A Common Jewish Hope?
My concern in this book, however, is primarily with Jewish messianism, both as an interesting phenomenon in the history of religion in its own right and as the context in which the earliest acclamation of Jesus as messiah must be understood. Jewish messianism, too, has been a subject of controversy in recent years.
The traditional assumption, at least in Christian circles, has been that messianic expectation was ubiquitous and had a consistent form. Consequently, the question of whether Jesus was the messiah admitted of a clearcut answer.
There has been a growing recognition in recent years that this view of the matter is heavily influenced by Christian theology. The Gospels portrayed Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. Those who did not perceive the correspondences were "foolish and slow of heart" (Luke 24:25). Traditional Christianity construed Judaism as a religion in waiting, and this construing of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity has had long-lasting repercussions in Christian scholarship. Its influence can still be seen in major scholarly, historical works in this century.
The classic scholarly view of these matters is presented in the handbooks of Emil Schurer and George Foot Moore. Both
Schurer and Moore proceeded on the assumption that there was a uniform system of messianic expectation in ancient Judaism.
This approach is still in evidence in the revised edition of
Schurer's classic, which provides "a systematic outline of messianism." The system, however, is i
nevitably constructed from late sources.
Moore's discussion is primarily a description of the rabbinic sources. The account in the revised Schurer is "based on all the intertestamental sources, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, but presented according to the pattern emerging from the apocalypses of Baruch and Ezra since it is in these two late compositions that eschatological expectation is most fully developed."
The apocalypses in question,
4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, were written at the end of the first century CE. It is obviously problematic to infer from them the pattern of messianic belief throughout the so-called intertestamental period. Yet the sources available to (the original) Schurer and Moore included little other evidence of messianism in this period.
Only two other documents in the Jewish Pseudepigrapha refer to a messiah. One, the
Psalms of Solomon, written after Pompey's conquest of Jerusalem in 63 BCE, resembles 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch insofar as it speaks of a royal, Davidic, messiah. The other, the
Similitudes of Enoch, is very different, and only uses the term "messiah" incidentally to refer to a preexistent, heavenly figure who is primarily patterned on the "one like a son of man" in Daniel 7.
In recent years there has been a sweeping reaction against the kind of synthesis presented by Schurer and Moore.
- James Charlesworth reports that "No member of the Princeton Symposium on the Messiah holds that a critical historian can refer to a common Jewish messianic hope during the time of Jesus. . . ."
- J. D. G. Dunn discerns "four pillars of Second Temple Judaism," monotheism, election, covenant, and land. Future hope does not rank with the pillars, much less messianism.
- E. P. Sanders provides an outline of the future hopes of "common Judaism," but he emphasizes that "the expectation of a messiah was not the rule."
- Burton Mack warns that it is wrong "to think of Judaism in general as determined by messianism, the desire for a king."
Even the editors of a volume on messiahs find "powerful reasons to ditch" the established consensus, and emphasize instead the diversity of "Judaisms and their Messiahs." The distinguished German scholar
Johann Maier goes so far as to ban the words "messiah," "messianic" etc. from the discussion of the Scrolls, on the grounds that they entail a
projection of Christian interests onto the material. He would speak instead of "anointed" figures.
Several factors have contributed to this rather dramatic shift in the assessment of Jewish messianism around the turn of the era. Jews and Christians alike have been sensitized to the theological distortions of past generations. Liberal Christians are eager to avoid anything that might smack of supersessionism. Moreover, messianism, and eschatology in general, have become something of an embarrassment in modern culture. They conjure up images of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, or, on a more respectable level, the Lubavitcher Rebbe and his followers. But there are also serious scholarly reasons for the shift. Our documentation for Judaism around the turn of the era is spotty, and explicit documentation of messianic expectation is relatively rare.
Nonetheless, there are reasons to believe that the pendulum of scholarly opinion has swung too far.