Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

biography about a human being.
    Still, there is no mistaking the tension that exists in the gospels between how the
     early church viewed Jesus and how Jesus seems to view himself. Obviously, the disciples
     who followed Jesus recognized him as messiah, either during his lifetime or immediately
     after his death. But one should not forget that messianic expectations were by no
     means uniformly defined in first-century Palestine. Even those Jews who agreed that
     Jesus was the messiah did not agree about what being the messiah actually meant. When
     they scoured the smattering of prophecies in the scriptures, they discovered a confusing,
     often contradictory, array of views and opinions about the messiah’s mission and identity.
     He would be an eschatological prophet who will usher in the End of Days (Daniel 7:13–14;
     Jeremiah 31:31–34). He would be a liberator who will release the Jews from bondage
     (Deuteronomy 18:15–19; Isaiah 49:1–7). He would be a royal claimant who will recreate
     the Kingdom of David (Micah 5:1–5; Zechariah 9:1–10).
    In first-century Palestine, nearly every claimant to the mantle of the messiah neatly
     fit one of these messianic paradigms. Hezekiah the bandit chief, Judas the Galilean,
     Simon of Peraea, and Athronges the shepherd all modeled themselves after the Davidic
     ideal, as did Menahem and Simon son of Giora during the Jewish War. These were king-messiahs
     whose royal aspirations were clearly defined in their revolutionary actions against
     Rome and its clients in Jerusalem. Others, such as Theudas the wonder worker, the
     Egyptian, and the Samaritan cast themselves as liberator-messiahs in the mold of Moses,
     each would-be messiah promising to free his followers from the yoke of Roman occupation
     through some miraculousdeed. Oracular prophets such as John the Baptist and the holy man Jesus ben Ananias
     may not have overtly assumed any messianic ambitions, but their prophecies about the
     End Times and the coming judgment of God clearly conformed to the prophet-messiah
     archetype one finds both in the Hebrew Scripture and in the rabbinic traditions and
     commentaries known as the Targum.
    The problem for the early church is that Jesus did not fit any of the messianic paradigms
     offered in the Hebrew Bible, nor did he fulfill a single requirement expected of the
     messiah. Jesus spoke about the end of days, but it did not come to pass, not even
     after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and defiled God’s Temple. He promised that God
     would liberate the Jews from bondage, but God did no such thing. He vowed that the
     twelve tribes of Israel would be reconstituted and the nation restored; instead, the
     Romans expropriated the Promised Land, slaughtered its inhabitants, and exiled the
     survivors. The Kingdom of God that Jesus predicted never arrived; the new world order
     he described never took shape. According to the standards of the Jewish cult and the
     Hebrew Scriptures, Jesus was as successful in his messianic aspirations as any of
     the other would-be messiahs.
    The early church obviously recognized this dilemma and, as will become apparent, made
     a conscious decision to change those messianic standards. They mixed and matched the
     different depictions of the messiah found in the Hebrew Bible to create a candidate
     that transcended any particular messianic model or expectation. Jesus may not have
     been prophet, liberator, or king. But that is because he rose above such simple messianic
     paradigms. As the transfiguration proved, Jesus was greater than Elijah (the prophet),
     greater than Moses (the liberator), even greater than David (the king).
    That may have been how the early church understood Jesus’s identity. But it does not
     appear to be how Jesus himself understood it. After all, in the entire first gospel
     there exists not a single definitive messianic statement from Jesus himself, not even
     at the veryend when he stands before the high priest Caiaphas and somewhat passively accepts
     the title that others keep foisting upon him (Mark 14:62). The same is true for the
     early
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source material, which also contains not a single messianic statement by Jesus.
    Perhaps Jesus was loath to take on the multiple expectations the Jews had of the messiah.
     Perhaps he rejected the designation outright. Either way, the fact remains that, especially
     in Mark, every time someone tries to ascribe the title of messiah to him—whether a
     demon, or a