What Jews Actually Expected From the Messiah

A familiar apologetic move runs like this. Take the life of Jesus of Nazareth — his death on a Roman cross, his alleged resurrection, his failure to establish any kind of political kingdom — and work backwards through the Hebrew Bible, plucking out verses and declaring that this was the plan all along. Prophecy fulfilled. Case closed. But if you actually sit down and read what Jewish people expected from the messiah — not what Christians later told them they should have expected, but what the texts and traditions actually describe — you get a picture that looks nothing like the Jesus of the Gospels. Not even close.

This is not a fringe observation. The Davidic warrior king is what John J. Collins calls "the common core of Jewish messianism around the turn of the era" (Collins, Scepter, ch. 3), and the single best place to start is Collins' landmark study The Scepter and the Star: Messianism in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a work that surveys the full range of messianic expectation in the centuries before and during the emergence of Christianity. What Collins demonstrates — with painstaking attention to the primary sources — is that Jewish messianic expectation was not monolithic. There was no single job description for "the messiah." But the expectations that did exist shared certain common features, and those features are devastating for the Christian claim that Jesus fulfilled them.

Collins identifies four basic paradigms — king, priest, prophet, and a heavenly messiah — and he is careful to add that "they were not equally widespread" (Scepter, ch. 1). Let me take them in turn.

The Davidic Royal Messiah

This is the dominant model, the one that shows up most frequently and most emphatically across the literature. When most Jews in the Second Temple period thought about "the messiah," they were thinking about a king — a descendant of David who would do what David did, only bigger and better and permanently. The foundational text is 2 Samuel 7:12-16, where God promises David that his dynasty will endure forever. By the time you get to the later prophets, this promise has crystallized into a specific expectation: a future Davidic king who will restore the kingdom of Israel.

And not in some vague spiritual sense. We are talking about concrete, political, this-worldly restoration. The messiah was expected to defeat Israel's enemies — militarily. He was expected to restore national sovereignty to the Jewish people. He was expected to rebuild or purify the temple. He was expected to gather the exiles of Israel back to the land. And he was expected to reign in justice and righteousness, establishing an era of peace.

The clearest expression of this expectation comes from the Psalms of Solomon, a collection of Jewish hymns written in the first century BCE, almost certainly in response to the Roman conquest of Jerusalem by Pompey in 63 BCE. Psalms of Solomon 17 and 18 are the key texts. Psalm of Solomon 17:21-25, in R. B. Wright's translation, lays it out with startling specificity: the expected son of David will "purge Jerusalem from gentiles who trample her to destruction," he will "shatter all their substance with an iron rod," he will "destroy the unlawful nations with the word of his mouth." This is a warrior. This is a conqueror. This is a king who drives out the occupying force and establishes Jewish political independence. The psalm does qualify the picture — as Collins puts it, the king "will not rely on horse and rider, or on a multitude for war" — but Collins is equally clear that the destruction of the nations is still the point, and that "the contrast between political and national, on the one side, and spiritual, on the other, is anachronistic" (Scepter, ch. 3).

And it continues. The Davidic messiah of Psalms of Solomon 17 gathers the scattered tribes, distributes the land among them, judges the peoples and nations, and rules with such righteousness that "there will be no unrighteousness among them in his days." Géza Vermes, in his groundbreaking Jesus the Jew, makes the point that this political, military, national expectation was not some marginal opinion — it was the mainstream. It was, on his reading, what ordinary Jews under Roman occupation were hoping and praying for, a case he builds from the prayers of the period (Vermes, Jesus the Jew, 130). Collins is more cautious — "Our sources do not permit us to speak with confidence about the majority of the Jewish people" — though he holds that "the expectation of a Davidic messiah was surely part of" the common Judaism of the period (Scepter, ch. 1).

Joseph Fitzmyer's The One Who Is to Come is, if anything, even more useful here — and more deflationary. Fitzmyer is a minimalist about messianism: working from a narrow definition of "messiah" as an awaited anointed agent of God, he argues that messianism proper does not emerge until roughly the second century BCE, and he regards Daniel 9:25-26 (which he dates to about 165 BCE) as the only Hebrew Bible text that is clearly messianic in that strict sense. The royal expectation, on his account, develops gradually out of the dynastic promise to David rather than springing fully formed from the Hebrew Bible. Throughout, he is meticulous about distinguishing between what the original texts meant in their historical context and what they came to mean in later messianic interpretation. Many of the so-called messianic prophecies — Isaiah 7:14, for example — were not originally about a future messiah at all. They were repurposed, reread, and reinterpreted over centuries. But even when they were repurposed into messianic expectations, those expectations remained stubbornly political and this-worldly. The messiah was supposed to win.

