order, entitled to its highest honours by their loyalty and by their sufferings in this present world. The Messianic Hope became concentrated upon the determined efforts of the pious, the Saints, to observe the Law, thus justifying God in acting speedily. If the time was greatly prolonged even the Elect might prove unequal to the strain. It was imperative for the pious themselves to search out what Divine guidance had been given to set a term to their endurance, what signs were to be expected to intimate that the End of the Days had arrived. The last stage of the evolution of the Messianic Hope envisaged the intervention of God by means of the Anointed Ones, ideal figures, a Prophet like Moses, a perfect Priest, a righteous King of the line of David. These would come in the End of the Days as God's highest appointed representatives to transform the whole world scene and usher in the Kingdom of God.

The scheme of the Messianic Hope, as outlined here, must be understood to be composite and not fully comprehensive. Many ingredients went into the framing of the Hope. different aspects were emphasised at different times and by different groups. It was accentuated as certain historical situations arose, aparticularly after the return from the Babylonian Exile, and was not consciously present in the thinking of the Jewish people all the time. Concern with the coming of messianic persons was part of the later expression of the Hope, especially from the second century B.C. onward, though it was nourished on ideas and predictions hundreds of years older, not exluding popular folklore and mythology.

We may select three circumstances as contributing importantly to making the Messianic Hope the powerful influence it became in the first century B.C. one of these was a change in attitude towards the Bible. The Hebrew Bible consists of three divisions; the Law, the Prophets (Joshua to Malchi), and the Writings (beginning withte Psalms and including the book of Daniel). The divisions represent stages of acceptance into canonicity. The Law, as consisting of the five books of Moses, had binding force by the fifth century B.C., or not much later. The Prophets did not acquire their force until about the third century B.C. The Psalms and some other books soon formed the basis of the third division, which was finally settled at the end of the first century A.D. The effects of the recognition of the Law and the Prophets, with the Psalms, as a corpus of sacred Scriptures were far-reaching. It opened the way for a new development, the treatment of these books as the Oracles of God. They became subject to all kinds of interpretation to draw out of them hidden meanings and prognostications.

A second circumstance was the worst calamity which had befallen the Jews since the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah and the loss of the Temple at the beginning of the sixth century B.C. The new calamity ws seen by pious Jews to be impending as a consequence of the attractions of Hellenism, which since the time of Alexander the Great had made increasing inroads into Jewish life and thought, fostering moral laxity and apostasy. The judgement of God must surely fall upon the nation as it had done in the past. It fully confirmed this opinion when the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes (175-162 B.C.) decreed the abolition of the Jewish religion and converted the Temple at Jerusalem into a shrine of Zeus Olympius. Throughout the country there was great persecutionm until resistance was organissed by the sons of the aged priest Mattathias of Modin. One son, Judas Maccabaeus, led the revolt in the name of God, and after a series of remarkable successes cleansed and rededicated the defiled Temple. One of the products of this testing time was the book of Daniel. Its apocalyptic dreams and visions were to exercise a major influence on messianic thinking and prediction.

The third circumstance to which we must draw attention is Jewish sectarianism. The experiences of the nation in the time of Atniochus and his immediate successors had administered a severe shock. The people became much more devout. There was revived in them a sense of destiny, of belonging to God in a special way, which demanded faithfulness to the Law revealed to them through Moses. They saw in the victories of the Maccabees the hand of god, out stretched for their deliverance when they were obedient to his commandments. The Messianic Hope comes out strongly in Daniel, where the people of the Saints of the Most High (likened to a Son of Man compared withe the Beast figures representing the predatory heathen Empires) are entrusted with God's everlasting kingdom, when all rulers will serve and obey him (Jeremiah 31:31-4). It began to matter very much to the more spiritually sensitive that the Divine laws should be observed meticulously, and this inevitably ave rise to sectarianism, to competition in holiness. From this period three ways of life in particular are made known to us, those of the Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes. They were minority movements, numbering only a few thousands in each case, but they were nevertheless extremely influential and gave impetus to the exposition of the Messianic Hope. Unfortunately, as regards the first two, they were also involved in a power-struggle for control of the political affairs of the nation.

