From David Alter’s notes on his translation of Isaiah 53:
Famously these words and what follows were embraced by Christian interpreters from the formative period of Christianity onward as a prophecy of the Passion narrative and the Crucifixion. The emphasis on the Servant’s bearing of the sins of the people and becoming a kind of sacrificial lamb seems especially relevant to the idea of Christ’s dying for the sins of humankind. Illness, however, is not part of the story of Jesus. Virtually no serious scholars today see this a prediction of the Passion, but it certainly provided a theological template for interpreting the death of Jesus.
Debate persists about the identity of the Servant. A recurrent Jewish view sees him as a representation of collective Israel, but the details of the passage argue for the biography of an individual, and already in the Middle Ages Abraham ibn Ezra proposed that the Servant was the prophet himself. The speaker then, would be one of the prophet’s disciples, as Blenkinsopp suggests, eulogizing him after his death (see verse 8) on behalf of himself but also a group of disciples (the “we” that is invoked here).
Poohbear you are certainly free to disagree with Alter but when you accuse him of bamboozling people you just make yourself look foolish.

The historical Jesus didn’t know he was going to die. You can’t claim to be coming back if you’re sure you’ll never leave. Jesus was sure that God was going to do something big within his lifetime. Namely, crush the great powers of the world(Rome/Persia), punish the wicked and corrupt and make him King of the new Earthly Kingdom of God(return to paradise). For Paul, Jesus is still King, so he will still have to come back when the paradise is restored on Earth.
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