[This article is part of the series "Various Views of Jesus"]
Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Scripture are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version® NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblical Inc.® Used by permission of Biblica, Inc.® All rights reserved worldwide.
In Part 1 we presented the Jewish view of Jesus. In Parts 2 and 3 we will present a Christian response to that view.
Christians affirm the Deuteronomy 13 principle: no miracle, however spectacular, can authorize Israel to abandon the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The resurrection is not offered as a miracle that overrides the Hebrew Scriptures, but as God’s public vindication of the One who fulfilled them in their deepest messianic pattern. The question is not whether the Messiah must complete the public work of restoration — Christians agree that He must — but whether the Tanakh teaches that the Messiah’s visible reign comes first, or that sin, atonement, and covenant renewal must come first. The Christian answer is that the Tanakh gives not only the destination of messianic hope but the path: suffering before glory, atonement before restoration, death before vindication, and then the kingdom in its fullness.
The traditional objection assumes the messianic mission had to be completed in one stage. But the Tanakh presents a messianic sequence, not merely a messianic endpoint: rejection, suffering, piercing, death, and atonement precede vindication and glory.[1] On the road to Emmaus, Jesus rebuked His disciples for missing what Moses and the Prophets had already taught: “Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” Then, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:26–27).
Daniel 9 sharpens the sequence. The prophecy begins not with political triumph but with the need “to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness” (Daniel 9:24). Then: “After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One [Mashiach] will be put to death and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary” (Daniel 9:26). Sin must be dealt with, the Messiah is put to death, and, after this, the city and sanctuary will fall. This starkly contrasts Maimonides’ criteria. Rather than prophesying immediate political restoration, Daniel specifies a time of political ruin following the Messiah’s death. Notice how Daniel also prophesied that this would happen before the destruction of the Second Temple — a window that closed permanently in 70 CE.[2]
Isaiah 53 presses the same movement: the Servant is “pierced for our transgressions” and “crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5); He is “cut off from the land of the living” and assigned a grave (Isaiah 53:8–9), yet afterward “will see the light of life” and “prolong his days” (Isaiah 53:10–11).
Psalm 22 adds striking concreteness: “they pierce my hands and my feet” (v. 16); “they divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment” (v. 18) — and yet the psalm ends in worldwide worship (v. 27).
Zechariah binds the threads: “They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him” (Zechariah 12:10), and then “a fountain will be opened… to cleanse them from sin and impurity” (Zechariah 13:1). Piercing, recognition, mourning, cleansing — one sequence.
Each text deserves careful interpretation in its own context, but together they establish a pattern too consistent to dismiss: a righteous or representative figure suffers, is pierced or cut off, bears sin, and is then vindicated in a way that leads to restoration. The Christian claim is not that Jesus will finish later what He failed to do the first time — it is that He accomplished exactly what the Tanakh said had to be accomplished first.
This sequence also makes covenantal sense. Exile and national ruin were themselves covenant judgments for rebellion against God (Leviticus 26; Deuteronomy 28–30); restoration cannot therefore be merely political, because if Israel’s sin remains, the root problem remains. Deuteronomy 30 accordingly promises not only return from exile but heart transformation: “The LORD your God will circumcise your hearts… so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live” (Deuteronomy 30:6). Jeremiah develops the promise into the new covenant, with God’s law written on the heart and sin remembered no more (Jeremiah 31:33–34); Ezekiel 36 adds cleansing, a new heart, and the Spirit. The cross is not an ad hoc excuse for a postponed kingdom; it is the covenantal foundation of the kingdom — and two comings is the natural shape of a prophetic pattern in which atonement precedes restoration and suffering precedes glory.
Jewish tradition itself registered the tension by speaking of two messiahs — Mashiach ben Yosef who suffers and dies and Mashiach ben David who reigns — and the Babylonian Talmud (Sukkah 52a) applies Zechariah 12:10 to the death of Mashiach ben Yosef. In Jesus, Christians find not two messiahs but one whose mission unfolds in two stages.[3]
The New Testament does not retreat from the Davidic requirement. Matthew opens by declaring Jesus “the son of David” (Matthew 1:1); Paul anchors his theology in how Jesus was “born of a descendant of David according to the flesh” (Romans 1:3; NASB); Gabriel tells Mary her child will receive “the throne of his father David” (Luke 1:32).
