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JEWISH LITERATURE, especially polemical literature, is replete with arguments that the Messiah could not have come—or that Jesus could not have been the Messiah—because the prophecies of the end of days remain unfulfilled. In most cases, these two formulations appear interchangeable. Since the very definition of the concept ‘Messiah’ is rooted in biblical descriptions of visible, global redemption, Judaism properly recoiled from scenarios without a shred of biblical justification in which the Messiah's mission is interrupted by death in an unredeemed world. The God of the Hebrew Bible sends the messianic king to accomplish his end, not to follow a two-part script in which the hero tragically dies and the words ‘to be continued’ suddenly appear on the screen.
The Jewish denial of this possibility has been expressed in various forms through the ages. This appendix presents a small but, I hope, representative sampling of relevant texts. Three of these, from Maimonides, Nahmanides, and Sefer haberit, have appeared in whole or in part earlier in the book.
1. Midrash Bereshit Rabba 98:
Our father Jacob saw Samson [in a prophetic vision] and thought that he was the King Messiah. Once he saw that he died, he said, ‘This one too has died. For your salvation I wait, O Lord.’
2. Jacob ben Reuben, Milḥamot hashem(c.1170), ed. Judah Rosenthal (Jerusalem, 1963), 78:
‘And this is the name by which he shall be called: the Lord our Righteousness’ (Jer. 23: 6). You [the Christian] said that the Messiah is called ‘the Lord our Righteousness’. Now according to your words, how can you say that this messiah of yours ‘reigned as king and prospered’? How were ‘Judah and Israel delivered in his days’, and how did they ‘dwell securely’ (Jer. 23: 5–6)? … [This figure] is the [true] messianic king, as it is written afterwards, ‘Assuredly, a time is coming—declares the Lord—when it shall no more be said, “As the Lord lives, who brought the Israelites out of the land of Egypt”, but rather, “As the Lord lives, who brought out and led the offspring of the House of Israel from the northland and from all the lands to which I have banished them.”
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