100 Reasons to Believe New Testament History
26. Jesus the Unique Messiah
The Old Testament predicted that a divine Messiah would come and liberate the Jewish people from their political oppressors, setting up an earthly kingdom of peace and prosperity A. What the Jews largely failed to grasp however, was the fact that the Messiah was to come twice: once as the suffering servant who would bear our sins, later as the powerful military deliverer who would liberate his people and sit as king of all the earth B. Many Jews today still await the Messiah’s one and only arrival as a conquering warrior.
How then can we explain the early Church’s assertion (made by exclusively Jewish believers initially) that Jesus was the suffering servant Messiah, who died and rose bodily from the grave? Where did they get these ideas? They could have only come from Christian influence or Jewish influence. We must rule out Christian influence because Christianity was a brand new faith, just then being birthed. Nor can we suppose that Christian doctrine was based on Jewish influence because, as just noted, Jesus was so unlike the conquering Messiah expected by most C. Likewise, his bodily resurrection from the dead was quite unlike the Jewish concept of resurrection. The Jewish concept would have been a spiritual resurrection, revealed in dreams or visions of Jesus in “Abraham’s Bosom” or some such thing D. In other words, we cannot suppose that Jesus was invented in an attempt to fulfill messianic expectations, because He was so utterly different than those expectations!
The best explanation therefore, for the New Testament declarations about Jesus’ ministry, doctrine, and resurrection, is that they reflect accurate history.
26. Jesus the Unique Messiah - Notes and References
A. Isaiah chapters 11 and 35, and Zechariah chapter 14 are examples of numerous such prophecies.
B. This fact is missed by many Jewish folks today, but can be seen by comparing Isaiah 11, which states that the Messiah would come and conquer Israel’s enemies in a military campaign, and set up His kingdom on earth, with Daniel 9:26, which states that the Messiah would be killed at his coming. Daniel also says that after the Messiah’s death, Jerusalem and its temple would be destroyed. The only way to interpret these prophecies is to suppose that the Messiah would come twice. Amazingly, 40 years after modern scholarship has placed the death of Jesus, the general Titus led a military campaign into Jerusalem, effectively razing the city, and the temple, to the ground.
C. “Jesus Christ came into the world at a time of religious and philosophical malaise. His own people the Jews, under the heel of Roman domination, were looking for a political Messiah. When Jesus largely avoided the politically loaded term “Messiah” and presented Himself as a spiritual Redeemer (the Son of Man who must suffer and die as the Servant of the Lord before exaltation to dominion), not even his own disciples understood Him. The Jews in general and the Sanhedrin in particular rejected Him for Barabbas, who was a political revolutionary. Thus Jesus died by Roman crucifixion.” Robert H. Gundry, PH.D. “A Survey of the New Testament”, Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1970, p. 383
“Historically it can be proven beyond question that on every important point Jesus’ conception of himself as Messiah differed radically from the conceptions held by all parties among the Jews…the transformation of a human Jesus to a divine Christ was a task of which neither the apostolic company nor Paul was psychologically or ethically capable, even if Jesus had met their stereotyped messianic expectations, which he did not…The single fact that official Jewry crucified Jesus for blasphemy is sufficient ground for rejecting the idea that Jesus fulfilled the messianic dreams of the time.”, John Warwick Montgomery, “History and Christianity”, Downers Grove, Illinois, 1971, pp. 22, 69
“In view of all this [first century antipathy toward the heathen in Palestine], what an almost incredible truth it must have seemed, when the Lord Jesus Christ proclaimed it among Israel as the object of his coming and kingdom, not to make the Gentiles Jews, but of both alike children of one Heavenly Father; not to rivet upon the heathen the yoke of the law, but to deliver from it Jew and Gentile, or rather to fulfill its demands for all! The most unexpected and unprepared for revelation, from the Jewish point of view, was that of the breaking down of the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile, the taking away of the enmity of the law and nailing it to His cross. There was nothing analogous to it; not a hint of it to be found, either in the teaching or the spirit of the times. Quite the opposite. Assuredly, the most unlike thing to Christ were His times.” Alfred Edersheim, Grindfield Lecturer on the Septuagint at Oxford, “Sketches of Jewish Social Life in the Days of Christ”, (Reprint ed., Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdrmans, 1957), pp. 28-29
D. William Lane Craig, Debate with Frank Zindler , “Atheism vs. Christianity: Where does the Evidence Point?”, debate at Willow Creek Community Church, Zondervan Publishing House (Video), 1994.