As it turns out, descendants of David were on the throne for a very long time—for some four centuries. But sometimes history gets in the way of expectations, and that happened in 586 BCE. That is when the rising political power of Babylon destroyed the nation of Judea—and its capital city Jerusalem, along with the temple of God originally built by Solomon—and removed the Davidic king from his throne.
Later Jews looking back at this disaster wondered how it could have happened. God had promised that even if David’s “son” should be disobedient, God would still honor him, and there would always be a king from David’s line ruling Israel. But that was no longer the case. Had God gone back on his word? Some Jewish thinkers came to believe that the promise of God was not null and void, but that it was to find fulfillment in some future time. The Davidic king had been temporarily removed from the throne, but God would remember his promise. And so an anointed one was still to come—a future king like David, one of his descendants, who would reestablish the Davidic kingdom and make Israel once more a great and glorious independent state, the envy of all the other nations. This future anointed one—the messiah—would be like his greatest ancestor, a mighty warrior and skilled politician. He would overthrow the oppressors who had taken over the promised land and reestablish both the monarchy and the nation. It would be a glorious time.
It appears that some Jews who had this expectation of the future messiah saw him in political terms: as a great and powerful king who would bring about the restored kingdom through military force, taking up the sword to dispose of his enemies. Other Jews—especially of a more apocalyptic bent—anticipated that this future event would be more miraculous: as an act of God when he personally intervened in the course of history to make Israel once more a kingdom ruled through his messiah. Those who were most avidly apocalyptic believed that this future kingdom would be no ordinary run-of-the-mill political system with all its bureaucracies and corruption, but would in fact be the kingdom of God, a utopian state in which there would be no evil, pain, or suffering of any kind.
Jesus as the Messiah
There is every good reason to think that Jesus’s followers, during his lifetime, believed that he might be this coming anointed one. Two pieces of data must be seen in tandem to recognize their full force. The first is one I have already mentioned, that “Christ” (i.e., anointed one; i.e., messiah) was far and away the most common descriptive title the early Christians used for Jesus, so much so that they often called him Christ rather than Jesus (so that, despite my little joke earlier, it really did begin to function as his name). This is very surprising, given the fact that as far as we can tell, Jesus did nothing during his life to make anyone think that he was this anointed one. That is to say, he did not come on the clouds of heaven to judge the living and the dead; he was not a priest; and he never raised an army and drove the Romans out of the promised land to set up Israel as a sovereign state. So why did his followers so commonly designate him by a title that suggested that he had done one of these things?
This question relates to the second datum. Many Christians today assume that the earliest followers of Jesus concluded that he was the messiah because of his death and resurrection: if Jesus died for sins and was raised from the dead, he must be the messiah. But such thinking is precisely wrong, for reasons that you may already have inferred from what I have said to this point. Ancient Jews had no expectation—zero expectation—that the future messiah would die and rise from the dead. That was not what the messiah was supposed to do. Whatever specific idea any Jew had about the messiah (as cosmic judge, mighty priest, powerful warrior), what they all thought was that he would be a figure of grandeur and power who would be a mighty ruler of Israel. And Jesus was certainly not that. Rather than destroying the enemy, Jesus was destroyed by the enemy—arrested, tortured, and crucified, the most painful and publicly humiliating form of death known to the Romans. Jesus, in short, was just the opposite of what Jews expected a messiah to be.
At a later point, Christians began heated and prolonged arguments with Jews over this issue, with the Christians claiming that in fact the Hebrew Bible predicted that the future messiah would die and be raised from the dead. They pointed to passages in the Bible that talked about one who suffered and was then vindicated, passages such as Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22. Jews, though, had a ready response: these passages are not talking about the messiah. And you can see by reading them for yourself, in fact the word messiah never occurs in them.
Whether or not you choose to understand these passages as referring to the messiah, even though they make no explicit reference to the messiah, is beside my point at this stage. My point here is that no Jew before Christianity was on the scene ever interpreted such passages as referring to the messiah. The messiah was to be a figure of great strength who overwhelmed the enemy and set up God’s kingdom; but Jesus was squashed by the enemy. For most Jews, this was decisive enough. Jesus wasn’t the messiah, more or less by definition.
But this leads now to the problem. If belief that Jesus had died for sins and been raised from the dead would not make any Jew think that he therefore must be the messiah, how do we account for the fact that Christians immediately started proclaiming—not despite his death, but because of his death—that he was the messiah? The only plausible explanation is that they called Jesus this after his death because they were calling him this before his death.
Here is what many scholars take to be the most reasonable scenario. During his life, Jesus raised hopes and expectations that he might be the messiah. His disciples expected great things from him. Possibly he would raise an army. Possibly he would call down the wrath of God on the enemy. But he would do something and would be the future ruler of Israel. The crucifixion completely disconfirmed this idea and showed the disciples just how wrong they were. Jesus was killed by his enemies, so he wasn’t the messiah after all. But then they came to believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead, and this reconfirmed what had earlier been disconfirmed. He really is the messiah. But not in the way we thought!
I will pursue this line of thinking in the next two chapters, as I explore belief in Jesus’s resurrection. At this stage I want simply to make the most basic point. Jesus’s followers must have considered him to be the messiah in some sense before his death, because nothing about his death or resurrection would have made them come up with the idea afterward. The messiah was not supposed to die or rise again.
Jesus’s Messianic Self-Understanding
IN VIEW OF THIS discussion, what can we say about how Jesus most likely understood himself? Did he call himself the messiah? If so, what did he mean by it? And did he call himself God? Here I want to stake out a clear position: messiah, yes; God, no.
I think there are excellent reasons for thinking that Jesus imagined himself as the messiah, in a very specific and particular sense. The messiah was thought to be the future ruler of the people of Israel. But as an apocalypticist, Jesus did not think that the future kingdom was going to be won by a political struggle or a military engagement per se. It was going to be brought by the Son of Man, who came in judgment against everyone and everything opposed to God. Then the kingdom would arrive. And I think Jesus believed he himself would be the king in that kingdom.