Prophecies of a Triumphant Messiah — Fulfilled in Jesus

The Jewish Tanakh (Old Testament) describes a triumphant figure that is associated with God’s glory and authority. This mysterious figure is variously named Emmanuel (God-with-us), Stone, Shepherd, Seed, King, Branch/Shoot, and Son of Man. Over the centuries, a range of Jewish commentators have explicitly identified this man as the promised Messiah.

As this series has shown, Jesus’s acts and words in the New Testament associate him with these messianic roles in ways that are far too numerous to be coincidental. As a result, there seem to be only two reasonable conclusions:

• Either the New Testament writers fabricated these details to artificially link Jesus to Jewish teachings about the promised Messiah,

• Or messianic prophesies really did foreshadow Jesus’s work, as he is recorded as claiming: “These are the very Scriptures that testify about me” (John 5:39).

The second scenario implies the existence of a transcendent, omniscient God who can impart information about the future through His prophets. This is not easy to accept, so it seems preferable to simply reject the messianic details in Jesus’s life as creative inventions. However, careful consideration of the following points makes fabrication seem highly improbable.

1. At the turn of the era, there did not exist a single, clear-cut messianic category that Jesus’s followers could have applied to him. Alan Segal, a Jewish scholar of ancient religions, therefore notes that writers of the New Testament did not seem to borrow from a preexisting messianic model in their description of Jesus’s nature and work.[1]

2. No other messianic group claimed that their teacher was the fulfillment of so many ancient prophecies. Why would only Jesus’s followers have done this? In particular, Jesus was the only Jewish teacher who was linked to themes of both kingship and atonement.

3. It would have required an extensive knowledge of Jewish scripture to fabricate Jesus’s connections to messianic prophecies. Some of Jesus’s followers, such as the Pharisee Paul, would have had the necessary education, but their claims resulted in severe persecution by fellow Jews, so it is difficult to understand the motive for concocting such elaborate fictions.

4. In first century Judaism, the Messiah was not expected to die.[2] Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman makes this categorical statement: “In no surviving Jewish text—whether in the Hebrew Bible or later, up to the time of Christianity—is the Messiah said to die and be raised.”[3] Martin Hengel agrees: “In the light of all our present knowledge, the suffering and dying Messiah was not yet a familiar traditional figure in the Judaism of the first century AD.”[4] And despite some sensational claims, there is no evidence of a suffering or dying-rising messiah in the Dead Sea Scrolls.[5] It is therefore difficult to explain why Jesus’s Jewish followers would have falsely portrayed him as the victorious messianic king of prophecy after his humiliating execution.

5. In particular, Jesus’s crucifixion would have placed him under the Old Testament curse on a hanged person (Deut 21:23), which the Apostle Paul admitted was a “stumbling block” to the Jews (1 Cor 1:23; Gal 3:13). As Martin Hengel points out, a crucified son of God would have been an unacceptable contradiction in both Hellenic and Judaic cultures of the time (Crucifixion in the Ancient World, 10).

6. Some of Jesus’s links to prophecy (such as his birth in Bethlehem) would have been easy to add to the tradition at any point. However, Jesus’s fulfillment of scripture reaches far beyond a few isolated details. Accounts of his teaching and work are saturated with references to scripture, and it is highly unlikely that random additions over time could have produced such a consistent and coherent record.

7. Paul’s letters make it clear that apostles such as James and John were alive when Jesus’s followers were proclaiming him as the promised Messiah and Son of God. However, there is no indication that these first apostles contested these astounding claims, which we would expect if the claims were fictions.

8. Significant events in Jesus’s last few years fit in remarkably well with the seven holy feasts of Judaism, in ways that defy coincidence and would have been impossible to fabricate.

The New Testament depiction of Jesus is therefore unique in Jewish writings. Old and New Testament scriptures combine to form a coherent and unified whole in their descriptions of God’s messianic promises and the work of Jesus. It does not seem credible that this could be the result of random fabrication, which suggests that Jesus really was the fulfillment of ancient promises and themes. And there is a certain logic to this: after all, if a Supreme Being created humanity in His own image, would we expect Him to care about His creation or not? Would He be able to communicate with His people in some way or not? Would he want to? Would humanity need some revelation from Him? If the answers to these questions are “Yes,” then it is reasonable to believe that God provided divine revelations to prepare the world for the coming of His Son as part of His plan for the redemption of creation. Old Testament Scripture therefore lends credence to the New Testament report that Jesus claimed to be foreshadowed in the Jewish Scriptures:

“And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, he expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:25–27).

[1]. Alan Segal concludes: “According to rabbinic description, it does not seem necessary to believe that early Christians merely associated Jesus with some pre-existent savior model who came equipped with a fixed title and job description” (Two Powers, x). [2]. Only after the rise of Christianity did rabbinic Judaism develop the concept of Messiah who would reign victoriously and a Messiah who would be slain in battle. Jewish scholar Joseph Klausner has proposed that the expectations of a slain messiah developed partly in response to the death of the messianic Bar Kokhba in AD 135 (Messianic Idea, 496). For the late dating of the dual-messiah concept, see also Mitchell, “Messiah bar Ephraim,” 222 n. 2, and Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus, 54. [3]. Ehrman, Apocalyptic Prophet, 218. [4]. Hengel, Atonement, 40. This is also argued by Charlesworth (“Messianology to Christology,” 8) and Wright (Resurrection, 25). [5]. See VanderKam and Flint, Dead Sea Scrolls, 345. Scroll scholar Geza Vermes makes this comment: “The recently and groundlessly advanced theory that ‘the Prince of the Congregation, Branch of David’ of 4Q285 is a suffering and executed Messiah is contradicted both by the immediate context and the broader exegetical framework” (Dead Sea Scrolls, 12). John Collins agrees: “The more sensational claims about fragments, such as the discovery of a dying messiah in a pre-Christian Jewish text . . . turned out to be short-lived” (Scepter, vi).