1. Did the historical Jesus see himself as the Suffering Servant?
2. Did Isaiah only mean the nation Israel (personified as Jacob)?
3. Did Isaiah only mean a person representing Israel / Jacob?
4. Did Isaiah mean both a person and the nation of Israel and switch between the two?
Well, there are no factual answers one can give. It’s all opinion. Here’s mine–
1)No, he saw himself more in the tradition of Jewish prophets. He believed he was a servant who would suffer, but I don’t think he saw Isaiah specifically as a prophecy of his fate. As Stephen said, that came later, after he was gone, and they were scrabbling around for explanations of what had happened.
2)Most likely, though the Jews did come to believe their God was god of all, creator of all, so there would be a certain universal character to it.
3)What else would he mean? (I’m Irish, and we’re allowed to answer questions with questions.)
4)I’d never thought of that!
Ahh that’s better. I know it’s easier to disengage (Stephen!
) because the subject of Isaiah 53 has been raked over many times, but there is more to it than just the lamb of God bit! I think it is worth looking at all 4 songs and thinking about the questions I have asked. Question 4 (which I’m glad you liked) is not original to me. I heard a theologian pointing out that some lines in the songs clearly point to the nation Israel, but that other lines in the same songs were irrefutably talking about a single man that just doesnt fit Jacob!
I beleive:
1. The historical Jesus was well aware of these passages.
2. Jesus saw himself as a fullfilement of some parts of them. Clearly the lamb of God of Isaiah 53 is one passage, but what what about ‘I offered my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard’ and ‘you who have drunk of the cup of the Lord’s wrath, you who have drained it to its dregs’
3. Isaiah himself intended the passages apply to both Israel / Jacob and to a future humble, gentle, suffering, propitiatory, individual righteous human servant, who would be ‘the arm of the YHWH’ who would ‘open the eyes of the blind’ ‘free captives from prison …..’, would be ‘a light to the gentiles’ and through whom Israel and Israel’s God would ‘bring salvation to the ends of the earth’ would bring salvation and ‘bring justice to the Nations’
In some ways, the King of a nation (or Messiah eg David and David’s son and Lord!) personifies and represents a nation to the world, just as does the father of the Nation (Jacob/Israel). The fate and suffferings of the Nation may be paralelled by it’s King. I believe Isaiah switches between these meanings in his prophecy and sometimes its almost as if Isaiah himself is this person – he kinda gets into the role and personifies Israel and Its human representative himself!
Shoot me down
1. I believe he had a good knowledge of scripture, but I don’t assume he put the same emphasis on given passages that his followers did after his death, when they were casting around for explanations as to what had happened. I think if he’d emphasized that particular passage in his teachings, we’d probably have stories to that effect. We know he liked to bring up Jonah.
2. I began thinking about the historical Jesus seriously after reading “Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the Gospels” by Michael Grant. His take was that Jesus looked to certain OT texts for cues, but wasn’t wedded to any particular role–prophet, Suffering Servant, Messiah–he wasn’t sure he was any of these. Because, of course, he woke up every day a mortal being, with the same doubts and questions as the rest of us.
3. It’s a bit of a stretch. In general, the OT writers are talking about their own times in a prophetic context, so there is some thought for the future, but it’s a mistake to read too deeply into that. That’s how we get people acting like Revelation is a road-map for our future, when it’s a coded commentary on what had already happened at the time it was written.
4. What happened to 4.? 🙂
I am going to use this reply for Q1: here is my case that Jesus knew the suffering servant passages and identified himslef with the suffering servant and that it was not a later Christian innovation:
Luk 4:17-21 And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.
This quote is from the first Servant Song in Isaiah 42 and Jesus’s ministry mirrored this to a high degree of similarity
Isaiah 53:8: By oppression and judgment he was taken away, yet who of his generation protested? Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes[c] his life an offering for sin
Mar 8:31-32 And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he spake that saying openly. And Peter took him, and began to rebuke him.
Isaiah 50:6 I offered my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard; I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting.
Luk 6:29 And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other
Isaiah 51:17 ‘you who have drunk of the cup of the Lord’s wrath, you who have drained it to its dregs’
Mat 26:39 And he went a little further, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.
Isaiah 52: 13-14 My servant will be raised up and highly exalted, just as there were many who were appalled at him….
John 3: 14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up
I rest my case
Thank you Robert, I stand corrected re isaiah 61 and this just proves I’m an amateur, but I think the other quotes were all from Servant Songs.
It seems to me that Jesus peppered his speech with scripture and it would be difficult to believe that he didn’t know the servant Songs bearing in mind his reference to drinking the cup in Gesthsemene, turning the other cheek, explaining his was to suffer and be handed over to the authorities (‘by oppression and judgment he was taken away’) which prompted Peter’s rebuke and the ‘get thee behind me Satan’ rebuke to Peter. Even ‘the son of man must be lifted up’ from John 3 sounds like a genuine utterenace from the historical Jesus.
To argue that all this prophetic fullfilment was all made up retrospectively after the fact of the crucifixion is a much less likely scenario historically in my amateur view.
Anyway, I beleive Jesus knew the Servant Songs and knew that he himself was fullfillling the suffering servant / lamb of God as well as the messianic, holy spirit accompanied, and anointed (?messianic) preacher of good news who brings good news to the poor, heals the brokenhearted, proclaims release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind and summons the acceptable year of the Lord. And I think my belief is well founded.
Jesus might have have had large portions of the OT memorized for all we know, but that doesn’t mean he put the same spin on a a given passage as his followers (and those who followed them) did after he was gone.
