What's missing is this: divine presence does not equal messiah. Perhaps it's a rhetorical question, but, Why do so many believers in Christ ( mostly I see it from Christians and Bahai ) equate these two, miracles and messianic status? There seems to be no basis for it.
Good question, I don't disagree so far as the Tanakh prophecies of a
mashiach are concerned. (And I trust Jewish scholars to be the most reliable authorities on this)
It is difficult to understand -
from a strictly scholarly, as opposed to religious point-of-view - exactly how Jesus conceptualised his own 'role' in the divine schema of history. Evidently, he regarded himself to be playing an exceptionally key one in a great cosmic drama. As noted by David Flusser, the Jewish scholar of early Christianity whose research we've been discussing, “
it would be absolutely absurd to suppose that Christianity adopted an unambitious, unknown Jewish martyr and catapulted him against his will into the role of chief actor in a cosmic drama.” So Jesus did so regard himself, only not to the extent of later advanced Christology after his death..
The interesting thing is that there is a school of historical Jesus scholars who don't think he claimed to be the messiah at all. Others (such as NT Wright, Larry Hurtado, David Flusser and Brant Pitre) do believe he thought this. But there is no consensus - so we cannot just say, "
the historical Jesus thought himself the messiah". Another prominent Jewish scholar of Christianity, Daniel Boyarin, does believe that Jesus thought himself to be the messiah - and he has a somewhat controversial 'take' on the intellectual landscape of Second Temple eschatological expectation:
A Jewish Messiah
As a Talmudic scholar, Daniel Boyarin spends his life studying and interpreting obscure ancient Jewish texts.
But, in recent years, Boyarin has been studying documents that most people would not consider to be Jewish texts. He has been bringing all of his Talmudic skills to bear on the study of the sacred texts of the Christian faith, texts that are commonly viewed as being in conflict with the Jewish faith from which they emerged.
Boyarin’s scholarly studies of the New Testament have led him to some startling conclusions...
https://www.thejc.com/judaism/features/why-a-divine-messiah-was-not-beyond-belief-1.44171
The Jewish Gospels is a short work aimed at general readers by Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmud at the University of California in Berkeley. In ancient times, the borders between what Judaism and Christianity were far more porous than we conceive today, he argues: it was not until the fourth century that the doctrinal differences were clarified, not least because of the desire of the Roman-backed church to put clear water between the spreading new faith and those it considered Jews.
His most explosive contention is that the concept of a divine messiah was not an alien import but part of the cauldron of ideas that bubbled in the volatile world of classical Judaism. “The basic underlying thoughts from which both the Trinity and the incarnation grew are there in the very world into which Jesus was born,” he writes.
Jesus could have plausibly claimed to be the “son of God”, or rather the “son of Man”, as was the more potent phrase, which goes back to the Book of Daniel. In his dreams, the prophet sees heavenly thrones — the plural is significant. On one sits the “Ancient of Days” whose hair is white as wool (Daniel 7:9): but emerging from the “clouds of heaven” is another apparition, who is likened to a “Son of Man”, whose “dominion is an everlasting dominion” and who is to be served by all peoples and nations (7:13-14).
Some interpreters may regard the Son of Man simply as the symbolic representation of a warrior-Messiah , who does not enjoy divine status, or of heroic Israel. But Boyarin suggests that Daniel’s vision reflected earlier traditions of a dual Father-Son godhead — which later rabbis successfully fought as heresy but which underlay the Gospels’ depiction of Jesus.
It is fair to say that the apocalyptic visions of Daniel are not familiar territory even to most shul-going Jews. Even less known are other texts on which Boyarin draws to bolster his argument that “Gospel Judaism” was a “Jewish messianic movement”.
The Similitudes of Enoch is an apocryphal work dated by scholars to the tumultuous first century CE — the same era as Jesus — and named after the mysterious character who appears briefly at the start of the Bible and is whisked to heaven.
In the Similitudes, the narrator Enoch recounts a heavenly vision of a figure with “a head of days” like “white wool”, accompanied by another “whose face was like the appearance of a man”. That “Son of Man” sits on “the throne of glory”: he will deliver judgment, vanquish the wicked and be worshipped on earth. Enoch comes to understand that the Son of Man is actually himself.
Another first century Jewish text, the Fourth Book of Ezra, depicts a redeemer “like the figure of a man”, flying with the clouds of heaven to initiate some kind of judgment day. “The forms of many people came to him, some of whom were joyful and some sorrowful; some of whom were bound and some were bringing others as offerings.”
The New Testament, he concludes, is “much more deeply embedded within Second Temple Jewish life and thought than many have imagined, even… in the very moments that we take to be most characteristically Christian as opposed to Jewish: the notion of a dual godhead with a Father and a Son, the notion of a Redeemer who himself will be both God and man, and the notion that this Redeemer would suffer and die as part of the salvational process.”
Of course, this is by no means a consensus view among scholars. PeterSchäfer, author of The Jewish Jesus, for example, believes that Boyarin overstates his case. But investigations of first-century Judaism are shaking old certainties. We all build our worldview on ideas about the past. The effect of works like Boyarin’s is to make the solid ground on which we think we stand seem more like ice that can melt into something more fluid.
I'm of the mind that Boyarin likely overstates his case as well.
Hurtado claims, more modestly, that Jesus regarded himself as kind of like a divine 'viceroy' or agent of the kingdom of God, which Jesus had taught was
"in-breaking" within history, following the ministry of John the Baptist (the last of the prophets, in Jesus's understanding). As E.P. Sanders noted in his landmark study
The Historical Figure of Jesus: "
As a devout Jew, Jesus thought that God had previously intervened in the world in order to save and protect Israel...Jesus thought that God would act even more decisively: he would create an ideal world. He would restore the twelve tribes of Israel, and peace and justice would prevail. Life would be like a banquet".
Jesus thought this process of 'kingdom-building' - already immanent in the world and spreading like the yeast leavening the dough in his parable, or the tiny seed slowly maturing into a great tree in one of his other kingdom parables - had been inaugurated with John's ministry and most particularly in his own. He thought this process would continue until the whole world was transformed by it: "
I have come to set the world on fire, and I wish it were already burning!" (
Luke 12:49)
He thought he was playing an eschatological role predicted by the Jewish prophets of the Tanakh, that we can be absolutely sure of. Which role, specifically, is up for debate but it involved - evidently - God's Reign be returned to Israel and spreading universally through his movement.
