The Jewish View of Jesus – Part 3

[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.

The Christian Response – Part 2

Jesus Is the Suffering Servant

The earlier argument showed that Isaiah 53 belongs to a broader pattern of suffering before glory. The specific question here is whether Isaiah’s Servant can be reduced to the nation as a whole.

Reading the Servant as the nation is harder to justify textually than the modern Jewish argument suggests. Isaiah 49:3 does call the servant “Israel,” but verses 5–6 say this same servant has a mission “to bring Jacob back to him” and “gather Israel to himself.” The servant represents Israel and yet stands apart from Israel, accomplishing for Israel what Israel itself has failed to do.^[1] That distinction is critical in Isaiah 53, which describes a righteous sufferer bearing the sins of the guilty. The speakers confess they had misjudged him: they assumed he was being punished for his own sins, only to realize he was “pierced for our transgressions” and “crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5). In the Prophets, Israel is ordinarily portrayed as the guilty covenant people suffering for its own sins, not as a perfectly righteous substitute whose wounds heal others. Isaiah 53:9 says of the Servant that he had “done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth” — language standing in deliberate contrast to Isaiah’s recurring charges against Israel itself (“Your hands are full of blood,” Isaiah 1:15; “your hands are defiled with blood … Your lips have spoken deceit” Isaiah 59:3; NASB). Against that backdrop, the Servant is Israel’s righteous counter-image.^[2]

Ancient Jewish interpretation was also more diverse than many modern readers realize. The corporate-Israel reading became dominant in the medieval polemical setting through Rashi, but earlier and later sources include messianic readings. Targum Jonathan opens Isaiah 52:13 with: “Behold, my servant the Messiah shall prosper.” The Babylonian Talmud identifies the Messiah as “the Leper Scholar,” drawing on Isaiah 53:4. The medieval commentator Moshe Kohen Ibn Crispin criticized the corporate reading and argued the passage refers, in its plain sense, to the King Messiah.^[3]

Finally, the text does not end with the Servant’s death. He is “cut off from the land of the living,” assigned a grave, and “poured out his life unto death” — yet afterward “will see his offspring,” “prolong his days,” and “divide the spoils with the strong” (Isaiah 53:8–12). If the Servant truly dies, the passage requires postmortem vindication. The Orthodox Jewish scholar David Flusser acknowledged that if Isaiah 53 speaks of the Servant’s death, it “implicitly also [speaks] about his resurrection.” The Christian reading is not forcing resurrection into the passage; it follows the text’s own movement from suffering, to death, to vindicated life.^[4]

Jesus’ Death Atones for Sin

Rome executed Jesus, but Jesus willingly gave Himself: “I lay down my life.… No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10:17–18). The meaning of the cross derives not from what Rome intended but from what the Messiah freely offered and what God purposed. Isaiah 53 had already provided the category: the Servant would pour out His life unto death and become an asham — a guilt offering — for the sins of others (Isaiah 53:10–12).^[5] The mechanism is not foreign to the Torah. Leviticus 17:11 establishes that “it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life,” and rabbinic tradition affirms the principle in the maxim ein kapparah ella be-dam — “there is no atonement except through blood.” The objection that sacrifice covered only unintentional sins is too narrow; Leviticus 16 says explicitly that Yom Kippur atoned for Israel’s transgressions, including pesha — willful rebellion.^[6] Nor is the idea that one person’s death can carry covenantal significance for others alien to Jewish theology. The Talmud reasons from the death of Miriam and the red heifer that “the death of the righteous atones,” and Numbers 35 enshrines a related pattern: the high priest’s death released manslayers from the cities of refuge. None of this proves substitutionary atonement by itself, but it shows that Scripture and Jewish tradition already contained categories in which the death of a righteous or priestly representative affects the standing of others before God.^[7]

Christians believe these patterns were always pointing forward. The Levitical sacrifices had to be repeated because animal blood could not permanently remove sin’s stain. Jesus, both unblemished offering and ultimate High Priest, entered what Hebrews calls the true heavenly sanctuary and offered Himself once for all, inaugurating the new covenant promised through Jeremiah: “I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more” (Jeremiah 31:34). The destruction of the Temple in 70 CE therefore created no theological crisis; it confirmed that the shadow had passed because the substance had arrived.^[8]

God Raised Jesus from the Dead

The resurrection is the hinge of the Christian claim, but Christians do not present it as a miracle detached from everything else. If Jesus had led Israel away from the God of Israel, the resurrection would not make Him true. But if He directed people to the God of Israel, honored the Torah, and fulfilled the Tanakh’s pattern of suffering before glory and death before vindication, then the resurrection is exactly what we should expect: God’s public vindication of His Messiah.