There really is nothing like the Kingdom of God that Jesus envisioned in the OT. Yes, he was working from a framework established by OT writings, but also from the much more recent ideas of the Essenes, and particularly John the Baptist–and he made his own contributions. He was not out there LARPing, if you know what I mean. If Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t an original, there never has been one in all of history.
…here is my case that Jesus knew the suffering servant passages and identified himslef with the suffering servant and that it was not a later Christian innovation:
You’re quoting the very people who did the innovating.
If Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t an original, there never has been one in all of history.
The historical Jesus was not particularly original. The Christ of Faith, created by the Church, was very original.
I’m sorry but I disagree with you all on Q1!The modern criteria of embarassement and mutiple attestation do not have to be fullfilled for somethng to be true. I think you have all drunk the koolaid of German scepticsm. Not eveyrthing that Jesus did and said was an embarassment to his followers (although a lot was!) and not everything jesus did and said was heard by everyone and independently recorded by more than one of the sources of the gospels.
Looking at the whole picture makes it over-whelming obvious to me at least that Jesus knew the Servant Songs and explained to his disciples that he was the suffering servant as well and the preacher of good news and the messiah. It’s by no means a stretch of the imagination and just because there were is no evidence that jews saw the suffering servant in this way before Jesus and that it explains the scandal of a crucified messiah by claiming it was predicted by God, does not make it unlikley to be true that Jesus applied it to himself ‘Today this prophesy was fullfilled in your hearing’, ‘beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself’…. etc etc
I have argued with Bart on his recent blog posts that to confine Jesus to being a failed apocalyticist is far too smalll a view of a much more complex, original and enigmatic man and that he was dead right about the destruction of Jerusalem and the terror to come on Judea and that after all, that’s whom he was preaching to! Conflation of this happening before his generation ended or before some of them tasted death with his end of the age / coming of the kingdom in power teaching may have been due to his listeners, or the gospel writers conflating the two events or even to Jesus conflting them due to his limited knowledge as a human (nobody knows the date, not even the son….’). Some of his ideas were original but of course they were in the context of Levantine culture, post-exilic Judaism and 2nd Temple Period apocalytocsim! He was of the school, if not a close relative of John the Baptist!
So, I beleive there is plenty of scope for a crtical scholar to beleive that Jesus was not a failed apocalyticist and that he did know his destiny which was part of divine a propitiatory plan. Of course if you are an atheist, you might find that difficult to swallow, but there are of course good arguments for theism. There are alsovery reasonable arguments to support the fact that Jesus was also a mircale worker and his resurrection, but that’s not for this post and had been extensively discussed elsewhere
I don’t know that’s all Bart thinks Jesus was–a failed apocalyptic preacher–but he certainly was that. And failure is the common lot of all who strive to change this world for the better, after all. His failure was less abject than most, but if we’re honest, we’ll have to see that he’d consider all that has been done in his name since his death to constitute failure. The sheep still struggle, the goats still impede. God hasn’t come.
He was, in his own strange way, a realist, and realistically, for those of good will to finally have their day, God would have to come.
We can appreciate all the complexities of him and still see that he was not content to sit around waiting fruitlessly for some future Messiah. So the question is, did he have some biblical role (greatly re-imagined) reserved for himself, or did he just see himself as a messenger–or a sacrifice? Because the role he played is not one that exists anywhere in the OT.
And for the record, I’m not an atheist, but neither do I believe there has ever been a religion (including atheism) that didn’t contain a great deal of human self-deception. That’s why Jesus had no intention of bringing yet another one into the world, and it happened anyway. Nothing succeeds as planned.
Yes, of course I have done Bart a disservice here by condensing his academically prolific scholarly writings on Jesus to one negative sentence (sorry Bart!, it was just for the sake of rhetoric ). On the matter of success or failure of Jesus, we will have to disagree amicably . Looking at our respective positions on this underlying question (which I like to call the “who do you say that I am? question”) it is clearly a matter of perspective. Our respective perspectives include our beliefs about Jesus’s self-perceived purposes, our beliefs about any divine purpose, our perception of what the historical Jesus actaully taught about the Kingdom and whether he was bodily resurrected or not. All these beliefs, perceptions and perspectives feed into how we think of Jesus and what our judgement is of the success or failure of his mission and his teaching.
You can believe anything you want to (including that atheism is a religion) if you are content to pull your beliefs out of your…uh, hat. But if you want your beliefs to comport with reality you have to gauge them by the evidence, not by how they make you feel. Better a disturbing truth than a comforting lie. But then that’s just me.
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Atheism doesn’t have to be a religion–neither does belief in God–lots of people believe in God without belonging to any organized system of belief (such people outnumber those who refer to themselves as atheists by a rather large margin going by recent polls).
Voltaire wanted God without religion, Comte wanted religion without God. Thus demonstrating that religion and belief in God are two separate things. They usually go together, but not always.
But that’s just history.
😉
Stephen said
You can believe anything you want to (including that atheism is a religion) if you are content to pull your beliefs out of your…uh, hat. But if you want your beliefs to comport with reality you have to gauge them by the evidence, not by how they make you feel. Better a disturbing truth than a comforting lie. But then that’s just me.
Stephen. It should be clear from my arguments that I have ‘pulled my beliefs from out of’ my logical assesement of evidence rather than errr.. my hat. So far, on this topic at least, all I’ve seen from you are brief unsupported and dismissive assertions. I can assure you that I have been down the road of being prepared to accept disturbing truths, rather than comforting lies. Have you really been down that road both ways? Anything that’s confirms one’s world view, is comforting and anything that challenges it, is disturbing. Have you perhaps considered that it might be you who is believing comforting lies rather than disturbing truths? Us Brits call this sort of the thing the [tea] pot calling the kettle black.
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