Myth of widespread messianic expectations early first C

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MrMacSon
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Re: Myth of widespread messianic expectations early first C

Post by MrMacSon »

John T wrote:
After the revolt*, the Roman empire with the help of Josephus promoted/endorsed the pacifist rabbinic sect over the messianic sect with the goal of convincing the masses that the promise of a conquering Jewish messiah, i.e. star prophecy was misinterpreted.
* After which revolt?
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MrMacSon
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Re: Myth of widespread messianic expectations early first C

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neilgodfrey wrote:
MrMacSon wrote:
  • The bar Kochba revolt is hardly a sign of a sustained interest in the Davidic messiah.
  • That's a significant point. Bar Kochba indicates that a messiah did not have to be literally Davidic at all in the understanding of the day.
  • Cheers. Your point - Bar Kochba indicates that a messiah did not have to be literally Davidic at all - is significant, too.
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Re: Myth of widespread messianic expectations early first C

Post by neilgodfrey »

Of relevance:

Origin of the Myth that the Jews Expected a Messiah

I quoted some passages from Green in my OP but here are a few more extracts taken from the linked blog post. (The reference is

Green, William Scott. 1987. “Introduction: Messiah in Judaism: Rethinking the Question.” In Judaisms and Their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era, edited by Jacob Neusner, William Scott Green and Ernest S. Frerichs, 1-13. Cambridge, Melbourne; Cambridge University Press.)

The Myth’s Origins

So what has led to today’s situation where it is taken for granted that
“In the time of Jesus the Jews were awaiting a Messiah.” (Mowinckel, He That Cometh, p. 3)

“from the first century B.C.E., the Messiah was the central figure in the Jewish myth of the future” (Raphael Patai, The Messiah Texts (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), p. xxvii.

“belief in the Messiah [is one of the four] good gifts which the people of Israel have left as an inheritance to the entire world.” (Klausner, Messianic Idea, p. 13)
Green’s explanation for this misguided state of affairs is that the academic study of “the messiah” derived not from an interest in Judaica but rather from “early Christian word-choice, theology, and apologetics.” First, he points to the problem faced:
Early Christians, and particularly the earliest Christian writers, had to establish a discourse that made Jesus’ career reasonable, his unexpected death believable, and their audacious commitment and new collective life plausible. The New Testament’s gingerly application of multiple titles to Jesus suggests a crisis of classification, the dilemma of a signified without a signifier. The New Testament records various solutions to this problem. Two of them were determinative for the study of the messiah.

(p. 4)
Secondly, the identifies two solutions to the problem in particular.

1. They gave Jesus a “surname” Christ and this term (=Messiah) acquired a supreme significance. Imagine if they had chosen to name Jesus as Jesus Lord or Jesus Rabbi or Jesus Son of Man instead of Jesus Christ.
2. The New Testament authors turned the Hebrew Scriptures into the foreshadowing of Jesus Christ‘s career, suffering, death. The promise-fulfillment motif was introduced. Genealogies rooting him to the same scriptures were also introduced.
The result:
By naming Jesus christos and depicting him as foretold and expected – “not something brand-new, but something newly restored and fulfilled”21 – early Christian writers . . . situated the messiah’s origin not in the present but in Israelite antiquity and thus established the Hebrew scriptures as a sequence of auguries. Reading scripture became, and to a large extent has remained, an exercise in deciphering and tracing a linear progression of portents. In Gerhard Von Rad’s words,

“The Old Testament can only be read as a book of ever increasing anticipation.”22

Or, as Joachim Becker puts it,

“the Old Testament itself and even the history that lies behind it possess a unique messianic luminosity.”23

. . . [T]he messiah was rooted in Israel’s past, and his appearance could be tracked and plotted, perhaps even calculated, through time. On the model provided by Matthew and Luke, the messiah emerges not as an abrupt response to a contemporary crisis, but as the ultimate fulfillment of centuries of accumulated hope and intensifying expectation. He is a constant desideratum, an inevitability, an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary figure. In a word, the messiah is the culmination and completion of an ancient Israelite tradition.

