Jesus Was Not The Messiah?

A common tactic by skeptics of belief in Jesus is to say that the Hebrew Bible lays out certain criteria for the role of Messiah. Skeptics then argue that Jesus is not fulfill one or more of these criteria, and therefore is not the Messiah.

Even in this form, there is a logical fallacy. It does not follow from:

(1) Messiah will fulfill prophecies A-Z
and
(2) Jesus did not fulfill prophecies A-Z
that
(3) Jesus is not the Messiah.

That simply does not follow. Instead, the skeptic needs to establish

(2') Jesus did not and will not fulfill prophecies A-Z

in order to fulfill their burden of proof. Unless and until they do, they have not established their conclusion.

With some arguments, however, they are more like the following:

(1) The New Testament claims that Jesus fulfilled X
but
(2) Jesus did not fulfill X
therefore
(3) Jesus is not the Messiah

The conclusion comes from practically nowhere. While (1) and (2), if they are both true, would undercut biblical inerrancy, the issue of inerrancy is a secondary issue. The Bible does not need to be inerrant in order to be an accurate witness to the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

But some arguments don't even fit that mold. Instead, they look like the following.

(1) Some Christian apologist says that Jesus fulfilled X
(2) Jesus did not fulfill X
(3) Jesus is not Messiah

That conclusion does not even follow.

Many skeptical arguments are a case of simple anachronism. The Gospel texts are not modern publications but are of the literary genre called "ancient biography." An example of this genre is Plutarch's Lives. Also, quotation in ancient Greek texts was not always verbatim. That is to say that if you expect quotations to be word perfect, then you are judging an ancient text by modern literary standards.

The purpose of an ancient biography not to give a list of technically accurate but dry details. It was to paint a general portrait of the subject. Richard Burridge is one of many proponents of this view, who says "we must study [the gospels] with the same biographical concentration upon their subject to see the particular way each author portrays his understanding of Jesus." J.P. Holding has a great series of articles refuting objections as well. Plutarch's Lives is a series of biographies of many ancient Romans. Some of their lives overlap, and among the many biographies, Plutarch can describe the same event from different perspectives, and contain variations in the secondary details. By today's standards, one might call them contradictions, but Plutarch's audience did not think of them as such.

Another argument made by skeptics is that the New Testament's quotation differs from that of the Hebrew Bible. First, ancient Greek does not hold direct quotation to the same standards that we do. Secondly, the New Testament generally uses the Septuagint for its source. I say generally, because Matthew is the main exception to this rule.

Matthew tends to get an unfair treatment by skeptical scholars because he does not use the very simple prooftexting, consisting of direct quotation, that modern popular Christianity is accustomed to using. His use of the Scriptures is more like that of the ancient rabbis, who had a method of Scriptural interpretation called PaRDeS. This stands for the four levels of interpretation: Pashat (literal), Drash (homiletical), Remez (hint), and Sod (secret). Those who insist that Matthew only use the Pashat, and only use direct quotation will severely misunderstand his interpretive method. One need only Read the Talmud to recognize just how free the rabbis were with their interpretations of the Old Testament.

At Qumran, the unearthing of the Dead Sea Scrolls revolutionized biblical scholarship. For years, biblical scholars thought that the Septuagint was a bad translation of a pre-existing Hebrew text. Once the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, all of that changed. About 35% of the Dead Sea Scrolls biblical manuscripts belong to the Masoretic tradition, 5% to the Septuagint family, and 5% to the Samaritan, with the remainder unaligned. This shows that there was some level of diversity in the textual traditions. This is important because it establishes that the Septuagint pre-existed Christianity. This means that the New Testament authors could not have fabricated their quotations of the Old Testament, and then created the Septuagint to cover it up. It also means that there was some diversity in the readings, meaning that we cannot rule out the possibility that Matthew, for example, was using non-aligned readings for some of his quotations.

Another blunder of the uneducated Bible reader is a misunderstanding of the word "fulfill" πληρόω in the Greek. The word means to fill up, to perfect, to render full, or to complete. It is fallacious to think that fulfillment = prooftext. It does not. 2 Peter speaks of God fulfilling his promise. James 2:8 states: "If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself,' you are doing well." The same word "fulfill" is being used, but no one would think that by loving your neighbor, you are the subject of a prooftext.

Next time, we will get into the texts that anti-missionaries and other skeptics use to argue that Jesus was not the Messiah.