From 160 B.C. we are in a new age, an age of extraordinary fervour and religiosity, in which almost every event, political, social and economic, was seized upon, scrutinised and analysed, to discover how and in what way it represented a Signs of the Times and thre light on the approach of the End of the Days. The whole condition of the Jewish people was psychologically abnormal. The strangest tales and imaginings could find ready credence. A new pseudonymous literature came into being, art moral exhortation and part apocalyptic prophecy, a kind of messianic science-fiction. People were on edge, neruotic. There were hot dipsutes, rivalries and recriminations.

The essence of the Messianic Hope, as we have seen, was the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, for which the prerequisite was a righteous Israel, or at least a righteous remnant of Israel. There must be a retun to the relationship with God initiated at the Covenant of Sinai. Of this the prophecies of Jeremiah spoke, when he said:

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a New Covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Juday.... After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my Law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord; for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I wil forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. (Deuteronomy 18:15)

These movements reveal in themselves how deadly serious had become the desire to merit God's intervention. We should be out of tune with the tempr of the time if we did not realise this. It was the study of the manner of the redemptive intervention which now accented the advent of messianic figures. The Sadducees, proving everything from express statements in the Law, looked for the coming of the Prophet like Moses (Jeremiah 33:15-26). The Pharisees and Essenes ranged more widely and brought into prominence the perpetual covenants with Levi and David. The prophecies of Jeremiah had further contained this promise:

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will perform that good thing which I have promised unto the house of Israel and to the house of Judah. In those days, and at that time, will I cause the Branch of Righteousness to grow up unto David; and he shall execute judgement and righteousness in the land. In those days shall Judah be saved, and Jerusalem shall dwell safely.... For thus saith the lord; David shall never want a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel; neither shall the priests the Levites want a man to offer burnt offerings, and to kindle meat offerings, and to do sacrifice continually [3].

For the Essenes the priestly Messiah would be the superior of the Royal Messiah, while for the Pharisees, who became disillusioned with hierarchical government, the Messiah par excellence would be the ideal king of the line of David. But they admitted the priority of a Levitical messianic personality to the extent that the Davidic Messiah would be preceed by a priestly forerunner in the form of the returned Prophet Elijah, whom they held to have been a priest.

For a brief period in the latter part of the second century B.C. the greatest hopes were entertained as a result of the victories of the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus I, under whom the Jews not only regained complete independence, but also a territory larger than any under Jewish rule since the reign of Solomon son of David. Not a few were ready to see in John one who combined all the messianic offices, being Prophet, Priest and King. But John Hyrcanus was no paragon, and his successors proved to be thoroughly unsatisfactory rulers, despotic, ambitious and unjust. Instead of the Kingdom of God there was war in Israel, and the Essenes had justification for their view that Satan had been let loose on the country.

From this time national affairs played an increasing part in the exposition of the Messianic Hope. It acquired a more personal and political colouring. The cry was raised, "Behold, O Lord, and raise up unto them their king, the Son of David, in the time which thou, O god, knowest, that he may reign over Israel thy servant; and gird him with strength that he may break in pieces them that rule unjustly." [4]

The change of emphasis in messianic expectations caused much thought to be given to the conditions which the Scriptures indicated would prevail when the Messiah would be revealed. there would be wars and tumults, public strife and divided families, pestilence and famine, persecution of the saints, a host of tribulations. These would be the Woes of the Last Times, presaging the coming of the Messiah. As Jewish affairs went from bad to worse by so much more were messianic convictions intensified. Those who looked for signs could find them in abundance. In 63 B.C. the Romans were called upon to aid John Hyrcanus II against his ambitious brother Aritobulus. There was internecine conflict, the siege and capture of Jerusalem, with the Roman general Pompey committing the enormity of entering the Holy of Holies in the Temple. The Jews lost their brief independence, and their land became a vassal state of Rome. once more Israel was subject to the heathen, and finally forced to accept at Roman hands a king, who, though he was a professing Jew, was of alien Idumean origin.

The reign of Herod the Great (37-4 B.C.) was from the beginning attended by disorders. Not only had he to preserve his throne by adroit manoeuvre and political intrigue in relation to the struggle then going on in the Roman world, he had to govern a people intensely hostile to his regime, only too willing to see him in a manifestation of diabolical sovereignty.