(pp. 5-6)
And our cultural heritage has bequeathed to us this traditional Christian way of reading the Jewish Scriptures and the way we understands early “Judaism” itself.

So Christian ideology or doctrine has subliminally governed the way we have read the Jewish writings. We have continued to read messianic promises, expectations, hopes, into them.
In the remainder of the blog post I have outlined Green's discussions of

  • How Scholarship Sustains the Myth
[/b]

and the problem of

  • Both Christian and Jewish Bias.
[/b]
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MrMacSon
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Re: Myth of widespread messianic expectations early first C

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neilgodfrey wrote:
John T wrote: Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea from A.D. 26-36, was ever on guard and had license to squash any Jew that had grandiose visions of being the greatly anticipated conquering messiah over the kittims, i.e. Roman Empire.
No doubt the Roman governor's job was to be alert to potential rebellion, but what evidence is there that Pilate or Rome was conscious of "messianic" upstarts as such? None that I know of. Sure there were the usual bandits and prophetic figures, but do you have any evidence that there was any preoccupation with a threat of "messianic" pretenders?
  • Moreover, is there any evidence that Pilate or Rome were looking for "messianic" upstarts as such?

    eta: I guess my question's the same as 'do you have any evidence that there was any preoccupation with a threat of "messianic" pretenders?'
Last edited by MrMacSon on Fri Feb 03, 2017 6:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Myth of widespread messianic expectations early first C

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MrMacSon wrote:
  • Moreover, is there any evidence that Pilate or Rome were looking for "messianic" upstarts as such?
Of course not.

The model of messianic expectations has been repeated so often that many simply assume it as a given, an indisputable fact. The model is imagined to lie behind everything else one reads. But it is just a model or hypothesis, an assumption.
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MrMacSon
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Re: Myth of widespread messianic expectations early first C

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neilgodfrey wrote:
MrMacSon wrote:
  • Moreover, is there any evidence that Pilate or Rome were looking for "messianic" upstarts as such?
  • Of course not. The model of messianic expectations has been repeated so often that many simply assume it as a given, an indisputable fact.

    The model is imagined to lie behind everything else one reads. But it is just a model or hypothesis, an assumption.
    • It's a proposition; an unsubstantiated proposition.
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Re: Myth of widespread messianic expectations early first C

Post by John2 »

Neil wrote:
Daniel 9:24-26, the source of supposed interest in messianic time-tables, is absent from Qumran and the Gospels.
Mk. 13:14/Mt. 24:15 at least refer to the abomination of the desolation, which is mentioned in Dan. 9:27, and Daniel 9:24-26 is commonly applied to Jesus outside of the NT.

And Collins notes regarding 11QMelchizedek that:
The citation [of Daniel] in 11QMelchizedek is more intriguing. It is introduced as a secondary quotation to clarify the "messenger" ... who is mentioned in Isa 52:7: "And the messenger i the anointed of the spir[it] as Dan[iel] said [..." (11QMelch col. 2:18). The (partial) restoration of the name Daniel is not in doubt, but it is unfortunate that the actual citation is not preserved. There are two verses in Daniel that mention a [messiah]: Dan. 9:25 refers to the coming of an "anointed prince" ... The following verse refers to another "anointed one" ... Most commentators restore Dan. 9:25 to 11QMelchizedek. An exception is Michael Wise, who opts for Dan. 9:26.

https://books.google.com/books?id=SSDEB ... EL&f=false


Off the top of my head, there must be at least a dozen OT verses about the Messiah that are interpreted in the DSS, many of which are applied to Jesus in the NT.

For examples, both 4Q174 and Hebrews (1:5 and 5:5) cite 2 Sam. 7:14:

[And] YHWH de[clares] to you that he will build you a house. I will raise up your seed after you and establish the throne of his kingdom [for ev]er. I will be a father to him and he will be a son to me. This [refers to the] Branch of David, who will arise with the Interpreter of the law who [will rise up] in Zi[on in] the [l]ast days, as it is written: I will raise up the hut of David which has fallen. This (refers to) the hut of David which has fall[en, w]hich he will raise up to save Israel.

https://books.google.com/books?id=6RfYx ... ez&f=false


Acts 15:15-18 also cites this fallen tent of David verse.