The Priestly Messiah

Here is where things get interesting, and where the Dead Sea Scrolls have genuinely transformed our understanding. The community at Qumran — the group responsible for the scrolls — did not expect just one messiah. They expected two. The Rule of the Community looks forward to the coming of "the prophet and the messiahs of Aaron and Israel" (1QS 9:11, in Collins' translation) — three figures, two of them anointed. That is not a typo. That is a plural: one priestly messiah (of Aaron) and one royal (of Israel). Collins grants that the plural "is actually unique" (the Damascus Document has a disputed singular) but still concludes that two messiahs are meant (Scepter, ch. 4).

Collins devotes significant attention to this dual-messiah expectation, and one detail is especially telling: at Qumran, the priest takes precedence over the royal messiah at the communal meal. In the messianic rule text (1QSa 2:17-21), when both figures are present at the eschatological banquet, no one may reach for the first portion of the bread and wine before the priest. In Collins' translation: "Fo[r he shall extend] his hand to the bread first. Afterwa[rds,] the messiah of Israel [shall exten]d his hand to the bread." The square brackets mark words restored where the scroll is damaged, but the order is not in doubt: the priest "takes precedence over him in the strictly hierarchical proceedings" (Scepter, ch. 4). The royal messiah waits his turn. We should be careful not to overread a single liturgical rubric into a full metaphysical hierarchy — but at minimum, the priestly figure is given ritual precedence over the king. This fits Qumran's intensely priestly orientation — they were almost certainly a breakaway priestly group that considered the Jerusalem temple establishment illegitimate — but it also complicates the Christian narrative enormously.

Christianity claims that Jesus combined the roles of priest and king, often citing the enigmatic figure of Melchizedek from Genesis 14 and Psalm 110. But the Qumran community, which was deeply immersed in messianic speculation, kept these roles separate. The priest was the priest. The king was the king. They did not expect them to be the same person. Short of reading the Damascus Document's singular as one figure, the sectarian texts keep the two offices apart, and Collins reads the plurality itself as pointed: it "implicitly rejected the combination of royal and priestly offices by the Hasmoneans" (Scepter, ch. 4).

The Prophetic Messiah

The third model is the prophetic messiah — a figure modeled on Moses and grounded primarily in Deuteronomy 18:15-18, where Moses tells the Israelites that God "will raise up to you a prophet from among you, of your brothers, like me" (Deuteronomy 18:15, WEB). This text generated an expectation of a coming prophet, sometimes identified with the return of Elijah (based on Malachi 4:5), who would prepare the way for the messianic age.

We see this expectation in the New Testament itself, actually. In John 1:19-25, John the Baptist is asked in turn whether he is the Christ, Elijah, or "the prophet" — three distinct questions, gathered into one line at 1:25: "if you are not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the prophet" (WEB). The categories were separate in the popular mind. In John 6:14, after the feeding of the five thousand, the crowd declares Jesus "the prophet who comes into the world" — and then, the very next verse tells us, Jesus perceived that they "were about to come and take him by force to make him king" (6:15, WEB). There is the expectation laid bare: the prophetic figure would lead to a royal, political outcome.

The Samaritans later developed their own version of this expectation — the Taheb, a Moses-like restorer — though the texts that describe him are centuries later. For the first century, Josephus records a Samaritan who, under Pilate, led a crowd up Mount Gerizim with the promise of revealing the sacred vessels Moses had buried there (Ant. 18.85-87). Josephus records multiple prophetic pretenders in the first century — figures like Theudas and the Egyptian, who gathered followers with promises of miraculous signs that would demonstrate divine endorsement and lead to national liberation. Every single one of them ended the same way: Roman troops showed up and the leaders were captured, killed, or put to flight — Theudas was caught and beheaded (Ant. 20.97-99), the Egyptian's followers were cut down while he himself escaped (Ant. 20.169-172; War 2.261-263) — and the movements collapsed. That is what happens when a claimant fails to deliver the expected sign: the movement does not survive the failure.