Christians respond to the patrilineal objection on two levels. First, Joseph’s legal fatherhood placed Jesus publicly within the Davidic house. Joseph was already betrothed to Mary at conception, and in Jewish law betrothal carried full legal weight — Matthew calls Joseph Mary’s “husband” before consummation and describes his contemplated separation as a “divorce” (Matthew 1:18–19). The Torah itself also recognizes lineage that is not strictly biological: the levirate law credits a child born to a widow through her deceased husband’s brother to the dead man’s line (Deuteronomy 25:5–10). And the virgin birth does not even require that analogy, because the objection assumes a competing human father whose biological claim must be adjudicated — and there is none. Joseph’s legal fatherhood stands unopposed.[4] Second, Christians have long argued that Jesus was also biologically related to David through Mary. Paul’s statement that Jesus was “born of a descendant of David according to the flesh” (Romans 1:3; NASB) is naturally read as genuine Davidic descent, and Luke’s genealogy — tracing through David’s son Nathan rather than Solomon (Luke 3:31) — has often been understood as her line.[5]
The dual profile this suggests — an earthly king with heavenly origins — is itself embedded in the Hebrew Scriptures. Micah declared that the ruler emerging from Bethlehem would have origins “from of old, from ancient times” (Micah 5:2). Rashi identifies that ruler as the Messiah and connects his “ancient origins” to the pre-creation language of Psalm 72:17.[6] Jesus pressed the paradox directly: quoting Psalm 110:1 — “The Lord said to my Lord: ‘Sit at my right hand’” — He asked the religious leaders why, if the Messiah were merely David’s biological descendant, David himself calls him “my Lord” (Matthew 22:42–45). They had no answer. As Franz Delitzsch observed, had first-century Judaism taken Psalm 110 to refer to David or an ordinary king, the question would have been trivially answerable. The silence is telling and suggests that the superhuman character of Psalm 110 was widely acknowledged in first-century Judaism.[7]
The false-prophet objection rightly insists that miracles alone are not enough. Christians fully affirm that standard: a sign cannot authorize rebellion against the God of Israel. But Deuteronomy gives Israel not only a warning against false prophets but the promise of a true one: “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your fellow Israelites. You must listen to him” (Deuteronomy 18:15). Some Second Temple Jewish sources show this end-time-prophet expectation standing alongside royal and priestly messianic hopes.[8]
The question is not merely whether Jesus performed signs but whether He led Israel away from Yahweh or revealed Yahweh’s purposes in their promised fullness. Jesus prayed to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He named the Shema the greatest commandment (Mark 12:29). He said plainly, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17), and taught that “Scripture cannot be set aside” (John 10:35). The Christian claim is that Jesus fulfilled the Torah by bringing it to its appointed goal. The priesthood, sacrifices, festivals, and purity laws were divine shadows pointing forward to cleansing, atonement, and God’s dwelling with His people. Jeremiah’s new covenant does not abolish God’s law; it writes it on the heart. The answer to Deuteronomy 13 is therefore not that Torah no longer matters, but that the Torah itself anticipated a greater fulfillment in the Messiah. When the substance arrives, the shadow has served its purpose.[9]
Christians do not believe Jesus is a second god. Biblical Christianity fiercely affirms the Shema. The disagreement does not lie in the number of gods but in the nature of the One God. Maimonidean Judaism defined God’s oneness as absolute, indivisible singularity; Christians respond that this later philosophical formulation cannot simply be read back into the biblical text. In its Deuteronomic context, the Shema is primarily a covenantal declaration of exclusive allegiance: Israel must worship Yahweh alone.[10] Even at the lexical level, the Hebrew word echad is used across the Tanakh where distinct parts are spoken of as one: Adam and Eve become “one [echad] flesh” (Genesis 2:24); the separate panels of the Tabernacle are fastened so that “the tabernacle is a unit [echad]” or literally “one tabernacle” (Exodus 26:6). This does not prove the Trinity, but it shows that Deuteronomy 6:4 does not exclude complexity within the one divine identity.[11]
More important is how God’s oneness is revealed across the Tanakh. In Zechariah 2:8–11 the LORD Almighty speaks of being sent by the LORD Almighty — a striking sender / sent-one distinction within the divine self-revelation. The Aramaic Targums frequently speak of the Memra — the “Word” of the Lord — as God’s personal self-expression, and early Jewish debates over the so-called “Two Powers in Heaven” show that some Jewish readers found in Scripture an exalted heavenly figure who shared in God’s rule, though later rabbinic authorities condemned such readings.[12] The prophets place the Messiah within this complex divine identity. Daniel 7 presents one like a son of man “coming with the clouds of heaven” — cloud-riding imagery the Tanakh elsewhere reserves for Yahweh Himself — and receiving “authority, glory and sovereign power” so that “all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him” (Daniel 7:13–14). Psalm 45 addresses the Davidic king directly as Elohim (“God”), and Isaiah 9 announces the birth of a royal child who bears the title “Mighty God.” These are not Christian inventions; they are tensions already present within Israel’s own canon.[13] The New Testament does not present Jesus as a rival deity but identifies Him with the divine name, throne, glory, works, and worship uniquely belonging to Yahweh. Paul puts it most pointedly in 1 Corinthians 8:6, where he reworks the language of the Shema: “yet for us there is but one God, the Father… and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ.” The earliest Christian claim was not that the Shema had been abandoned but that the crucified and risen Messiah had been revealed within the identity of the one God of Israel.[14]
The charge that the Incarnation is a pagan corruption misreads the Hebrew pattern of God’s presence. At the dedication of the First Temple, Solomon acknowledged that even “the heavens, even the highest heavens,” could not contain God — yet he prayed that God’s presence would be specially associated with the earthly Temple, and the glory of the LORD then filled it so powerfully that the priests could not enter (2 Chronicles 6:18–20; 7:1–2). Just as the cloud of glory in the Holy of Holies did not empty the rest of the universe of God’s presence, the Christian claim that “the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” in Christ (Colossians 2:9) does not mean God shrank or abandoned His heavenly throne.[15]
The Tanakh also records God appearing in visible, personal, and even human form. In Genesis 18, Yahweh appears to Abraham at Mamre as one of three visitors — yet one of them speaks as Yahweh, promises Isaac’s miraculous birth, and remains in dialogue with Abraham as the Judge of all the earth. Even the Babylonian Talmud reads the scene as divine kindness: “the Holy One, blessed be He” came to visit Abraham after his circumcision.[16] If the Torah can speak of Yahweh appearing this way, the Incarnation should not be dismissed as inherently foreign to the Hebrew Scriptures. John’s announcement that “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14) is not a departure from Jewish theology into pagan myth but the climactic expression of a biblical pattern — God’s Word creating, revealing, judging, and saving, and now personally come among Israel in the Messiah.[17]
The Christian Response will conclude in Part 3.
Endnotes