And Milgrom notes that:

Paleographically, the manuscript of 4Q174 is dated early in the first century C.E.

https://books.google.com/books?id=ROama ... ry&f=false


Though spin has said regarding this that, "Palaeography only tells you when a text was copied in relation to other works," 4Q174 was at least being copied in the first century CE, according to the paleographic dating.

And 4QTestimonia cites Dt. 18:18-19 and the star prophecy from Numbers, both of which are applied to Jesus in the NT or by Christians (e.g., Acts 3:22).

Vanderkam notes that:

The first three paragraphs are united around the theme of future leaders: the prophet like Moses, a star who rises from Israel (the Davidic messiah apparently), and the priests (one like Levi, but his descendants as well).

https://books.google.com/books?id=i2i5h ... ah&f=false


So in my view the DSS are as messianic as the NT.
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MrMacSon
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Re: Myth of widespread messianic expectations early first C

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John2 wrote: Neil wrote:
Daniel 9:24-26, the source of supposed interest in messianic time-tables, is absent from Qumran and the Gospels.
Mk. 13:14/Mt. 24:15 at least refer to the abomination of the desolation, which is mentioned in Dan. 9:27, and Daniel 9:24-26 is commonly applied to Jesus outside of the NT.
  • Can you elaborate on what you mean by "Daniel 9:24-26 is commonly applied to Jesus outside of the NT"?
John2 wrote: Off the top of my head, there must be at least a dozen OT verses about the Messiah that are interpreted in the DSS, many of which are applied to Jesus in the NT1.

For examples, both 4Q174 and Hebrews (1:5 and 5:5) cite 2 Sam. 7:14:
[And] YHWH de[clares] to you that he will build you a house. I will raise up your seed after you and establish the throne of his kingdom [for ev]er. I will be a father to him and he will be a son to me. This [refers to the] Branch of David, who will arise with the Interpreter of the law who [will rise up] in Zi[on in] the [l]ast days, as it is written: I will raise up the hut of David which has fallen. This (refers to) the hut of David which has fall[en, w]hich he will raise up to save Israel.

https://books.google.com/books?id=6RfYx ... ez&f=false
Acts 15:15-18 also cites this fallen tent of David verse.
  • < . . snip . . >
And 4QTestimonia cites Dt. 18:18-19 and the star prophecy from Numbers, both of which are applied to Jesus in the NT or by Christians (e.g., Acts 3:22).
  • 1 As Haggadah'?
John2 wrote: So in my view the DSS are as messianic as the NT.
  • But the NT are mid-1st C at the earliest, and possibly later.
.
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Re: Myth of widespread messianic expectations early first C

Post by John2 »

MrMacson wrote:
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "Daniel 9:24-26 is commonly applied to Jesus outside of the NT"?
Stuff like this, for example:

http://www.bible.ca/H-70-weeks-daniel.htm
But the NT are mid-1st C at the earliest, and possibly later.
Not sure what you mean, but I think some of the epistles are mid-first century CE and the rest of the NT is late first century to early second century CE. To rephrase my statement you are responding to though, I see the DSS as being as interested in the Messiah as the NT.
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Re: Myth of widespread messianic expectations early first C

Post by MrMacSon »

John2 wrote:MrMacson wrote:
But the NT are mid-1st C at the earliest, and possibly later.
Not sure what you mean, but I think some of the epistles are mid-first century CE; and the rest of the NT is late first century to early second century CE.
I think the epistles are 2nd century; as with the other books of the NT, including the Gospels (but the stories are mostly set in the 1st C).

John2 wrote:
  • ... I see the DSS as being as interested in the Messiah as the NT.
Sure. This thread is about widespread/popular expectations - in the early years of the first century, let's say up to around year 30 CE - of the appearance of a messiah figure (to liberate Judea from Rome). Can you tie the DSS to widespread/popular expectations of the appearance of a messiah figure in the early years decades of the first century; let's say up to around year 30 CE?
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