The Heavenly Messiah

Collins' fourth paradigm is the odd one out — "somewhat different from the others, since it is not defined by function" (Scepter, ch. 1). Its root is Daniel 7, where "one like a son of man" comes "with the clouds of the sky" and receives "an everlasting dominion" (Daniel 7:13-14, WEB). Later writers read that figure as an individual savior. The Similitudes of Enoch (1 Enoch 37–71) seat "that Son of Man" on "the throne of glory" (Scepter, ch. 7), and Collins judges this heavenly messiah "likely to be older than 70 CE", though the date is disputed. Fourth Ezra 13, from "the end of the first century CE," has a man rise from the sea and destroy the attacking nations with a stream of fire from his mouth (Scepter, ch. 8).

This, Collins says, is the paradigm that "was applied most successfully to Jesus in the Gospels," and his reason is pointed: "if only because his manifestation still awaits eschatological verification" (Scepter, ch. 1). It also holds the one exception worth knowing. Fourth Ezra 7:28-29 does have a messiah who dies — after a four-hundred-year reign, along with everyone else alive. But the book postdates the Temple's fall, Collins notes that "this scenario has no clear precedent in earlier traditions" (ch. 8), and that death atones for nothing. A heavenly judge who has not yet arrived is not a crucified one.

What None of These Models Describe

None of these models — not the royal, not the priestly, not the prophetic, not the heavenly — describe a figure who gets arrested by the temple authorities, handed over to the Roman governor, subjected to a humiliating public execution reserved for slaves and rebels, and then, three days later, allegedly rises from the dead only to ascend to heaven without having accomplished a single one of the expected messianic tasks.

The concept of a second coming is not a feature of any pre-Christian Jewish messianic expectation. On the most common critical reconstruction, it is a Christian innovation, born of necessity. When Jesus died without fulfilling the messianic program, his followers faced a choice: abandon the claim that he was the messiah, or redefine what "messiah" meant. They chose the latter. They split the messianic job description into two phases — a first coming for suffering and atonement, a second coming for conquest and reign — and then they went back through the Hebrew Bible to find texts they could assign to each phase. On that reconstruction, this is post-hoc rationalization on a grand scale. Collins frames the same move more neutrally: the realization of Jesus' kingship was "transferred to heaven or deferred to a second coming, but is still shaped by biblical paradigms," Psalm 110 and Daniel 7 above all (Scepter, ch. 9).

Collins is restrained in his language — he is a careful scholar — but he is not vague. "There is little if anything in the Gospel portrait of Jesus that accords with the Jewish expectation of a militant messiah," and the Christian use of Psalms 22, 31 and 69 for a suffering messiah "involved a new line of interpretation, however, for which there was no precedent in Judaism." Fairness requires the other half of his argument: "The messianic identity of Jesus must be grounded in some way before his crucifixion." He points to the Qumran text 4Q521, which speaks of a messiah "whom heaven and earth obey" alongside the healing, raising of the dead and good news for the poor that Jesus cites in his answer to the Baptist. In the fragment "it is apparently God who heals the wounded," though Collins thinks God acts through an agent, and he says the parallel "strengthens the case that the epithet 'anointed' or 'messiah' could have been attached to him" in his lifetime. That messiah, he adds, is "best regarded, like the 'anointed' speaker in Isaiah 61, as a prophet, not a king" (Scepter, ch. 9). So the title had roots before the crucifixion; a messiah whose defining act was to die had none. On my reading, then, the belief that the crucified man was nonetheless the messiah came first, and the scriptural arguments for a dying messiah came second.

Vermes makes a similar point from a different angle. In Jesus the Jew, he argues that the historical Jesus is best understood as a charismatic healer and teacher in the tradition of Galilean holy men — figures like Honi the Circle-Drawer and Hanina ben Dosa. Whatever Jesus thought about himself, the messianic theology that developed after his death was a product of the early church, not of Jesus' own self-understanding (at least not in the elaborate Christological form it eventually took).

The Apologetic Response and Why It Fails

Defenders of the traditional Christian reading have answers to all of this, and they deserve to be stated at full strength; the fullest modern statement of the scriptural case is Michael L. Brown's multivolume Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, which argues at length that the Hebrew Bible foretold a suffering messiah. I do not think these answers succeed, but they are better than they are usually given credit for.

