Jews rejected Jesus. This is a line people have repeated since the early days of Christianity, even though the first Christians were all Jewish, and without Jewish followers there’d be no Christianity. And mind you, regardless of how many Jews accepted Jesus, the line never fails because any Jewish convert isn’t seen as a Jew anymore. That said, since most Jews in Jesus’ day did say no, and most have said it since, I’ll use the standard line to keep things moving, but you already know what it hides.
Today we’re going to ask a lot of questions that I don’t have the answers to. While the piece may sound unfriendly to some people, the sort of questions asked here were continuously asked by the early Church fathers, and that’s how some doctrines and dogmas took shape. If they solve the problem, and Christianity can’t have a problem, then the doctrines and dogmas must be right. Hence, the approach didn’t necessarily have malice, nor did it have to be Biblical. It’s like being convinced the suspect is innocent and then working out how to explain away the evidence against him, although you have no idea what happened. But to complicate things, all this doesn’t say whether the suspect is actually guilty.
So, without further ado, let’s talk about Jesus’ mission and what he succeeded in.
Messiah Claimants Were Everywhere
First-century Judea had more messiah candidates than affluent people. Josephus, a Jewish historian who lived through the war with Rome, describes a prophet named Theudas who promised to split the Jordan river, an unnamed man from Egypt who gathered a crowd on the Mount of Olives and promised Jerusalem’s walls would collapse, and Judas the Galilean, who led a revolt over a Roman tax census around the year 6. Acts mentions Theudas, Judas and the Egyptian too, so Christians can’t wave these men away. Each of them drew followers and each of them ended up under Roman swords.
A century later Rabbi Akiva, one of the most respected teachers of his generation, backed Bar Kokhba, the commander of the 132 revolt against Rome, as the messiah. When Bar Kokhba lost and the Romans flattened Judea, Jewish teachers dropped the claim. Jews of that period weren’t allergic to messiahs. They tested candidates against a list and moved on when the candidate failed it.
The list came from the prophets: a king from David’s family who rebuilds the nation, gathers the exiles, and ushers in a time when nations stop training for war (Isaiah 2:4, Isaiah 11, Ezekiel 37:24-28). Jesus died on a Roman cross while Rome still ran the country, and the list stayed unchecked. His own followers saw the same problem. In Luke’s gospel, two of them walk home from Jerusalem after the crucifixion and say they’d hoped he was the one who would redeem Israel (Luke 24:21). Past tense, from his own side.
So convincing people has to sit near the top of the job description for any messiah, since everyone in the audience had already watched a string of failed candidates. Either Jesus failed at that job, or he didn’t care whether anyone was convinced. The second option makes for a bizarre strategy, especially when nobody was handed a test for telling a genuine messiah from a charlatan, and nobody has been handed one since.
Mark’s Jesus Hides the Message on Purpose
The earliest gospel addresses the question of failure directly. In Mark 4:11-12, Jesus tells his disciples that outsiders receive teaching in parables so that they will look without seeing and listen without understanding, in case they turn around and are forgiven. The wording comes from Isaiah 6. The Gospel of John extends the idea, stating that people couldn’t believe because God had blinded their eyes (John 12:37-40). Paul takes it furthest in Romans 9-11, where Israel’s unbelief is arranged by God as a temporary hardening that lasts until the non-Jewish nations have come in (Romans 11:25).
Taken together, these passages place responsibility for the unbelief on God and Jesus. If God closed the door, blaming those left outside makes little sense. If Jesus intended the crowds to be convinced, the mission failed, and if he intended them to be confused, it succeeded and leaves no grounds for complaint about the result.
The Religion Grew Around a Man Who Never Met Jesus
What eventually became Christianity built itself around Paul, who never laid eyes on Jesus during his lifetime. Paul says his message came from a revelation (Galatians 1:11-12), and that he stayed away for years before a brief visit with Peter and with James, Jesus’ brother (Galatians 1:18-19). The disciples Jesus trained for years kept living as observant Jews, and James ran the Jerusalem community until his death in the 60s. Paul wrote the earliest surviving documents, and his version of the message traveled to the non-Jewish world and won there. The gospels came decades later, written in Greek by anonymous authors who weren’t eyewitnesses and who wrote inside the world Paul had built.
So the people Jesus personally taught never produced the movement that carried his name across the empire. An outsider with a vision did, and he spent a good part of his career arguing with the people who’d known Jesus in person.
Someone Had to Collect on the Sin Debt
The center of Paul’s message is that Jesus sacrificed himself for our sins. This doctrine fits most easily with a Jesus who ranks below God, which matches how Paul writes (1 Corinthians 15:28 has the Son eventually placing himself under God). Once the church council at Nicaea in 325 made Jesus God’s equal, the transaction became harder to explain, since it meant God sending God to be killed so that God could be satisfied. Who received the payment? Christians have debated that question for centuries without settling it.
The problem the sacrifice was meant to solve raises its own difficulty. Everyone sins, which means God either couldn’t create humans who didn’t, or created them knowing they would and then resolved the situation by having his son executed. Both options reflect poorly on the creator, and both reduce the burden on a first-century Jew who heard the message and declined it.
If the purpose of Jesus’ arrival was to be humiliated, tortured and killed, then those who didn’t follow him weren’t failing at anything the plan required. The plan depended on his death, and nothing in it required a crowd of believers.
A Mission Statement With Two Versions
That brings us to what Jesus’ mission was and whether he finished it. John 19:30 has him announce that it’s done, and Christians read that as a completed mission. If the job was to die for sins, he completed it on schedule, and Jewish unbelief played no part in a plan that would’ve run the same way without it. If the job was to convince his own people that he was the promised king, he failed within his own lifetime, and Paul needed a divine hardening to explain the gap.
The question underneath both versions is whether Jesus knew what it would take to convince each individual and failed to deliver it, or knew and didn’t care because convincing Israelites was never on his agenda. The second possibility carries a further implication. Persuading his own people would have worked against his plan to sacrifice himself for the sins of humanity, since a messiah who convinced the crowds and the authorities would never have ended up on a Roman cross.
Do you think you have solid answers to these questions? Comments are open to everyone, but to keep the discussion intellectually honest, answers must come from the Bible. Otherwise, inventing things the Bible doesn’t say to save the day is no different from doing so just to criticize it.
If you’re finding value here, I’d love for you to consider becoming a supporter to keep The Unholy Truth alive.
Sources and Further Reading
Bart Ehrman (historian of early Christianity), How Jesus Became God and Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium
Paula Fredriksen (historian of ancient Christianity), Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle and From Jesus to Christ
Amy-Jill Levine (New Testament scholar and Jewish studies professor), The Misunderstood Jew
Geza Vermes (Jewish historian of the Dead Sea Scrolls), Jesus the Jew
Daniel Boyarin (Talmud scholar), The Jewish Gospels
Josephus (first-century Jewish historian), Antiquities of the Jews 18.1-10, 20.97-99, 20.169-172
The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford University Press), notes on Isaiah 7, 49 and 53, and Hosea 11
Re "Either Jesus failed at that job, or he didn’t care whether anyone was convinced."
Why does no one ask why Jesus even wanted to be a messiah, an "anointed one of god" especially after Christians decided he was god. It makes no sense to claim now that Jesus was anointed by god, but he was/is god. It isn't much of a feat to anoint oneself.
And Christians, who developed a great track record for being anti-Jewish, saying it is important that Jesus had this Jewish office is equally mind bending.