db130/According to JK's generally held view,~~~~~~

THE
IDEA OF
MESSIANIC SUFFERING, DEATH,
AND RESURRECTION CAME ABOUT
ONLY AS AN APOLOGY AFTER
THE FACT OF JESUS' DEATH!

In this view, it is simply a scandal for Christian messianic thought that Jesus was scourged and humiliated as a common rebel, despite the fact that he was the Messiah. In that case, "then why did G d allow His Chosen One, the Messiah, to undergo frightful suffering & even to be crucified the most shameful death of all, according to Cicero 24 and Tacitus 2B and not save him from all these things?

The answer can only be that it was the will of G d and the will of the Messiah himself that he should be scourged, humiliated, and crucified!

But whence came a purpose like this, that would bring about suffering without sin? The answer to the question of Jesus' suffering and death, according to Joseph Klausner (& nearly everyone else), is that the suffering of the a Messiah was vicarious and the death an atoning death ~ in other words, the common Christian theology of the cross.

After the Messiah Jesus' humiliation, suffering and death, according to this view ~ held by many Christian thinkers and scholars as well as Jewish ones ~ the theology of Jesus' redemptive, vicarious suffering was discovered, as it were, in Yeshayahu/Isaiah 53, which was allegedly reinterpreted as referring not to the persecuted People of Israel, but to the suffering Messiah:

YET IT WAS THE WILL OF THE LORD TO CRUSH HIM WITH PAIN. WHEN YOU MAKE HIS LIFE AN OFFERING FOR SIN, HE SHALL SEE HIS OFFSPRING, AND SHALL PROLONG HIS DAYS; THROUGH HIM THE WILL OF THE LORD SHALL PROSPER. OUT OF THIS ANGUISH HE SHALL SEE LIGHT; HE SHALL FIND SATISFACTION THROUGH HIS KNOWLEDGE. THE RIGHTEOUS ONE, MY SERVANT, SHALL MAKE MANY RIGHTEOUS, AND HE SHALL BEAR THEIR INIQUITIES. THEREFORE I WILL ALLOT HIM A PORTION WITH THE GREAT, AND HE SHALL DIVIDE THE SPOIL WITH THE STRONG4; BECAUSE HE POURED OUT HIMSELF TO DEATH, AND WAS NUMBERED WITH THE TRANSGRESSORS; YET HE BORE THE SIN OF MANY, AND MADE INTERCESSION FOR THE TRANSGRESSORS.

If these verses do indeed refer to the Messiah, they clearly predict his suffering and death to atone for the sin of humans, but the Jews allegedly interpreted these verses as referring to the suffering of Israel herself and not the Messiah, who would only triumph. To sum up this generally held view:
THE THEOLOGY OF THE SUFFERING OF THE MESSIAH WAS AN AFTER-THE-FACT APOLOGETIC RESPONSE TO EXPLAIN THE SUFFERING AND IGNOMINY JESUS SUFFERED, SINCE HE WAS DEEMED BY "CHRISTIANS" TO BE THE MESSIAH.

Christianity, on this view, was initiated by the fact of the crucifixion, which is seen as setting into motion the new religion. Moreover, many who hold this view hold also that Yeshayahu/Isaiah 53 was distorted by Christians from its allegedly original meaning, in which it referred to the suffering of the People of Israel, to explain and account for the shocking fact that the Messiah had been crucified.

This commonplace view has to be rejected completely. The notion of the humiliated and suffering Messiah was not at all alien within Judaism before Jesus' advent, and it remained current among Jews well into the future following that ~ indeed, well into the early modern period.

"The expectation of an eschatological suffering savior figure connected with Isaiah 53 cannot therefor be proven to exist with absolute certainty & in a clearly outlined form in pre-Christian Judaism. Nevertheless, a lot of indices that must be taken seriously in texts of different provenance suggest that these types of expectations could ALSO have existed at the margins, next to many others. This would then explain how a suffering and dying Messiah surfaces in various forms with the Tannaim of the second century C.E., and why Isaiah/Yeshayahu 53 is clearly interpreted messianically in the Targum and rabbinic texts"! Some points in this statement require revision, the Targum is more a countered ample than a supporting text, and for the most part this is spot on?!

The fascinating (and or some, no doubt, uncomfortable) fact is that this tradition was well documented by modern Messianic Jews, who are concerned to demonstrate that their belief in Jesus does not make them un-Jewish. Whether or not one accepts their theology, it remains the case that they have a very strong textual base for the view that the suffering Messiah is based in deeply rooted Jewish texts early and late.

Jews, it seems, had no difficulty whatever with understanding a Messiah who would vicariously suffer to redeem the world. Once again, what has been allegedly ascribed to Jesus after the fact is, in fact, a piece of entrenched Messianic Speculation & Expectation that was current before Jesus came into the world at all! That the Messiah would suffer and be humiliated was something Jews learned from close reading of the biblical texts, a close reading in precisely the style of classically rabbinic interpretation that has become known as midrash, the concordance of verses and passages from different places in Scripture to derive new narratives, images, and theological ideas.

Throughout these entries, we have been observing how ideas that have been thought to be the most distinctive innovations of Jesus himself or his followers van be found in the religious literature of the Jews of the time of Jesus or before. This observation takes nothing away from the dignity or majesty of the Christian story, nor is it meant to!

Rather than seeing Christianity as a new invention, seeing it as one of the paths that Judaism took ~ a path as ancient in its sources as the one that rabbinic Jews trod ~ has a majesty of its own. Many Jews were expecting the divine-human Messiah, the Son of Man. Many accepted Jesus as that figure, while others did not. Although there is precious little pre-Christian evidence among Jews for the suffering of the Messiah, there are good reasons to consider this too no stumbling block for the "Jewishness" of the ideas about the Messiah, Jesus as well! Let's make clear we're not claiming that Jesus and his followers contributed nothing new to the story of a suffering and dying Messiah; also I am not, of course, denying them their own religious creativity, but claiming that even this innovation, if indeed they innovated, was entirely within the spirit & hermeneutical method of ancient Judaism, and NOT a scandalous departure from it.