First, they argue that the diversity of messianic expectation means there was room for a suffering messiah. But diversity does not mean infinity. The expectations were diverse within a bounded range, and that range consistently included national restoration, military victory, and political sovereignty. A crucified messiah was not one option among many. It was a contradiction in terms, and Paul, writing within a generation, concedes as much: "we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews" (1 Corinthians 1:23, WEB). The strongest form of the diversity argument comes from critical scholars, not apologists: Israel Knohl (The Messiah before Jesus, 2000) finds a slain and exalted messiah at Qumran a generation before Jesus, and Daniel Boyarin (The Jewish Gospels, 2012) argues that a divine, even suffering, messiah was a Jewish idea first. They are a minority. Collins, reviewing Knohl's identification of the hymn's speaker with a messiah put to death after Herod's death, calls it "all extremely speculative" (Scepter, ch. 6, excursus "Israel Knohl's Messiah Before Jesus").

Second, they argue that Isaiah 53 predicted a suffering messiah. The reading that became dominant in medieval and later Judaism — following Rashi in the eleventh century — identifies the suffering servant as the nation of Israel, not an individual messiah. The servant is explicitly identified as Israel multiple times in the surrounding chapters, and that collective reading has a strong textual basis — though 49:5-6, where the servant is sent "to bring Jacob again to him, and to gather Israel to him" (Isaiah 49:5, WEB), is the passage its critics cite. Nor is the collective reading a medieval invention: Origen, in the third century, already reports a Jewish interlocutor who read the passage of the whole people (Contra Celsum 1.55). But even in antiquity, where individual and messianic readings were in fact common, the texts do not give the apologist what he needs. Take Targum Jonathan, the Aramaic paraphrase of the prophets. Its Isaiah grew in layers (Bruce Chilton, its modern translator, distinguishes a Tannaitic from a later Amoraic phase), and its messiah in chapter 53 will build "the sanctuary which was profaned for our sins" — which presupposes the Temple's destruction in 70 CE. This reading is itself post-Christian. It does apply the passage to the messiah: the servant of 52:13 is "my servant the messiah." But most of the suffering in 53:3-10 is redirected onto Israel and the nations, and the messiah becomes what Chilton, surveying the whole Targum, calls "general and teacher, intercessor and final arbiter" (Isaiah Targum, xvii). In chapter 53 he prays effectively for the people's sins, and "in no sense can the Messiah … be said to suffer" (103). Even where the Targum keeps the Hebrew's statement that he handed his life over to death (53:12), it sets that inside a triumph. What it lacks is a messiah whose rejection and death are the means of atonement — which is the Christian reading.

Third, and strongest, they argue that the New Testament itself admits the mismatch and answers it from scripture. The disciples on the Emmaus road say it outright — "we were hoping that it was he who would redeem Israel" (Luke 24:21, WEB) — and the risen Jesus replies, "Didn't the Christ have to suffer these things and to enter into his glory?", explaining "in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:26-27, WEB). The expectation, on this view, was not wrong but incomplete. N. T. Wright adds a historical point that my Josephus paragraph sets up: other messianic movements did not survive their leader's defeat, so this one's survival needs explaining, and Wright explains it by the resurrection (The Resurrection of the Son of God, 2003).

The answer to the scriptural half is Collins': that reading "involved a new line of interpretation … for which there was no precedent in Judaism" (Scepter, ch. 9). Luke 24 is the church explaining its own reinterpretation, not evidence that anyone read the texts that way beforehand. Wright's point is real, and I grant it: something convinced the followers that the crucified man had been vindicated. But the movement's survival shows that they reinterpreted the job description, not that it had included a crucifixion all along.

The historical evidence is what it is. Jewish messianic expectation in the Second Temple period centered on a royal, political, this-worldly deliverer. Jesus of Nazareth did not deliver. His followers reinterpreted the entire concept of messiahship to accommodate that failure. That is where the evidence leaves me. That the Gospel Jesus does not match the militant Davidic profile is common ground among critical scholars, Jewish and Christian; how the early church came to call him messiah anyway is where they disagree.

The question is not whether Jesus fulfilled Jewish messianic expectations. He did not. The question is whether the Christian reinterpretation of those expectations is legitimate — whether you can take a job description that says "defeat the Romans" and, after your candidate gets killed by the Romans, declare that the job description actually said "get killed by the Romans."