David
- I have shown before with references to the OT, where in the OT it was prophesised long before Paul and the gospel writers, that the expected messiah, of whom all the NT bible writers were utterly certain, would be persecuted by his own people who would reject him as their messiah, and perhaps even persecute him unto his death. And in one place in the OT, for which I don’t have the reference, I think there is even prophecy of someone who might be the messiah being “hung on a tree” (which apparently meant a form of “crucifixion”).
I'd be really interested in this citation because I can't think of anywhere in the OT that matches this description. I think you might be interpolating Deuteronomy 21:23 ('Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree'), which is about the law on executions, nothing to do with messiahs, into messianic prophecies. Paul later applies the verse to Jesus (Galatians 3:13), but that is his back-reading.
The NT writers certainly interpreted OT prophecy by applying it to Jesus's life. This leads them at times to inventions (the Flight out of Egypt seems to have been inspired by Hosea 11:1, 'Out of Israel I called my son', cf Mt 2:15). Hosea's verses weren't originally messianic prophecy either. Scholars differ as to what messianic prophecy was in the OT, but none of them think there was such a clear and well-understood prediction of the messiah and his life as you give. You seem mostly to be referencing the Servant Songs from Isaiah, which indeed are interpreted by the NT (and most Christians) as prophecies of Jesus's death. But they are notoriously unclear and scholars are still arguing about who Isaiah originally meant, with (as I understand it, I'm no expert) the majority view being that Isaiah was writing about the nation of Israel/Judah. At the time Judah was in exile but that exile was about to end, and that is the reference of the prophecy.
There were all sorts of messianic ideas floating about in early Judaism, as far as we can tell, and it's not as simple as saying that there were clear OT references as to what the messiah would be or do. Other Jewish sects interpreted different bits of OT as messianic prophecy. That the NT writers later interpreted some prophetic passages as messianic, most of which had not been intended that way by their writers, and applied them to Jesus, does not mean that they were making Jesus up out of whole cloth. More plausibly, they were Jews steeped in their Scriptures and they looked for parallels to insert Jesus into their pre-existing faith. Jesus himself might also have been driven by the idea that he was fulfilling certain OT prophecies, but this is more speculative.
It is also worth remembering that 'prophecy' in Judaism then, as now, had less of the fundamentalist Christian connotation of 'psychic-style prediction of the future' and more of 'speaking truth to power'. Messianic prophecy is about keeping hope alive of a time when God's rule of peace and justice will be perfected on earth, and not so much about precise times and seasons.
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In which respect, when Paul talks of Jesus being crucified, his same letters actually state very clearly that he is obtaining all such Jesus beliefs from what he thought had been written ion the OT, and not from anything that any mortal man had ever told him about Jesus. That’s what his own letters actually say!
No, it isn't. If you're referring to Galatians 1:11-12, he clearly says that he received his Gospel 'not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ' (NRSV). He says nothing about the OT. His reference is to personal communication with the resurrected Christ, which he seems to have sincerely believed to have happened (he speaks of visions and mystical experiences elsewhere, and of course there's the famous 'Damascene experience' attested to in Acts, if you take that as historical). In Galatians he's polemically arguing for his version of the Gospel against that of rival Christian factions, and part of his argument here is to counter the accusation that his authority is less than that of his opponents (such as, at times, Peter and James) who'd known Jesus in the flesh or even been related to him. He begins the letter, 'Paul an apostle—sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead— and all the members of God’s family who are with me... (Gal 1:1-2, NRSV)', which is a pretty pugnacious opening: I don't rely on fleshly authority but on spiritual, and lots of people agree with me. Nothing about the OT there.
So that’s a fairly obvious possibility of where the biblical writers got the idea that Jesus had been betrayed and persecuted by his own Jewish people, even unto his death.
And against that - what evidence is there in any of the biblical writing that any of those authors personally had any knowledge at all of a human Jesus being executed? The answer to that, is that there is absolutely no evidence that any of them personally knew of any such execution. What they knew about was only what they had come to believe as the legend of the long awaited messiah and his demise as foretold in their Old testament … and as I say, their writing even tells you that they are obtaining all those beliefs from what they thought was written centuries before in the OT.
I'm really fighting back the snark here but ... again, this is at the level of 'not even wrong'. There is so much argument and detail about when the early Christians began to worship Jesus as divine and why, which OT texts they applied to him and how they understood those, the role of the Jewish messianic traditions, and so on, in the scholarship, that it's hard to know where to begin answering a question that betrays so much ignorance. As to the means of execution, that Jesus was crucified is attested in some of the earliest Christian literature we have, notably Philippians 2:8, the famous 'Philippian hymn', which many scholars believe to be even older than Paul's letter. He certainly seems to be quoting rather than writing here. See also 1 Corinthians (1:18).
Nowhere is it asserted in the OT that the messiah would be crucified. Also, we know the Romans crucified people, it's hardly a big leap to think this applied to the historical Jesus. And crucifixion was a deep humiliation, particularly for Jews (because of the Deuteronomy passage), so the early Christians, who were Jews, would hardly have made it up if they wanted their leader and messiah to be taken seriously. We have evidence that the Romans and probably the Jews mocked the early Christians for worshipping a crucified messiah. In fact, the earliest crucifix (portraying Jesus) that we have is the Alexamenos Graffito (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexamenos_graffito) which portrays a crucified victim with a donkey's head and the legend, 'Alexamenos worships his God'. A crucified messiah was shocking, not expected, and this is one reason why scholars are practically unanimous that one of the few sure things we can know about the HJ is that he was crucified.