Herod was an ambitious man and a clever one, brave, with regal bearing and qualities of leadership, but he was impulsive and had neurotic tendencies which the circumstances of his reign so aggravated as to convert hiim into omething like the raging ruthless monster his apocalyptic-minded subjects believed him to be. With real and imagined plots against him he could not feel secure until he had destroyed the Hasmoneans around whom popular support could still gather. First to be got rid of was Antigonus, then the boy Aristobulus whom he had made high priest at the age of sixteen, and then the aged former high priest and king, the inoffensive Hyrcanus II. Later the Hasmonean princess Mariamne whom he had married and genuinely loved, was executed, followed by her mother Alexandra; and to the end of his days the king's fears of conspiracy by famly and friends led him on to the destruction even of his own children.

Successfully switching his allegiance from the vanquished Marc Antony to the victorius Octavian, afterwards the Emperor Augustus, Herod reached a height of political power and prestige. But as the friend of Caesar, devoted to the romans and to the Hellenic way of life, he made himself ever more noxious to his people, who would not be placated even by his grandiose rebuilding of the Temple. They hated and feared him, and were kept from revolt only by the strongly manned fortresses which Herod constructed at strategic points and by his conversion of the country into what we would now call a police state. The pious attributed to the wrath of God the great earthquake in Judea in the seventh year of his reign and the persistent droughts followed by pestilence in the thirteenth year of his reign. Such calamities seemed like the plagues of Egypt, and Herod appeared as another Pharaoh of the Oppression. The signs seemed certainly to confirm the current interpretation of the prophecies that the Last Times had begun.

For the extreme pietists these days were "the Period of the Wrath". Many abandoned the cities and took to the wilderness. Sectarian communities, like that of Qumran by the Dead Sea, flourished as fresh recruits joined them. Such communities had long existed on the eastern fringe of the country; but now they were multiplied and increased in variety, holding themselves to be the faithful elect of the Last Times.

Through the sources of information at our command we obtain a picture of the situation in Palestine towards the close of the first century B.C. which, if it could be put on canvas, would seem to be the work of madman, or of a drug addict. A whole nation was in the grip of delirium. The king on this throne was a sick and gloomy tyrant. His embittered subjects feared and detested him to an extent that was almost maniacal. Religious fanatics fasted and prayed, and preached wrath and judgement. Obsesed with conviction that the Last Times had come, terror and superstition overcame all reason among the people. Self-recrimination accompanied messianic fervour. No wonder that when herod died all hell was let loose.

At first a cry of relief went up throughout the land, and then in a moment all was tumult and disorder. Soldiers went on the rampage. Bands of brigands plundered. In the name of liberty from Rome and the Herodians various leaders set themselves up as king and readily got together a multitude of armed followers. "And thus", writes Josephus, "did a great and wild fury spread itself over the nation, because they had no king to keep the masses in good order; and because those foreigner, who came to reduce the seditious to sobriety, did, on the contrary, set them more in a flame, because of the injuries they offered them, and the avaricious management of their affairs." [5] In punitive actions by the Romans thousands were killed in different parts of the country, and at Jerusalem two thousand were crucified.

HE THAT SHOULD COME

Christianity affirms that Jesus was this Messiah, whose advent fulfilled the prophecies, but singularly fails to concentrate on the implications as the effective means of becoming better acquainted with his character and activities. The Messiaship of Jesus is asserted, and then side-stepped in order to disclose him in a light more congenial to Hellenic rather than Jewish concepts. Quite commonly, for isntance, quite apart from the claim that Jesus was God, the view is expressed that the Jews of the time were expecting a Warrior Messiah, one who would win military victories over the enemies of Israel, and in this way accomplish the deliverance. The Jews rejected Jesus because he was a man of peace, who represented the love of God.

But what authority is there for such a view? [missing - page torn] the contemporary opinion of those who studied the scriptures, certainly Jesus could never have tought of himself as the Messiah. But in fact in references to the Messiah up to the time of Jesus the conception of a Warrier Messiah does not appear. Among te peasantry of Palestine many did entertain such a notion, because conditions were so bad that violence seemed to offer the natural remedy. Living under alien domination, oppressed and ill-used, who is to blame them if they did? To the desperate the niceties of prophecy mattered little. Anyone would serve as Messiah, whether descended from David or not, if he was bold, courageous, a leader of men. There were plenty of people with little to lose, who were ready for any adventure which promised food and drink, and the destruction of the enemies, and who often quite sincerely would believe themselves to be fighting the battles of God. Such people over a thousand years later joined the Crusades. But we must not judge the Messianic Hope by such as they. Those who took things into their own strongly criticised and denounced by the Pharisees, who were the chief spiritual instructors of the masses.