Jewish history offers a useful comparison. When Rome crushed the Second Jewish Revolt (132–135 CE) and Simon bar Kokhba died, his death did not become the basis for a proclamation that God had raised him. The violent death of a would-be Messiah at pagan hands normally counted against, not for, his messianic claim; dead messianic movements did not become resurrection movements.^[9] The Jesus movement broke that pattern. Very early after His public crucifixion, His followers proclaimed in Jerusalem — the very city of His execution — that God had bodily raised Him. Paul preserves an early tradition in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8: Christ died, was buried, was raised on the third day, and appeared to Peter, the Twelve, more than five hundred people at once, James, all the apostles, and finally to Paul himself — and Paul notes that many of the five hundred were still alive, making the claim publicly verifiable.^[10] The empty tomb also matters. The earliest Jewish counterclaim, recorded in Matthew 28:11–15, was not that Jesus’ body remained in the tomb but that His disciples had stolen it — an explanation that rejects the resurrection while conceding the tomb was empty.^[11] Two further witnesses are especially significant. Paul was no grieving disciple; he was an active persecutor. James was Jesus’ brother, and the Gospels record that Jesus’ brothers did not believe in Him during His ministry (John 7:5). Yet after the resurrection, Paul became the great apostle to the Gentiles and James the leader of the Jerusalem church — both attributing their transformation to encounters with the risen Jesus.^[12]

The resurrection does not stand alone. Daniel 9 said the Messiah would be put to death before the destruction of the city and sanctuary; Isaiah 53 said the Servant would be cut off and then prolong His days; Psalm 22 moved from mocked and pierced humiliation to the ends of the earth turning to the LORD; Zechariah 12–13 moved from looking on “the one they have pierced” to a fountain opened for cleansing. The Father’s raising of the Son is not a last-minute rescue of a failed mission. It is the historical vindication of the Messiah who fulfilled the prophetic sequence already written in Israel’s Scriptures.

Conclusion

This article has sought to present the traditional Jewish objections to Jesus fairly and on their own terms. The points raised are serious and deserve a serious response, and Christians find that response within the Tanakh itself. Taken together, the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings paint a coherent portrait that Jesus matches: a son of David who is greater than David; a prophet like Moses who brings God’s covenant purposes to their climax; a Messiah revealed within the divine name and worship without introducing another god; a God who can dwell among His people without ceasing to transcend all things; a righteous Servant who bears sin; an Anointed One cut off before the destruction of the Second Temple; and a suffering figure whose death gives way to vindication and worldwide worship. No single thread carries the whole case, but the convergence is hard to dismiss.

If you are Jewish and have read this far, you have engaged seriously with some of the hardest questions our two traditions hold in common. The invitation at the end of that engagement is not to abandon the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — or the Scriptures He gave your people. It is to meet the One those Scriptures were always pointing toward.

If you would like to know how to become a follower of the Jewish Messiah, visit our page How to Become a Christian.

Endnotes

1. J. Alec Motyer, The Prophecy of Isaiah: An Introduction and Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 385–89; John N. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah: Chapters 40–66, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 287–92; Michael L. Brown, Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, vol. 3, Messianic Prophecy Objections (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2003), pp. 41–48.↑
2. Brown, Answering Jewish Objections, vol. 3, pp. 51–66.↑
3. S. R. Driver and Adolph Neubauer, eds. and trans., The Fifty-Third Chapter of Isaiah according to the Jewish Interpreters (New York: Ktav, 1969), vol. 2, 99–100, 259; b. Sanhedrin 98b, Sefaria, https://www.sefaria.org/Sanhedrin.98b.↑
4. David Flusser, Judaism and the Origins of Christianity (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1988), 423; Brown, Answering Jewish Objections, vol. 3, 75–77.↑
5. Brown, Answering Jewish Objections, vol. 3, 75–76; Motyer, Prophecy of Isaiah, 430–41.↑
6. b. Yoma 5a, Sefaria, https://www.sefaria.org/Yoma.5a; b. Zevahim 6a, Sefaria, https://www.sefaria.org/Zevachim.6a; Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Teshuvah 1:2; Michael L. Brown, Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, vol. 2, Theological Objections (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000), 109.↑
7. b. Moed Qatan 28a, Sefaria, https://www.sefaria.org/Moed_Katan.28a.↑
8. David M. Moffitt, Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 283–303; George H. Guthrie, Hebrews, NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 325–44.↑
9. y. Ta’anit 4:5, 68d; Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Melachim uMilchamot 11:3–4; N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 3 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 275–76, 557–59.↑
10. James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, Christianity in the Making 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 854–55; Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 264–309.↑
11. Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2004); N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 3 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 636–38.↑
12. Wright, Resurrection of the Son of God, 325–27, 560–62, 704; Habermas and Licona, Case for the Resurrection, chap. 5.↑