Who and What is a Messiah?

A Jewish chap named Jacob wrote the following highly irritated comment on John Calvin. “Read,” he suggested “about John Calvin from the Jewish perspective and his assault against the true messiah of Israel Marcus Julius Agrippa.” He ended by with a wonderfully graphic curse.
“May his bones be ground into dust.” See his comment on my previous blog.
When the followers of Yeshua, called Masiah in Hebrew or Moshiach in Aramaic, broke away from mainstream Judaism in the First Century of the Christian Era, they left a lot of angry Jews behind. They also left behind a fair number of folk who claimed to be the actual Jewish Messiah.
Marcus Julius Agrippa, one of two kings of Roman Judea, is one claimant. He lived at or near the time of the first Jewish revolt in AD 70. As a result of that revolt, Herod’s temple was burned down and the land was nearly denuded of trees to crucify the rebels. But the game wasn’t over.
“Another leader who was thought to be the true Messiah was Simon Bar Kokhbah who set up a Jewish State in Judea in AD132. When he wiped out an entire Roman legion, people began to think he might really be the Messiah.
He ordered all the Jewish Christians to leave what became known as Palestine, began minting his own coins, and waited for Roman reaction. It came a year later when a full third of Rome’s legions converged on Judea and flattened the place so thoroughly that Roman troops could pitch their tents on what had once been Jerusalem. It was the worst pounding the city ever took.
After that, until the Muslim incursion, no Jews were permitted to live in Judea. For the next 1300 years, Jerusalem had only a tiny Jewish community who spent much of their time bewailing the several falls of Jerusalem.
There were other Jewish leaders who were thought to be the Messiah by one group in Judaism or another. The Baal Shem Tov (early 1700s), founder of Hasidic Judaism, was thought by some of his followers to be the Messiah.
Many Jews still look for the Messiah. I remember reading that boxcar loads of Orthodox Jews would sing “What shall we do when Messiah comes; we shall make merry when Messiah comes” as their trains drove them into the death camps during World War II.
The chief theological difference between the Jewish belief about their Messiah and the belief of the Jewish—and later Gentile—Christians about their Messiah is that Christians believe their Messiah (Christ, from the Greek) is actually God.
To Jews who stayed behind in the First Century and those who have identified themselves as Jewish ever after, the very notion is absurd. It is a blasphemy. “Hear, oh Israel, the Lord Thy God is One” is bedrock to Jewish faith. It has been ever since the destruction of Jerusalem under the Neo-Babylonians in 586BC.
(Even if some Hebrew scholars insist that the word used for “one” here is actually plural.)
If Calvin’s bones should be ground to dust for suggesting that one or another of these claimants could not be the Messiah, then so should the bones of all orthodox Christians be ground into dust. Possibly my commenter would agree. I don’t know.
Since AD325, the position of all orthodox Christians—Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Coptics, Protestants, Maronites, Baptists and Pentecostals—has been that Christ was “very God of very God” as he was defined by the Council of Nicaea.
The Christian Church did not arrive at this position all at once! In the Fourth Century, about half of all Christians essentially believed what many Jews did during his time—that he might have been a wise Rabbi, a prophet, a miracle worker, but that he was certainly not fully God.
Such heretics were bounced out of the church and most eventually became Muslims three centuries later. In modern times, this belief has resurfaced in the church as the Unitarian denomination. But modern Christianity is founded upon the 1700 year old Nicene Creed which defined his deity.
Codicils of the Creed that are no longer published also did things like order Jewish Christians to stop practicing Jewish rituals, keeping Kosher, or using the Jewish calendar to celebrate “Pascha” (or, in English, Easter). This is why Passover and Easter are no longer in Sync.
Five centuries after Nicaea, the Jewish Christian Church no longer existed. They absorbed into the mainstream Gentile Christian tradition or they returned to Judaism proper. Jews at this point became known as the “Christ Killers” and their lot in Christian lands was not a happy one.
So if my friend, Jacob”, wants to grind someone’s bones into dust for refuting the claims of non-divine Messiahs—or any one of them—he must go much farther back than Calvin (or Luther) or anyone of that era. His problem began with the folk who defined Jesus Christ as God.
That movement began in the First Century of the Christian era. Christ himself said, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father (God). I and the Father are One.” He commanded baptism in the “Name of the Father, the Son (himself), and the Holy Spirit”.
There was argument—among both Jews and Gentiles—that he was not God. The Gnostics saw him as only God. The Arians saw him as only human. There were a hundred shades of opinion in between. Gospels were written that backed any one of these beliefs.
Only after Nicaea the heretical Gospels removed from the canon, keeping only those that acknowledge Jesus as God. These are the people Jacob should be irate with. They are the ones who put an apparently unbridgeable gulf between Christianity and Judaism, between Christianity and Islam, too.
Calvin was merely reiterating a 1200 year old tradition and doctrine.
In short: It required an infinite atonement (punishment, payment) to deliver humankind from the mess we had put ourselves in. Only God could make such an infinite sacrifice. Q.E.D. “Christ must be God. Or else as the Christian Rabbi from Tarsus wrote “we are of all men most miserable.” For a non-divine Messiah, according to St. Paul, could do nothing for us.
There’s your problem, Jacob. Like the orthodox Jews of the First Century—who were perfectly willing to follow a non-divine Messiah, with a human army—you cannot stomach the thought of a Messiah who is God himself. That’s been a Jewish position since Ezekiel.
Work that out for yourself—understand what your real issue is—and you’ll be less likely to rain down curses on any one poor Sixteenth Century preacher.