To call Jesus the messiah was for most Jews completely ludicrous. Jesus was not the powerful leader of the Jews. He was a weak and powerless nobody—executed in the most humiliating and painful way devised by the Romans, the ones with the real power. Christians, however, insisted that Jesus was the messiah, that his death was not a miscarriage of justice or an unforeseen event, but an act of God, by which he brought salvation to the world.
