One of the points I try to emphasize in my book Love They Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West is that Jesus’ teachings were not made out of whole cloth but are deeply rooted in the Hebrew Bible and teachings of other Jewish teachers of his day.  Here is one place in my book where I try to stress the point. ****************************** Throughout the prophets of Hebrew Scripture (Isaiah, Amos, etc.) we find a recurring emphasis that God is concerned for the poor, the outcast, the vulnerable – and he expects his people to be actively concerned as well, helping rather than exploiting those in need.   Living centuries later and dealing with different situations, Jesus frequently aligned himself with such prophetic teachings.  He shared their assumptions about what it means to live as God wants – above all, to care for others and especially those in need, rather than for one’s own life and desires.  Jesus was not alone in this; similar views could be found in [...]

I now can mount a second argument for why Jesus almost certainly called himself the messiah during his lifetime.  Remember: by that I do not mean that Jesus wanted to lead a military rebellion against the Romans to establish himself as king.  On the contrary, I think Jesus was not a supporter of a “military solution.”   Jesus was an apocalypticist who believed that God himself would take action and do what was needed – overthrow the evil ruling authorities in a cataclysmic show of power and destroy all that was opposed to himself, and so bring in a good, utopian kingdom on earth.  And Jesus would be made the king. I don’t need here to give the extensive reasons for thinking that Jesus held to this kind of apocalyptic view in general – I’ve talked about it at length both in a number of my books and on the blog.  The question here is the more narrow one: did Jesus think he would be the king of the coming kingdom?  I have given one strong [...]

In the current thread I’m trying to establish that Jesus believed he was the messiah.  I have pointed out that his followers would not have considered him the messiah because they believed he had been raised from the dead (since the messiah was not supposed to die and rise again) unless they had already considered him the messiah prior to his death.  But that, of course, does not mean that Jesus *himself* thought he was the messiah.  And so we have to look for evidence from Jesus’ life that indicates that this is what he thought about himself, and my argument is going to be that there are several pieces of evidence that strongly suggest it is, of which my plan is to stress two. As background, in my previous post, I laid out the world view that Jesus himself almost certainly subscribed to, a view that scholars have called Jewish apocalypticism.  I need to develop these thoughts a bit in this post; and the next;  after that I’ll lay out in (very) summary fashion [...]