Chapter 227 of 404

Early Belief in Jesus as Messiah

Some doubt that Jesus’ earliest followers considered him a Messiah, but this skepticism rejects all the explicit testimony that remains extant in favor of a hypothesis argued virtually from silence.⁶ Writing in a Diaspora setting where “anointed one” was unintelligible as a title, Paul, our earliest extant NT writer, sometimes uses “Christ” virtually as Jesus’ surname; the idea of Jesus as “Messiah” must certainly predate Paul. Paul’s language may suggest that the entire Judean Jesus movement that he knew considered Jesus as “Christ” (Gal 1:22); certainly he shows no awareness of, or need to refute, Jesus-followers who deny Jesus’ Messiahship (not even Paul’s so-called “Judaizing” opponents do this).⁷ The closest explicit evidence we have in the first century for a nonmessianic interpretation of Jesus belongs to Josephus (Ant. 18.63), whom no one claims as Jesus’ follower.

Other respected scholars have even suggested that Jesus himself drew on biblical passages that lent themselves to a messianic interpretation.⁸ Such arguments remain contested, but one observation seems difficult to evade. Given the environment in which Jesus ministered, he had to know that his teachings about the kingdom and some of his actions would lead to speculation about his messianic character.⁹ It would not have been possible for him to be ignorant of the frequent connection between Jewish eschatology and biblical expectations of an end-time Davidic ruler and that his growing following and invitations to follow could not but have stirred speculations.¹⁰ In keeping with this observation, we should note the observation of E. P. Sanders and others that the earliest strands of the Jesus tradition indicate that Jesus taught that his disciples would have a role in the Messianic kingdom, a promise that would naturally imply that he attributed to himself the role of God’s viceroy.¹¹

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