Shmuel Silberman
INTRODUCTION
In Part I of
this essay we noted that Jesus did not accomplish any of the tasks delineated
in clearly Messianic passages of the Bible. Jesus was never a Davidic king
reigning in a world of:
(a) Universal peace;
(b) Universal knowledge of G-d;
(c) The
(d) The Jewish exiles gathered to the
Missionaries answer that Jesus has done
other Messianic tasks, so he is definitively the one who will do in the
future what is so far undone.
The missionary response tries to turn
failure into virtue. They claim Jesus needed
to die before the above tasks were fulfilled. In other words, dying on the
cross is itself a Messianic task.
The problem, they claim, is that our
definition of Messianic prophecy is too narrow. Missionaries expand Messiah son
of David’s function to include things Jesus is claimed to have done
already:
(a) Appearing during the
(b) Dying a sacrificial death.
Part II of this essay assesses the
validity of these claim. Is there any
Biblical evidence that the Messiah son of David was predicted to live and die
during the