The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World

by Bart D. Ehrman

To make sense of early Jewish outrage over claims concerning the messiahship of Jesus, we need to cut through many centuries of Christian thinking, mountains of subsequent Christian theological speculation, and masses of Christian “common sense” about how Jesus came as the fulfillment of Scripture. Many Christians today have serious difficulty understanding how Jews in antiquity and throughout history, down till today, have rejected the claim that Jesus was the messiah. In this traditional Christian view it is very simple and clear-cut: the Jewish Scriptures themselves predicted the messiah would be born of a virgin in Bethlehem, that he would be a great healer and teacher, and that he would suffer an excruciating death for the sins of others and then be raised from the dead. All that is in the Jews’ own Bible. Why can’t they see that? Can’t they read? Not all Christians have thought this way, of course. Those who have done so have been trained to read the Old Testament in certain ways, to see references to a future messiah where Jews themselves have never detected any messianic prophecies.

Despite their differences, all these expectations of the coming messiah had one thing in common: he was to be a figure of grandeur and power who would overthrow the enemies of Israel with a show of force and rule the people of God with a powerful presence as a sovereign state in the Promised Land. And who was Jesus? He was a crucified criminal. He appeared in public as an insignificant and relatively unknown apocalyptic preacher from a rural part of the northern hinterlands. At the end of his life he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with a handful of followers. While there, he ended up on the wrong side of the law and was unceremoniously tried, convicted, and tortured to death on criminal charges. That was the messiah? That was just the opposite of the messiah.