Questioning the Historicity of Early 1C Popular Messianism
Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2015 4:41 pm
Occasionally when a reference appears here to popular messianic movements in the first half of the first century I have dropped what some seem to think is the equivalent of a flat-earth argument -- that we cannot be sure there was any such popular expectation in the times of Jesus.
I quote here something I read a little while ago that explains where I am coming from. Hopefully some of us will recognize the idea is not so weird as it seems to sound. It's from chapter one of Judaisms and their messiahs at the turn of the Christian era, "Introduction: Messiah in Judaism: Rethinking the Question" by William Scott Green. Bolding is my own:
I quote here something I read a little while ago that explains where I am coming from. Hopefully some of us will recognize the idea is not so weird as it seems to sound. It's from chapter one of Judaisms and their messiahs at the turn of the Christian era, "Introduction: Messiah in Judaism: Rethinking the Question" by William Scott Green. Bolding is my own:
These arguments, which are representative of a type, appear to suggest that the best way to learn about the messiah in ancient Judaism is to study texts in which there is none. . . .
The establishment of future hope as the subject of study has three important consequences. First, it makes it possible to collect an extraordinary number and range of biblical and postbiblical texts under a single "messianic" category and to treat their contents as species of a genus. Almost any textual reference to the future, or to eternity, or to an idealized figure - to say nothing of verses with unclear temporal limits - is an immediate candidate for inclusion. The absence of eschatology or of the title "messiah" is no barrier. With this rubric, Joseph Klausner could begin his history of the messiah idea in Israel not even with David, but with Moses!
Second, the use of future hope as the primary taxon of messianism also permits those varied texts to be arranged chronologically and cast as components of a continuous and unitary tradition. Indeed, the notion that messianic belief or expectation originated in Israel's experience and then developed in Judaism is the cornerstone of nearly every major scholarly treatment of the subject. This supposition has been relentlessly applied to the study of the messiah even when the evidence admittedly fails to support it or even contradicts it. For instance, Hesse concluded his survey of messianic references in biblical and postbiblical writings with the following claim:If, by Hesse's own admission, the evidence is minimal and inconclusive, it is difficult to understand how to know that there "must have been" a messianic movement in Israelite religion and Judaism, much less that later versions of it were the product of "hundreds of years of history."It is very difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct a history of the Messianic movement in Israel and post-exilic Judaism from these scanty passages, many of which cannot be dated with any certainty. There undoubtedly must have been such a movement. This is shown by the examples given and it may also be concluded from the fact that Messianism emerges into the clear light of his- tory in later centuries, not merely as a trend that has just arisen in Judaism, but as a movement with hundreds of years of history behind it.
To violate ordinary scholarly principles of evidence and inference with such forced arguments requires powerful external motivations. It would be disingenuous and unhelpful to pretend that a question as significant and sensitive as the messiah has escaped the vagaries of theological interests, both Christian and Jewish.