Maimonides is one of Judaism's greatest opponents of Christianity. He believed it unacceptable for a Jew to convert, and that Jews who do should be shunned. However, Maimonides gives an argument which actually supports the claim that Jesus is Messiah, an argument that I have not heard any Christian give.
In his Laws of Kings, Maimonides writes:
The thoughts of the Creator of the world are not within the power of man to reach them, ‘for our ways are not His ways, nor are our thoughts His thoughts.’ And all these matters of Jesus of Nazareth and that of the Ishmaelite who arose after him are only to straighten the way of the king Messiah and to fix the entire world, to serve God as one.Maimonides argued that Christianity and Islam will help the world eventually submit to Israel as God's sovereign nation. What if Maimonides was right for the wrong reasons?
Let's assume that the rabbis are right and that some future Jewish ethnic and religious leader (let's call him David Goldstein) came to power and did what the rabbis said that Messiah would do. He will rebuild the temple, reinstitute the priesthood, be anointed king of Israel, and subdue the world to Israel's sovereignty.
How will the Christian and Islamic nations react to this new King David?
Since this person is not a Muslim, and not a recognized prophet of Islam, the Muslim world is not just going to obey his orders. If he tries to rebuild the temple on the Temple Mount, he will be chiseling Muslim territory, which is an act of war under Sharia. Islam also expects a Mahdi leader to subdue the world to Sharia Law in preparation for the last Day of Judgment.
So Islam will not accept such a leader, so David Goldstein will have to subdue the Muslim world by force, until the true believers in Islam are dead, and the moderates eventually submit to Goldstein's power, at the cost of considerable bloodshed.
Christianity will be even worse, since anyone other than Jesus who fulfills these prophecies will be labeled immediately as the Antichrist, and as a lying, trickster servant of the Devil. Such a person must be opposed to the last man. Therefore, in such a scenario, Goldstein will have to wage war against the Christian world until all resistance is stamped out as well.
So theoretically, there could be a future Jewish Messiah who brings the world in submission to Israel, but any such person will have to kill a half billion people or more in order to achieve these ends.
Now let's assume that Jesus is Messiah. In both Christianity and Islam, Jesus is a prophet, or even greater than a prophet. Both religions require that its adherents do whatever he says. If Jesus returned to Israel, and told the world that they must submit to Israel and allow the new temple to be built, the next thing you would hear is 3 billion people bending the knee in submission to Israel, without anyone having to fire a single shot.
