A crucified messiah was a contradiction in terms. It was not merely unexpected or disappointing. It was, in the framework of first-century Jewish messianic expectation, a logical impossibility — like a married bachelor or a square circle. Jewish hope had more than one messianic figure in view (John J. Collins distinguishes four paradigms in the literature of the period: king, priest, prophet and heavenly figure), but in its dominant, royal form the Messiah was, by definition, the one whom God had anointed to deliver Israel. He was supposed to defeat the Romans, restore the Davidic throne, rebuild or purify the Temple, and inaugurate an age of peace and justice. What the Messiah was emphatically not supposed to do was get arrested by the Temple authorities, handed over to the Roman governor, and executed on a cross like a common criminal.
Bart Ehrman puts it as directly as anyone has. In How Jesus Became God (2014) he writes that Jesus "was just the opposite of what Jews expected a messiah to be." On his blog he goes further: a crucified messiah was "a concept that would have seemed not just unusual or bizarre to most Jewish ears in the first century, but absolutely mind-boggling and self-contradictory." Crucifixion was not just a method of execution. It was a statement. Rome reserved it for slaves, rebels, and the lowest of the low. Deuteronomy 21:23 declared that anyone hung on a tree was "accursed of God" (World English Bible). The Hebrew phrase can also be read as an affront to God rather than a curse — the Jewish Publication Society's 1917 translation has "a reproach unto God" — but first-century readers took it as a curse. The Temple Scroll from Qumran (11Q19 64:6-13) applies the law to a man hung alive on the tree and calls him cursed by God and by men, and Paul quotes the verse of Jesus himself: "Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree" (Galatians 3:13). A crucified messiah was not a failed messiah; he was a cursed messiah. The cross did not merely end the messianic claim — it actively refuted it.
And yet, within a generation of the crucifixion — by the time Paul was writing in the 50s — Jesus's followers were not only maintaining his messianic identity but making claims about him that went far beyond anything pre-Christian messianism had ever envisioned. He was not just the Messiah. He was the Lord. He was seated at the right hand of God. He was the agent through whom God created the world. How do you get from "accursed of God" to "seated at the right hand of God" in little more than twenty years?
The answer — and this is the argument I want to walk through — is that you get there by reading backwards. You start with the catastrophe of the cross, you pass through the catalyst of the resurrection experiences, and you end up in the scriptures, searching for any text that might explain how the death of God's anointed could be part of God's plan. The christology did not emerge from the prophecies. The prophecies were found — created, curated, reinterpreted — because the christology demanded them.
A word about that phrase. "Reading backwards" is borrowed — it is the title of Richard Hays's 2014 book Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness — and I am borrowing it against the grain. Hays uses it to make a confessional, figural point: that the evangelists reread Israel's scriptures retrospectively in the light of Jesus and thereby uncovered a Christ who was, on his reading, truly prefigured there. I am using the same observation about direction — text read in the light of event, after the fact — to make the opposite point about what that retrospection produces. We agree on the motion of the arrow. We disagree, profoundly, about what it lands on.
The Catastrophe
E.P. Sanders, in Jesus and Judaism (1985), reconstructed the historical situation with characteristic sobriety. Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic prophet who believed that God was about to intervene in history to establish his kingdom. He gathered followers, went to Jerusalem, caused a disturbance in the Temple, and was arrested and executed by the Romans under Pontius Pilate. Whatever else is uncertain about the historical Jesus — and a great deal is uncertain — the crucifixion is one of the most secure facts in ancient history. Tacitus records his execution under Pilate (Annals 15.44). Josephus, in a passage later Christianized but probably authentic at its core, has Pilate condemn him to the cross (Antiquities 18.63-64). Paul, writing within twenty years of the event, presupposes it as common knowledge.
The crucifixion was a catastrophe for the Jesus movement. Not merely an emotional catastrophe — though it was certainly that — but an intellectual and theological catastrophe. The entire framework within which the disciples had understood Jesus was shattered. If Jesus was the Messiah, God should have vindicated him. God should have intervened. The kingdom should have arrived. Instead, Jesus died the death of a criminal under a curse, and the kingdom did not come.
Paula Fredriksen, in When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (2018), emphasizes how thorough the disillusionment must have been. The disciples were not sophisticated theologians with a backup plan. They were Galilean Jews who had staked everything on the conviction that Jesus was God's anointed agent of eschatological transformation. When Jesus was executed, that conviction should have died with him. In the normal course of events, the movement should have dissolved, or moved on to a new leader.
