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These are opinionated essays. They argue positions on biblical-studies topics and draw conclusions from critical scholarship. For neutral, both-sides treatments that adjudicate nothing, see Scripture Analysis.
Tagged “Jewish interpretation”
7 posts · Show all posts
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The Triumphal Entry: Fulfillment or Staging?
Mark's Jesus sends ahead for the donkey, and Matthew's version has two animals where Zechariah's poetry has one. Why the triumphal entry reads as an enactment rather than a prediction come true, and where scholars divide.
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Messiah ben Joseph: Did Jews Expect a Dying Messiah?
Rabbinic tradition knows a messiah who dies before the final redemption. But in the Talmud he falls in battle rather than dying for sins, and the texts that name him come after Jesus. What the tradition can and cannot show.
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The Suffering Servant Debate: Israel, the Prophet, or the Messiah?
Isaiah 53 read through the Septuagint, Qumran, the Targum, the Talmud and Rashi: why an ancient messianic reading was never a Christian one.
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How the New Testament Writers Read the Old Testament
The New Testament writers did say the prophets spoke of Jesus. But they read those texts by pesher, midrash and typology, finding correspondences backward from Jesus, and none of those methods yields a prediction.
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Ezekiel's Shepherd-King, Reduced to One Line
The 356-prophecy list keeps Ezekiel's shepherd-king as one line, "Descendant of David", and drops the land, the statutes, the reunited tribes and the temple.
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What Jews Actually Expected From the Messiah
Second Temple Jews looked for a king, a priest, a prophet or a heavenly figure. John J. Collins's four messianic paradigms, and why none of them had room for a messiah whose defining act was to die.
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The Proof-Text Game: How 356 Becomes 24
A popular list counts 356 prophecies fulfilled in Jesus. Check each verse in its context and the count falls to roughly two dozen that some ancient Jewish tradition read messianically, and only a handful of those predate Christianity.