Of the Branch of David for whom pious Jews waited it was written: "With righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked." (Isaiah 9:4) The sharp two-edged sword of the Messiah would be no physical weapon, but justice and righteousness.

Dating from the first century B.C. we have an exposition of the kind of Messiah who was expected, based on the passage from Isaiah just quoted.

"And a righteous king and taught of God is he that reigneth over them; and there shall be no iniquity in his days in their midst, for all shall be holy and their king is the Lord Messiah. For he shall not put his trust in horse and rider and bow, nor shall he multiply unto himself gold and silver for war, nor by ships shall he gather confidence for the day of his battle.... For he shall smite the earth with the word of his mouth for evermore.... He himself is also pure from sin that he may rule a mighty people, and rebuke princes and overthrow sinners by the might of his word. And he shall not faint all his days, because he leaneth upon his God: for God shall cause him to be mighty through the spirit of holiness, and wise through the counsel of understanding, with might and righteousness. [6]

The Son of David who was to come would be holy and just, "the Messiah of righteousness", as he is called in the Dead Sea Scrolls, living in close communion with God and obedient to his will. It is by the word of truth that he will convict and defeat his adversaries.

That the Messiah should have such a charcter fully accords with what he have brought out about the nature of the Messianic Hope. The goal was the universal rule of God acknowledged by all men, when war, strife and wickedness should cease. To reach that goal it was required that Israel should be "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation". How much more must the Messiah, who would come in God's name, be the perfect Israelite? To him would apply the words of the Psalmist: "Thou lovest righteousness, and hatest wickeness: therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.... Then said I, Lo I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me, I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea thy law is within my heart." (Psalms 45:7, 40:7-8)

This was the likeness to which the Messiah was expected to conform, and this is what Christians should have been taught. It was said of him:

And he shall gather together a holy people, whom he shall lead in righteousness: and shall judge the tribes of the people that hath been sactified by the Lord his God. And he shall not suffer iniquity to lodge in their midst; and none that knoweth wickedness shall dwell with him. For he shall take knowledge of them that they be all sons of their God, and shall divide them upon the earth according to their tribes.... He shall judge the nations and the peoples with the wisdom of his righteousness. Selah. [7]

The discovery of the Scrolls has turned scholarly attention again to the ancient references to the various Jewish and related sects and to those relics of them which have survived. Research in this field has no become one of the most promising developments for the illumination of Christian Origins. here we can only touch on some aspects which have a bearing on the Messianic Hope and its interpretation by Jesus, and relate to the region in which he lived.

It used to be customary to think of Jesus as brought up in a Judaism which answered roughly to that of the second century A.D. and derived from that of the Pharisees, and which was much the same all over Palestine. This view is no longer tenable, though on the basis of it we have had a book by Robert Aron, entitled Jesus of Nazareth: The Hidden Years, which while colourful is largely erroneous. Certain scholars long ago apprehended from the rabbinical literature that the people of the north and south did not see eye to eye on many things. it was possible even to detect in Primitive Christianity the clash of Galilean and Jerusalem traditions. But only lately has it become appreciated that northern Palestine down to the time of Jesus had retained many features of the old religion of Israel, when it was separate from Judah, and this not only among the Samaritans.

In Galilee those who were of Hebrew stock could be called Jews in that they served the God of israel, but they differed in many ways from the Judeans. Their Aramean speech was hard to follow because they slurred the gutturals, and in their customs and religious observances they were distinguished in a number of respects from the southerners. The Galileans were proud, independent and somewhat puritanical, more resentful of alien domination and infringements of their libery. they were to e found in the forefront of the resistance movement to the Romans and to the Jewish authorities subservient to them. When the imperial cpitation tax was levied on the Jews in A.D. 6-7, it was the rebel Judas of Galilee who raised again the battle-cry "No Ruler but God". It was with these stubborn, hardy and intensely patriotic folk that Jesus, himself a Galilean, had to deal.