N.T. Wright has made much of what normally happened next. In a 1998 essay he notes that when Simon bar Giora was put to death at Titus's triumph in Rome, or Simeon ben Kosiba (Bar Kokhba) fell in 135, claiming that he had really been the Messiah after all would have invited, in Wright's words, "a fairly sharp response from the average first-century Jew." The movement founded by Judas the Galilean did outlive him, but it passed to his sons and descendants, down to Eleazar at Masada; it did not proclaim Judas vindicated. "In no other case, however," Wright writes, "right across the century before Jesus and the century after him, do we hear of any Jewish group saying that their executed leader had been raised again from the dead." Wright takes this as evidence for a bodily resurrection. I take it as a measure of how much the resurrection experiences had to accomplish.
But that is not what happened with Jesus. And the reason it did not happen brings us to the second stage.
The Catalyst
Something happened after the crucifixion that convinced at least some of Jesus's followers that he was alive. What exactly happened is, historically speaking, irrecoverable. Paul — our earliest source, writing in the 50s CE — says that Jesus "appeared" to Cephas (Peter), then to the Twelve, then to over five hundred brothers at once, then to James, then to all the apostles, and finally to Paul himself (1 Corinthians 15:5-8). Paul uses the Greek word ōphthē, which can mean "was seen" or "appeared" — the ambiguity is, exegetically speaking, significant.
Ehrman calls these "appearances" visions, and deliberately leaves open whether they were veridical or hallucinatory: "I am not going to take a stand on this issue," he writes, and his case "does not rise or fall depending on whether the visions were veridical or not." What he stresses instead is the modern research on bereavement visions, which finds that those who have them "almost always assume, and wholeheartedly believe, that they are veridical." Others — including N.T. Wright in The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003) — argue that the experiences must have been more than subjective visions to produce the results they produced. The debate is important but, for our purposes, secondary.
What matters for the argument I am making is not what happened but what the followers concluded from what happened. They concluded that God had raised Jesus from the dead. And that conclusion — whatever its basis — changed everything.
Here is why. If God raised Jesus, then God vindicated Jesus. If God vindicated Jesus, then Jesus was not cursed — the cross was not the refutation of his messianic identity but somehow part of the divine plan. If the cross was part of the divine plan, then there must be something in the scriptures — God's revealed will — that explains it. And so the search began.
This is the hinge of the entire argument. The resurrection experiences — whatever they were — did not merely restore the disciples' faith. They created a theological problem that demanded scriptural resolution. The problem was precise: how can God's Messiah suffer and die? The Jewish scriptures, as understood in the first century, did not have a ready-made answer. There was no pre-existing doctrine of a suffering, dying, and rising Messiah waiting to be applied. The disciples had to build one, and they built it out of the raw materials of the Hebrew Bible, using the interpretive methods available to them.
The Search
Donald Juel's Messianic Exegesis (1988) is one of the most important scholarly treatments of this process, and his argument deserves careful attention. Juel argued that early Christian christological interpretation of the Old Testament centered on a small number of royal-messianic texts, read in the light of a crucified and risen Messiah. I will call them generative texts: passages that, once read christologically, opened up chains of association leading to other texts.
The most important generative text was Psalm 110:1: "Yahweh says to my Lord, 'Sit at my right hand, Until I make your enemies your footstool for your feet.'" This psalm was understood as Davidic — written by David about a figure he addressed as "my Lord." If Jesus was the Messiah, the son of David, then this psalm could be read as David addressing his messianic descendant. And if the risen Jesus was now seated at God's right hand (the conclusion drawn from the resurrection experiences), then Psalm 110:1 described his present status perfectly.
But notice what has happened. The psalm was not originally messianic in the technical sense. It was a royal psalm, probably composed for the enthronement of a Davidic king. The "Lord" addressed is the reigning monarch, not a future eschatological figure. The early Christians read it messianically because they were looking for texts that matched their experience of a risen and exalted Jesus. The interpretation was driven by the experience, not the other way around.
From Psalm 110, the chain of association extended outward. Psalm 2 — another royal psalm, about the anointing of a Davidic king — was connected through the shared theme of divine enthronement: "Thou art My son, this day have I begotten thee" (Psalm 2:7, JPS 1917). If Jesus was the Lord of Psalm 110, he was also the Son of Psalm 2. And if he was the Son whom God had "begotten" — a metaphor for enthronement — then his resurrection could be understood as his enthronement as Messiah. Paul seems to reflect this early christology in Romans 1:4, where he says Jesus was "declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead." The resurrection was the moment of messianic appointment.
