Their conceptions of a coming Messiah were so coloured by their awareness of the failure of the two great wars that we cannot expect much early historical material to have survived unscathed.80 So, despite the confident pronouncements of many generations, both Christian and Jewish, we must conclude initially that we cannot say what, if anything, the average Jew-in-the-market-place believed about a coming Messiah. In the surviving literature, ‘when an individual Messiah is envisaged, his role and character remain vague and undefined’.81