In the spiritual sphere the Pharisees were not nearly so wel entrenched in Galilee as they were in Judea. They had a following in the north because of their piety and becuse they represented themselves as the People's Party, but they had an uphill struggle to contend with the Galilean way of life. The Gospels indicate that to meet the challenge of the teaching of Jesus the local Pharisees found themselves in need of the help of experts from Jerusalem (Mark 3:22, 7:1). That the Galileans and Judeans were still affected by age-old antagonistic feelings is brought out by the Gospel of John. At Jerusalem there was opposition to the idea that the Prophet or the Messiah could possibly come from Galilee, and Jesus was taunted with being a demon-possessed Samaritan (John 7:40-3, 7:51-2, 8:48). On the other hand his Galilean followers remonstrated with him for wanting to return to Judea where "the Jews of late sought to stone thee" (John 11:7-8). We are so familiar with the application of the term Jew to all persons of Jewish faith that we may not realise that in the New Testament the name is sometimes used in the narrower sense to mean Judeans, the inhabitants of Judea, compared with Galileans or Samaritans.

We have also to think of Galilee as part of a region in which sectarian communities flourished. Some of these, like the Rechabites and Kenites, had an ancient tribal history. The area in which they functioned was in the proximity of the Sea of Galilee, in the Decapolis, Gilead and Bashan, the Gaulan and Hauran, and towards Lebanon and Damascus.

The Damascus Document among the Dead Sea Scrolls tells how in the early history of the Community "the Penitents of Israel went forth out of the land of Judea and sojourned in the land of Damascus". There they entered into the New Covenant spoken of by Jeremiah the prophet, undertaking to separate themselves from all unrighteousness, not to rob the poor, the widow and the orphan, to distinguish between clean and unclean, sacred and profane, to keep the Sabbath strictly, also the festivals and the Day of Atonement, to love each one his brother as himself, and to care for the poor, the needy and the stranger. This indication of locality should be taken much more seriously and literally. Those who followed the restored Mosaism did not all gravitate towards Qumran. We have ever reason to believe that many remained in the northern districts we have metnioned and founded settlements there. These "elect of Israel" of the Latter Days would encounter many kindred spirits in northern Palestine among groups carrying on the old ascetic Nazirite way of life, abstaining from animal food and intoxicants. The term Essean-Essene appears to have come from the northern Aramaic word Chasya (Greek Hosios) meaning Saint. it would seem that we have to treat the term as generic, covering a variety of loosely related groups. For the people "the Saints" were the Jewish eclectic bodies, who also bore or were given descriptive names according to their affiliations or characteristics.

There has been emerging ever clearer evidence that in the Galilean region an ancient Israelitish type of religion persisted in the time of jesus, defying Judean efforts to obliterate it. To an extent we have to think of him in teh context of that northern faith which so strongly coloured and influenced those communities of 'the Saints' which were spread across this area, and which gave rise to some expressions of Messianism with which he was acquainted. The Gospels identify him with the small Galilean town of Nazareth; but the name he bears, Jesus the Nazorean, has northern sectarian implications. United with the fact that he was of davidic descent, the prophetic initimations could be seen to be fulfilled in him which spoke of the Messiah as the sprout (nezer) from the root of Jesse. (Isaiah 11:1, Matthew 2:23)

In the north the messianic doctrine of the Righteous King could join hands with the idea of a Suffering Just One and the conception of the Messiah as the ideal Israelite, the Son of Man. In the book of Daniel, as we have seen (above), the Saints who are to possess the kingdom are already likened to a Son of Man. These elect of the Last Times regarded themselves as performing an atoning work by their sufferings. In the Community Rule from qumran it is said of the leaders of the Council:

They shall preserve the Faith in the land with steadfastness and meekness, and shall atone for sin by the practice of justice and by suffering the sorrows of affliction.... And they shall be an agreeable offering, atoning for the land and determining the judgement of wickedness, and there shall be no more iniquity. [8]

We can say, therefore, that at the time when Jesus lived not only was there a widespread expectations that the Messiah would shortly reveal himself, but also that in some of the current thinking about "he that should come" there was nothing inconsistent with the way in which Jesus understood the functions of the Messiah.

In approaching the historical Jesus no question of his deity arises, since before the paganising of Jewishing belief in the development of Christianity no authority identified the Meissiah with the Logos, the eternal Word of God, or conceived the Messiah to be an incarnation of God. The very term, the Anointed one, indicates a call to office. It was not the title of an aspect of the godhead. We do not have to entertain at all the notion that Jesus or any other claimant to be the Messiah in Palestine at this period could suppose hiimself for one moment to be divine. In the early history of Christianity it can be sufficiently seen how the doctrine arose out of the impact of the Gospel on the Gentile world, and in the circumstances was almost inevitable. There are plenty of instances still today of Christianity in many lands being coloured by the polytheistic faiths the Church has conquered and absorbed. Our concern must be to overcome this barrier to our comprehension of Jesus, and reaching back to the core of Christianity to deal only with the requirements of the messiahship as he would have known them.