Psalm 16 entered the christological arsenal through a different route. Acts 2:25-28 quotes it at length: "You will not leave my soul in Hades, Neither will you allow your Holy One to see decay." Peter's argument, as Luke presents it, is straightforward: David wrote the psalm but David died and was buried and his body decayed. Therefore David was not writing about himself. He was writing, as a prophet, about his descendant the Messiah — who was raised from the dead and whose body did not see decay. The logic is pesher-like: take a text whose original meaning is the psalmist's personal confidence in God's faithfulness, and reapply it to a new referent that the interpreter believes the text was "really" about all along.
Isaiah 53 and the Suffering Servant
But the most consequential scriptural discovery, at least for later theology, was the fourth Servant Song, Isaiah 52:13–53:12. It is here that the early Christians found, or created, the category of a Messiah who suffers vicariously for others. How early and how central it was is disputed. Morna Hooker argued in Jesus and the Servant (1959) that the servant figure's influence on Jesus and the earliest tradition has been much overstated, and New Testament passages that actually develop the servant's vicarious suffering are few, 1 Peter 2:22-25 chief among them.
The passage describes a figure who is "despised and rejected," who is "wounded for our transgressions" and "bruised for our iniquities" (KJV), upon whom "Yahweh has laid … the iniquity of us all," who is "as a lamb that is led to the slaughter," and who "bore the sins of many." Read through christological lenses, the correspondence with the crucifixion narrative is striking.
But — and this is the critical scholarly point — the Servant of Isaiah 53 is not identified as a suffering Messiah in any surviving pre-Christian Jewish text. The Targum of Isaiah (Targum Jonathan) does call the figure of 52:13 "my servant, the Messiah," but it is no pre-Christian witness: Blenkinsopp describes it as going through several editions from the Tannaitic period to a final Babylonian redaction in the fourth or fifth century. And it will not let the Messiah suffer. Its translator, in Blenkinsopp's words, "firmly rejects any idea of a suffering and dying messiah," reassigning the passage's rejection and suffering partly to Israel and "mainly to foreign oppressors" (Isaiah 40-55, 83-84). No Dead Sea Scroll explicitly identifies the Servant with the Messiah. Later rabbinic texts do sometimes read the Servant messianically — the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 98b) applies Isaiah 53:4 to the Messiah — and the Talmud also knows a slain Messiah ben Joseph, but these are post-Christian witnesses. They cannot tell us what Jews expected before Jesus.
The scholarly consensus, represented by figures like Joseph Blenkinsopp and John J. Collins, is that the Servant in Isaiah 53 was most likely understood, in its original context, as a personification of Israel, a prophetic figure, or a representative individual — not as the Messiah. The reading of the Servant as a Messiah who suffers and dies is, on the surviving evidence, a Christian innovation. The early followers of Jesus, searching the scriptures for a way to make sense of the crucifixion, found in Isaiah 53 a passage that described innocent suffering as meaningful, redemptive, and divinely ordained. They applied it to Jesus. And that application became a cornerstone of later Christian atonement theology.
The logic is worth stating plainly: the early Christians did not believe Jesus was the Messiah because he fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah 53. They applied Isaiah 53 to Jesus because they already believed he was the Messiah — a belief formed during his life, shattered by the cross and, as they saw it, reconfirmed by the resurrection — and they needed to explain why the Messiah had suffered.
Psalm 22 and the Passion Narrative
The same dynamic is visible in the role of Psalm 22 in the gospel passion narratives. Psalm 22 is an individual lament, not a messianic psalm. But its opening cry — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" — and its vivid imagery of suffering provided the gospel writers with a scriptural template for narrating the crucifixion.
The correspondences between Psalm 22 and the passion narratives are extensive. The mocking bystanders who shake their heads (Psalm 22:7; Mark 15:29). The casting of lots for garments (Psalm 22:18; Mark 15:24; John 19:23-24). The thirst (Psalm 22:15; John 19:28). The question is not whether these correspondences exist — they obviously do — but which direction the influence runs.
