Probably the two best books on messianism that I've read (so far) are:
John Collins, The Scepter and the Star
William Horbury, Jewish Messianism and the Cult of Christ
Horbury offers some very good evidence for the Suffering Servant of Isaiah as a "messianic prototype".
1. The figure is interpreted as Messiah in the Isaiah Targum.
2. Justin Martyr gives the text a messianic spin which Trypho purportedly agrees with (Dial. 13.2-9; 18.2-90.1).
3. The Israelite king appears as a suffering servant in Pss. 89 and 39.
4. The "annointed one" is God's servant in Zech. 3.8.
5. The LXX can be read with a messianic interpretation though it does not demand this sense.
6. Mk. 10.45 could be said to combine a martyrdom and messianism.
7. In counter-point the Ethiopian Eunuch of Acts 8 does not know who the Suffering Servant of Isaiah is, thus, the messianic interpretation was hardly uniform and not immediately recognizable to all.
He concludes: "It was perhaps orginally formed on the model fo the suffering king, and a messianic interpretation was probably current in the Second Temple period, but the passage was not then regarded as obviously messianic" (p. 33).
You simply MUST read the Jewish scholar
ReplyDeleteJoseph Klausner, The Messianic Idea in Israel, which treats OT, Pseudepigrapha, and Rabbis.
It is a masterpiece, which saw the significance of, for example, the ingathering of the exiles, long before E. P. Sanders was a twinkle in his daddy's eye! It is also a good antidote to Fitzmyer's messianic minimalism from a man who knows how ancient Jews think.