This famous—some might say, notorious—line from the 1979 film Monty Python's Life of Brian was spoken by Brian's mother, Mandy Cohen, played by Terry Jones. It provoked outrage among many Christians at the time, many or most of whom had not actually seen the film, but that was no impediment to their negative response.
The story is that Brian has unintentionally acquired a following of people who are convinced he’s the Messiah. Brian has done nothing to encourage that—indeed, he repeatedly insists that he isn’t—but his followers interpret virtually everything that he says or does as further evidence that he is! Which prompts his mum’s response.
The offended Christians presumed that Jesus was in the filmmakers’ crosshairs, but that was not the case: Jesus appears as a contemporary of Brian (who is amongst those listening to him). The film’s parody is not of Jesus, but of brainless religious fundamentalism; exemplified in one scene where, when Brian insists that people have to think for themselves, the crowd obediently repeats everything he says (demonstrating precisely the opposite!).
None of that has much to do with the subject of this blog—which is Jesus as the Messiah—but it was the first thing that came into my head as I sat down to write. Perhaps that’s because the identity of the Messiah underlies both the film and the blog (says he, striving for some valid connection).
There’s no question that the Gospel writers identified Jesus as the Messiah. The very first verse in the New Testament says “This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah…” In the NIV, Matthew mentions the word four times in his first chapter. Though first-century Jewish people in general failed to see that (for reasons we’ll come on to), it’s a crucial claim in Christianity.
Every Christmas, church services read Bible passages that announce it: “This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about…” (Matthew 1:18). Numerous carols and contemporary worship songs celebrate it (especially when the synonymous “Christ” is included in the count—Messiah being from the Hebrew/Aramaic, and Christ from the Greek, the language of the New Testament, but both meaning the same thing; Christ was not Jesus’ surname). It’s fair to say that Jesus being our Messiah is a taken-for-granted truth. And yet—for most of us—he really isn’t.
I don’t mean “he isn’t the Messiah” in a Life of Brian sense. I mean that the “long-awaited Saviour” of whom Christians sing and preach was long awaited by the Jewish people. Not by gentiles (which I’m assuming most readers of this blog are). To use the Apostle Paul's olive tree analogy, gentiles have been grafted (unnaturally, says Paul!) on to the Jewish tree. Yet, to hear most gentile Christians speak, you'd think it was the other way round: Jews are invited to be grafted on to God's tree, provided they accept the Christian Jesus on our terms! We’ve effectively made Jewish people outsiders to their own story.
Now I don’t want to get sidetracked into questions about the validity of Jewish faith that does not expressly incorporate belief in Jesus as the Messiah. That’s a far too complex subject for a sidebar in passing. My simple point is that the overwhelming emphasis of the Gospels that tell the story of Jesus is focused on him being the Jewish Messiah. Put differently, there was no gentile Messiah awaited by gentile believers (it’s both a category error and an anachronism to think otherwise).
During the first and second centuries, what eventually became Christianity was still understood as a stream within Judaism (and some scholars say that remained the case for considerably longer). It would be more accurate historically to speak of there being multiple Judaisms (plural) during this time, given that there was no magisterium (no pope or the like) to pronounce on what was and was not “authentic” orthodox Judaism.
This may seem a strange concept to us today, especially in evangelicalism, which is so focused on “correct beliefs” (albeit that evangelicalism itself has no such person or body). “Christians” as we now call them were, in the first instance, those faithful Jewish believers who recognised Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. The so-called “parting of the ways” between what became Christianity and what became Judaism occurred gradually during the period between the second and fourth centuries.
Only when we realise this can we read the New Testament with its writers, recognising the issues and concerns that shaped what they wrote. Without that awareness, we're highly likely to misunderstand what they're saying.
The underlying theological issue in both the background and the foreground of Galatians is a classic example. If you read Galatians without awareness of the ‘New Perspective on Paul’ (which is really a new scholarly perspective on first-century Judaism) then I guarantee you will miss it (and misread what the letter is saying, and about what). A while ago I wrote a blog on that called “Re-reading Galatians” if you’re interested (just use the search facility on the blog section of my website).
Tragic though it is from a Christian perspective that the majority of the Jewish people at the time (and since) failed to recognise Jesus of Nazareth as the long-awaited Jewish Messiah, an equal or greater tragedy has been the theological anti-Judaism that, over the centuries, elements of Christianity have built upon that: crudely, that “the Jews rejected and killed Jesus,” and the terrible repercussions that statement has led to.
The Reformers made a flawed assumption about Paul's conflict with some of his first-century Jewish contemporaries (the so-called “Judaizers”—a word you’ll sometimes hear preachers use, but one that we do not find in the New Testament). They assumed that it was all about “works-righteousness”: the belief that good works get you to heaven (which no faithful Jew ever believed, then or since). They also assumed that Paul's situation directly corresponded to Luther and Calvin's conflict with sixteenth-century Catholicism. That interpretation has helped provide a perceived theological justification for all kinds of anti-Jewish persecution, most tragically of all, of course, in the Shoah (Holocaust).
Why, then, did most faithful first-century Jews fail to recognise Jesus as their Messiah? The word Messiah simply means an “anointed one” (it comes from the Hebrew verb māšaḥ, meaning “to anoint,” associated with appointing kings, priests, and occasionally, prophets). Out of interest, the Greek equivalent is Christos, from chriō, which also means “to anoint.” The Hebrew Scriptures don't offer a single, clear definition of what the Messiah's role would involve, what kind of person he would be, or when he might appear. So it's hardly surprising that there were different expectations of the Messiah at the time of Jesus. Different “pictures” were to be found—essentially, a liberating “conquering hero” figure and an Isaianic “suffering servant” figure that Christians subsequently recognised in Jesus. Chalk and cheese!
That time period is, of course, significant in terms of setting expectations. The land of Israel was under Roman occupation—part of the Roman Empire. For God’s people to be under pagan rule in the promised land was anathema to faithful Jews; how were they to read what was happening? For some Jewish religious leaders, it was self-evidently God’s judgement on the sinfulness of the ordinary people. The solution—that would also bring the Messiah—was repentance and holiness. Hence a principal cause of Jesus’ clashes with religious leaders (often characterised as “the Pharisees”): their excessive religious zeal was insufficiently empathetic with the struggles of the ordinary (poor) people. They were blaming and judging those whom God loved.
Given that context, it’s hardly surprising that a Messiah who was a liberating warrior king (modelled on the legendary King David of old—a “Son of David”) was the messianic figure they liked the sound of best. The idea of a “suffering servant” kind of Messiah was, to state the obvious, far less appealing. They were suffering enough already; they didn’t need a suffering Messiah to come and suffer with them.
It's really us gentiles who are the “very naughty boys” for speaking and singing of Jesus as “our” Messiah! Though, of course, the new covenant that Jesus inaugurated would very soon embrace gentiles as well. But their inclusion—that the Holy Spirit had clearly initiated (a key point)—was the cause of considerable confusion and controversy among the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus: where, if at all, did some or all of Torah fit?
Image: Mandy addressing the crowd, Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), © Python (Monty) Pictures Ltd.