Psalm 22:16 is the exception that makes the point. The Hebrew of the verse is notoriously difficult; the Septuagint reads "they dug" my hands and feet, and Christian translations have generally rendered it "pierced." Yet no New Testament writer quotes the verse, and none of the four crucifixion scenes narrates the nailing: Mark says only that "they crucified him" (Mark 15:24-25), and John's spear-thrust is tied to Zechariah, not the psalm (John 19:34-37). Nails appear only afterwards, when Thomas asks to see "the print of the nails" (John 20:25); even Luke's risen Jesus shows his hands and feet without mentioning them (Luke 24:39-40). If the psalm were a prediction the evangelists had watched come true, this is the verse they would have cited. The verse becomes a proof text for the nails only in the second century, when Justin Martyr says that "They pierced my hands and my feet" was used "in reference to the nails of the cross" (First Apology 35) — once the story had supplied what the psalm's Greek did not.
The parsimonious explanation is that the gospel writers used Psalm 22 as a source for constructing their passion narratives, though critics differ on how far the construction went. Its strongest form is John Dominic Crossan's "prophecy historicized": on his view the scriptural models did not color remembered events but controlled the story, so that without them, in Crossan's words as Mark Goodacre quotes them, "nothing is left but the brutal fact of crucifixion itself" (The Birth of Christianity, 521). Raymond Brown, whom Crossan set at the opposite pole, held that the basic incidents came from early Christian memory and were narrated, and embellished, in scriptural language. Goodacre, who thinks Crossan caricatures Brown, proposes a middle model under a term borrowed from Judith Newman, "scripturalization": events prompted scriptural reflection, which in turn shaped how the events were remembered and retold. On any of these views the evangelists were not simply recording historical details that happened to match the psalm. They were shaping their accounts of the crucifixion using the psalm as a literary and theological template. The psalm provided the language, the imagery, and the theological framework — innocent suffering followed by divine vindication — that the evangelists needed to tell the story of the cross.
This does not necessarily mean that every detail drawn from Psalm 22 is fictional. Jesus may well have been mocked. His garments may well have been divided. But the specific form in which these events are narrated — the verbal echoes, the structural parallels — comes from the psalm, not from eyewitness memory. The text has shaped the narrative.
The Completed Circle
Now step back and look at the whole process in sequence.
Crucifixion, vindication, search: the first three stages are the argument so far.
Stage four: They find Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, Psalm 16, Psalm 110, Psalm 2, and a network of other texts. They read these texts christologically, using the interpretive methods of pesher, midrash, and typology that were standard in first-century Judaism. They construct a scriptural argument for a suffering, dying, and rising Messiah.
Stage five: Later gospel writers — Mark in the late 60s or early 70s, Matthew and Luke in the 80s, John in the 90s — compose narrative accounts of Jesus's life and death that are shaped by these scriptural texts. They weave the psalms and prophets into their passion narratives. They construct infancy stories to match prophetic texts. They create a literary world in which Jesus's life appears to be the fulfillment of a continuous stream of prophetic prediction.
The process starts with an event — the crucifixion — and ends with narratives that make the event look like it was predicted all along. But the arrow of causation runs backward. The event generated the scriptural interpretation, and the scriptural interpretation generated the narratives. What looks like prediction-fulfillment is actually post-hoc rationalization — sophisticated, theologically creative, and deeply sincere post-hoc rationalization, but post-hoc rationalization nonetheless.
The Reverse of Prediction-Fulfillment
The upshot is that early christology was built from the ground up. The first followers of Jesus did not inherit a blueprint for a suffering Messiah from the Hebrew scriptures and then recognize that Jesus fit the blueprint. They started with Jesus — specifically, with the shattering experience of his death and the transformative experience of what they took to be his resurrection — and they built the blueprint to fit him.
The apologetic model of prediction-fulfillment runs the arrow the other way, and it deserves to be stated at full strength. In its strongest form it need not claim that anyone read the blueprint in advance. (Some apologists do claim that ancient Jews read Isaiah 53 of the Messiah; the witnesses they cite, as we saw, are post-Christian.) It holds that the texts were genuinely about Jesus, but that their meaning was veiled until the event disclosed it — and the gospels say as much themselves. Before the cross the disciples "understood none of these things" (Luke 18:34); afterwards the risen Jesus "opened their minds, that they might understand the Scriptures" (Luke 24:45); and John says the disciples "didn't understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written about him" (John 12:16). That is a coherent position, and it has a ready answer to the objection that nobody was expecting a messiah like Jesus. But notice what it concedes. On its own telling, no one could see the prediction until after the fact. A prediction that can be recognized only in retrospect is, as evidence, indistinguishable from a retrospective reading — which is exactly the reconstruction offered here.
