My own view is that the scholars here are wrong, misled by a generation that sought to strip Christianity of all things Jewish, and that the early Christians retained the messianic idea in a modified but still quite recognizable form.86 After all, even Justin Martyr, in the middle of the second century, regarded it as important that Jesus should have been the true Jewish Messiah. But even if these scholars were right—indeed, especially if they were right, and if Christianity did officially give up Messianism as such—then the persistence of messianic themes throughout most of the New Testament
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