What, then, of the term Son of God? The Messiah was not directly so-called; yet he could be thought of as having a filial relationship to God wihout any idea among jews that such a description ipmlied deity, and this could happen in so far as the Messiah appeared as the representative Israelite and as the preordained King of Israel. Sonship of God meant something quite different to the Jewish mind than to the Gentile mind.

The right understanding of Jesus commences with the realisation that he identified himself with the fulfilment of the Messianic Hope. Only on this basis do the traditions about im become wholly intelligible. He was no charlatan, wilfully and deliberately misleading his people, well knowing that his posing as the Messiah was fraudulent. There is not the slightest suspicion of pretence on his part. On the contrary, no one could be more sure of his vocation than was Jesus, and not even the threat of imminent death by the horrible torture of crucifixion could make him deny his messiahship.

We have to accept the absolute sincertiy of Jesus. But this does not require us to think of him as omniscient and infallible. it is possible to hold that the Messianic Hope was not only a justifiable but indeed an inspired conception, and yet in many respects the predictions and expectations of the interpreters of the Scriptures could be quite wrong. It is one thing to see visions and dream dereams, and quite another when it is demanded that such visions and dreams be acted out on the plane of history in all their apocalyptic grandeur. How could Jesus soberly imagine that this could and would be accomplished? He could do so because he was a Jew, belonging to a people whose history, as they read it, was a record of miracles wrought on their behalf and who believed in greater miracles to come. But what Jesus anticipated would happen was no more likely to be correct than that of any other interpeter of the prophetic legends. During his lifetime he could to an astonishing extent because of his personal qualities enact and obtain compliance with the messianic scheme as he apprehended it. But he had no control over what lay behond, and in much that he anticipated he was mistaken. The Church had to face before very long the acute problem of the postponement of his expectations, and dealt with it rather lamely and unconvincintly by largely spiritualising them. The dogma of his deity did not allow it to be admitted that he had been in error.

The convictions that Jesus had, as we must appreciate, rested on the oracular treatment of the Old Testament. The Jewish circles in which he moved were accustomed to applying the text of the sacred books not only to the messianic figures, but to other individuals concerned in the Cosmic Drama, and in general to the circumstances of what they believed to be the Last Times. Abundant illustrations of this kind of prophetic exegesis are furnished by the Dead Sea Scrolls and the apocalyptic literature. The Bible had secrets to yield which could be extracted by the right methods for the guidance and instruction of the Elect of the End of the Days.

Christianity got going when the followers of Jesus started to proclaim that in him the Messiah ahd come, and sought to prove this in the only way which would carry conviction, by demonstrating from the Scriptures that all that had befallen him hd been foretold. There is now every reason to believe that the first presentation of the gospel took the form of a compendium of such Biblical Testimonies, a work which in its various recensions underlies the canonical Gospels, and whose influence can be discerned on other parts of the New Testament and on much of the patristic literature. We have evidence that some accounts of the activities of Jesus became coloured an elaborated by prophecies which it was deemed apropriate to identify with them. But the picture we have of the immediate and spontaneous association of prophecies with the experiences of Jesus argues strongly that his disciples were not initiating the process, but continuing one they had acquired from him.

The Gospels insist that Jesus had some foreknowledge of his fate which he had derived from the Scriptures. Significantly, he began to communicate this information only after he had elicited from Peter at Caesarea-Philippi the affirmation that he was the Messiah. "From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day." (Matthew 16:21, 17:22-23, 20:17, 26:2) He declared this on the ground that these things were written concerning the Messiah.

If Jesus exhibited such foreknowledge this would be nothing extraordinary if he had had access to some of the literature of "the Saints", as seems to be indicated by his familiarty with the idea of a Suffering Just One and with a Son of Man christology. Josephus tells us of the Essenes: "There are some among them who profess to foretell the future, being versed from their early years in holy books...and oracular utterances of the prophets." [9] In his writings he gives instances of their powers, and no doubt many in such circles did acquire remarkable insight and capacity for seership as a result of their training.

