Jewish Views of the Messiah 1

Readers of the New Testament often assume that everyone in Jesus' day expected a Messiah to come. And many assume that all Jews had the same basic view of what that Messiah would be like. For example, Matthew 2 presents us with religious leaders who know that the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem. Given the barrage of prophetic verses that the New Testament sees fulfilled in Jesus, it is easy to get the impression that all the Jews in Palestine knew--or at least should have known--exactly what their Messiah was going to be like. And of course, Christians believe that Messiah should have looked just like Jesus.

But here we must remember that the New Testament primarily gives us the early Christian perspective on what the true Messiah should look like. The ideas that the Messiah would come from heaven (John) or that the Messiah would suffer for sins (Mark, Paul) were almost completely unique perspectives in Jesus' day. Indeed, Paul presents the idea of a suffering Messiah as a stumblingblock to the Jews, who were scarcely expecting such a Messiah (1 Cor. 1:23; 2:8).

And we must also remember that the New Testament authors largely interpreted the Jewish Bible (or Old Testament, for Christians) "spiritually." That is, they did not read the words of the Bible with a view to what those words meant originally when they were first written. They read them with a view to what God might be saying to them through through those words in their "true" meaning. Most of the words that Matthew finds fulfilled in the life of Jesus would not have meant the same things to his contemporaries. Most of them are interpretations unique to Matthew among ancient Jewish writers.

The Jewish Bible/Old Testament
In context, the most relevant passages of the Jewish Bible/OT on this topic are those that relate to Israel having a king. The word "Messiah" is the English version of meshiach, the Hebrew word for "anointed." A king is thus an "anointed one," anointed with oil when he becomes king and thus considered approved and empowered by God to rule. The Greek word for Messiah is christos. So "Christ" means the same thing as "Messiah." When Christians refer to "Jesus Christ," they are calling Jesus the Messiah, the anointed king.

Several passages in the Jewish Bible/OT clearly hold that a descendant of King David would continue to rule forever. To be sure, comments like these probably did not have 1000's of years in the future in mind when they were first written. But they are a clear basis for why some Jews at the time of Christ expected God eventually to send them a king. For example, Psalm89:29 says "I will establish his [David's] line forever, and his throne as long as the heavens endure." Whenever the Jews did not perceive themselves to be in power--or did not think the correct individuals were in power--such a time was ripe for some group to look to a coming "anointed one" to restore Israel's national fortunes.

But perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Jews did not always expect such a political figure to arise. And at times groups might vary in what types of individuals they expected God to anoint. Thus the community at the Dead Sea expected God not only to anoint a king, but a true priest as well. The majority of scholars on this topic currently agree that there was no single expectation of what a Messiah might be at the time of Christ. But when Jews did expect one, the dominant picture was that of a human, earthly king who would restore Israel as a nation. Such expectations flow neatly from those parts of the Bible that expect David's descendants to rule Israel forever.