PHILIP JENKINS AT THE ANXIOUS BENCH:
Messiahs by the Sackful.
Some timely thoughts for Holy Week!
In Jesus Christ Superstar, a mocking Pilate complains that “You Jews produce messiahs by the sackful!” Most popular histories take it for granted that Jewish thought was dominated by the eager expectation of a messiah, who would be an individual man, and the main debate concerned the nature of that role. Would he be a mighty conqueror, a new David? In his weakness and apparent worldly failure, Jesus, we are told, represented a truly odd candidate for messiahship.
In fact, the story is much more complex than this account would suggest. Yes, candidates for messiahship were much in evidence during and after Jesus’s time, culminating in the nationalist leader Simon Bar-Kokhba in the 130s AD. But we should stress how new this focus was historically. As in so much else, the two or three centuries before Jesus’s time witnessed rapid and radical development in the concept of the messiah, an idea far more nuanced than our modern stereotype would suggest.
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And also:
Making the Messiah.
The figure of the Messiah has been critical to both Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. Christians, by definition, are followers of the Messiah. In tracing the origin of this idea, though, we must draw a distinction between eschatological hopes of a glorious coming age, and the individual figure of the messiah, the Davidic king. In the familiar form of a specific human who would usher in the Last Times, the concept is only really defined during the second century BC. In the decades before Jesus’s birth, the idea was still a work in progress.
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