Believing himself to be the Messiah, it would not be surprising if Jesus should have sought to learn from "the Saints" as much as he could of what was required of him and what would befall him. There is no novelty in the view that he believed it to be incumbent on him to fulfil the messianic predictions. The early Christians delighted to pursue the quest for such fulfilments in his life to the extent that, with the help of the Greek Bible, they could uncomver allusions in the most unlikely texts, and even create incidents to conform with supposed prophetic necessities. Ephraem the Syrian, in the fourth century, declaims: "Come hither thou troop of prophets, ye interpreters of verities. See ye the King hath not turned aside from the path ye trod out for him!" [10] But it is needful to emphasise that neither before nor since Jesus has there been anyone whose experiences from first to last have been so pin-pointed as tallying with what were held to be prophetic intimations concerning the Messiah. The nearest comparison available to us is that of the Teacher of Righteousness of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is only recently, since this discovery, that we have become fully aware that before the time of Jesus the Old Testaments was being interpreted oracularly in the same way as we find in the New Testament.

The logical deducations from this vital piece of information were partly seen even before the evidence derived from the Scrolls. We may take as an example the inquiry conducted by Sir Edwyn Hoskyns and Noel Davey, published in 1931, from which we may quote two brief excerpts. [11]

Jesus acted as He did act and said what He did say because He was consciously fulfilling a necessity imposed upon Him by God through the demands of the Old Testament. He died in Jerusalem, not because the Jews hounded Him thither and did Him to death, but because He was persuaded that, as Messiah, he must journey to Jerusalem in order to be rejected and to die.

The Historian is dealing in the end with an historical Figure fully conscious of a task which had to be done, and fully conscious also that the only future which mattered for men and women depended upon what He said and did, and finally upon His death. This conscious purpose gave a clear unity to His words and actions, so that the actions interpret the words and the words the actions.

What we have adduced leads up to a crucial question. If Jesus believed that a series of experiences would happen to him in accordance with prophetic requirements, dd he, as Hoskyns and Davey suggest, consciously proceed to speak and act in accordance with them? It rather looks as if these scholars realised the implications of what they were saying, and being orthodox Christians they shied away from them, for at the end of their book we read:

Thus far it might be argued that the evidence points to a strange human act of will by which Jesus determined to obey the will of God as He had extracted the knowledge of it from a persistent study of the Old Testament Scriptures.... But this is not the truth. No New testament writer could think of Jesus as the Greeks thought of Prometheus. We must therefore conclude that Jesus Himself did not think of His Life and Death as a human achievement at all. Language descriptive of human heroism is entirely foreign to the New Testament. The Event of the Life and Death of Jesus was not thought of as a human act, but as an act of God wrought out in human flesh and blood, which is a very different matter. [12]

Here could be the explanation of much that is mysterious in the Gospel story. Reading the story in this messianic light could make it possible to know, much more clearly, accurately and decisively, the real Jesus. In making the attempt to do so we shall chiefly be concerned with the way in which he prepared for and carried out what he believed to be his messianic task, emphasising in particular to an extent not previously brought out in the manner in which he sought to attain his objectives so as to compel circumstances to comply with what for him were the imperative requirements of the prophecies.

For the man who embarked on this formidable and fantastic undertaking this was no game he was playing. He was in deadly earnest. As he saw it in his own time and setting, with its strange obsessions, tremendous issues depended on the measure of his faithfulness to unalterable divine decrees. He had need of all those qualities of mind and character which had been promised to the Messiah to enable him to succeed.

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[1] F. Crawford Burkitt, The Gospel History and its Transmission, p. 29

[2] John A.T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, Honest to God

[3] Testament of Simeon, vii. 1-2, Cp. Testament of Naphtali, viii. 2-3; Testament of Joseph, xix. 11

[4] Psalms of Solomon, xvii, 23-4

[5] Josephus, Antiquities XVII. x. 5

[6] Psalms of Solomon, xvii. 35-42

[7] Psalms of Solomon, xvii. 28-31

[8] "The Community Rule", vii. The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, tr. Geza Vermes

[9] Josephus, The Jewish Wars, II. viii. 6

[10] "Rhythm against the Jews", a sermon delivered on Palm Sunday (see B.W.P. Stather Hunt, Primitive Gospel Sources, p. 236)

[11] Sir Edward Hoskyns and Noel Davey, The Riddle of the New Testament, pp. 160 and 250

[12] The Riddle of the New Testament, p. 254