On the surviving pre-Christian evidence, no one was sitting around reading Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 and waiting for a crucified redeemer. (A handful of Qumran texts have been read as partial exceptions — 4Q541, for one, describes an eschatological priest who meets slander and opposition — but none describes a Messiah who dies and rises. The best-known scholarly dissent is Wright's argument, taken up below, that Jesus himself read Isaiah 53 before the cross.) The idea had to be invented. And the genius of early Christianity — and it was genuine genius — was that they invented it using the very scriptures that seemed to refute it.
Ehrman's reconstruction in How Jesus Became God runs along these lines. The crucifixion "completely disconfirmed" the disciples' hope; "but then they came to believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead, and this reconfirmed what had earlier been disconfirmed. He really is the messiah. But not in the way we thought!" The scriptural search follows from that last clause. If he was the Messiah, but not in the way anyone had thought, the scriptures had to be reread until they said so.
And the search found what it was looking for. Not because it was objectively there, waiting to be discovered, but because the interpretive methods they employed — pesher, midrash, typology — are designed to find correspondences. They are tools for generating meaning, not for testing hypotheses. Point them at any body of literature with any set of events in mind, and they will produce connections. That is what they are for.
Why This Reconstruction Matters
The reconstruction I have outlined — catastrophe, catalyst, search, discovery, narrative — is not the product of anti-religious bias. The core of it — that the early Christians read backward from the events to the texts, not forward from the texts to the events — is widely held among critical scholars working across the religious spectrum. Juel was a Lutheran. Hays was a United Methodist. Sanders described himself as a liberal, modern, secularized Protestant. Fredriksen converted to Judaism. They disagree on many things. But they agree on the basic direction of influence: from event to text, not from text to event.
I should be careful here, because agreeing on the sequence is not the same as agreeing on what I have made of it. When I call the result "post-hoc rationalization," that is my judgment, not theirs. A figural reader like Richard Hays will grant that the evangelists read Israel's scriptures in the light of Jesus, after the fact, and still insist that this backward reading discloses something true that was genuinely latent in the texts all along. Hays accepts the direction of the arrow; he rejects the deflationary conclusion I draw from it. With him the disagreement is not about the historical sequence. It is about whether a meaning found in hindsight can be a meaning that was really there.
N.T. Wright goes further and disputes the sequence itself. In Jesus and the Victory of God (1996) he argues that Jesus went to the cross already interpreting his vocation through Isaiah 53 and related texts, so that a scriptural reading preceded the event rather than being found after it. His account of the resurrection, noted above, disputes the second stage as well. Wright is the best-known dissent from the reconstruction offered here, but not a lone one: he builds on a line of German scholarship, Martin Hengel and Peter Stuhlmacher above all, which argues both that Jesus interpreted his own death through Isaiah 53 and that the passage left more mark on pre-Christian Judaism than is usually allowed (Hengel and Daniel P. Bailey's "The Effective History of Isaiah 53 in the Pre-Christian Period," in Janowski and Stuhlmacher's The Suffering Servant). A reader should know that the reconstruction has capable opponents.
This matters because the direction of influence determines the evidential weight of the "fulfilled prophecies." If the prophecies came first and were genuinely predictive, their fulfillment in Jesus is extraordinary — perhaps even supernatural. But if the interpretation came second — if the early Christians started with Jesus and read backward into the texts — then the fulfillment is not evidence of supernatural foreknowledge. It is evidence of how creative people make sense of traumatic and transformative experiences by finding meaning in their sacred literature.
That is my own weighing of the evidence. The question every honest inquirer must face is this: which explanation is more parsimonious? That dozens of ancient Hebrew texts, written across centuries by different authors in different contexts, were all, by a single divine design, predicting specific details about a first-century Galilean peasant? Or that a small group of devastated followers, galvanized by experiences they interpreted as resurrection, searched their scriptures with passionate intensity and found in them the meanings they needed to find?
You do not need supernatural intervention to explain the second scenario. You need grief, conviction, scriptural literacy, and the interpretive tools that were standard equipment in first-century Judaism. Human creativity — the same creativity that produced the pesharim at Qumran and the midrashim in the rabbinic academies — did the rest.
The early Christians were not discovering prophecies. They were constructing a christology. And they did it by reading backwards.
