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The First Messiah

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This is a truly remarkable book. Wise offers an interpretation of the enigmatic figure of the Teacher of Righteousness, who figures as a unique teacher and interpreter of the Bible in central texts of the Qumran scrolls. Many scholars have ascribed a large part of the Thanksgiving Hymns to him. Alphonse Dupont-Sommer regarded him as a forerunner of Jesus. Wise goes much further. Based on a close examination of the Hymns and other Qumran literature, Wise is able to reconstruct the life and career of the Teacher, who started out as a high-ranking Jerusalem priest, and ended up as an exiled rebel, but deriving strength from his firm belief that he is the Messiah of God. As a careful and highly respected scholar, Wise naturally realises that such a reconstruction has to be speculative. He therefore presents it as a kind of historical novel. The result is astounding But it is largely convincing. The story of the First Messiah comes to life. Wise presents us with a detailed picture of the inner life of a great religious figure. He starts his account with a review of various Messiahs of the modern world, finding several common characteristics. He ends by comparing the First Messiah with the Jesus of the New Testament, finding many parallels between them. But he derives the similarities rather from the psychological mind-set of all Messiah figures, not from more direct influences. Remarkably, he never even mentions the Essenes, considered by most modern scholars as the religious group responsible for the Qumran Scrolls, and thus the community in which the Teacher was working. It is also remarkable that Wise, when discussing the Jesus of the New Testament, does not bring out the very marked difference between the Jesus figure of Paul - remarkably similar to the Essene Teacher - on one hand, and the Jesus of the Gospels and Acts, on the other. The largely fictional nature of the latter figure is emphasized in recent books by George A. Wells (The Jesus Myth), Earl Doherty (The Jesus Puzzle), T. Freke and P. Gandy (The Jesus Mysteries), and myself (Jesus, - A Hundred Years before Christ). Altogether Wise's superlatively written book is a weighty contribution to our knowledge of Judaism and and its Christian offspring in the centuries around the beginning of our era.

Alvar Ellegård, University of Göteborg, Sweden.

This book, along with Israel Knohl's "The Messiah Before Christ" (see my review) present conflicting but very credible theories concerning the Qumran Teacher of Righteousness and how he may have been a catalyst for Jesus' self understanding as the Messiah of Israel.

Wise identifies the Teacher as an individual named Judah who started a breakaway movement about 76 b.c. in opposition to the Pharasaic takeover of the Temple. We can surmise that this may be the Essene leader of the same name mentioned in Josephus but Wise leaves that up to the reader.

Wise goes through each of the hymns he believes were written by Judah which gives us the only authentic self portrait we have of a Jewish messianic leader almost contemporaneous with Jesus. These writings are crucial to our understanding of Jesus and the New Testament. Rather than undermining the New Testament, which so many sensationalists have done, the Thanksgiving Hymns actualy support the claims that were made about Jesus. They also explain why Jesus may have been so hostile to Pharisees since these were Judah's antagonists as well.

Wise claims that the "Self Glorification Hymn" was probably written after Judah's martyrdom by his followers which is strikingly similar to what Jesus' followers handed down to us in the New Testament.

Even if you don't agree with Wise's theories, he gives us an outstanding and in depth overview of the Dead Sea Scroll community. The Damascus Document gives us a history of the community similar to the Book of Acts. The progression of the hymns written by Judah reveals how his own movement progressed and was in danger of collapsing when many of his followers turned on him. It reveals the diversity of Judaism and how they were pitted against eachother even though the ultimate enemy was the foreign invader ie Rome. The War Scroll is a cryptic diatribe against Rome, similar to the Book of Revelation, and that Rome would be desroyed on a cosmic and supernatural scale, not by human political movements.

Jesus probably became familiar with Judah's legacy through John the Baptist who was probably a member of this community at one time. After John was killed, Jesus took the messianic role upon himself which Judah had done a hundred years prior.

The most important idea in this book is that if Judah could believe this about himself, why not Jesus?

Michael O. Wise's book The First Messiah is well worth reading for those interested in ancient history, especially Palestine during the first century B.C. This book is a page-turner. It is chock-full of interesting stories from obscure corners of history. Its only drawback is the weak final chapter, which talks about Jesus.

The main topic of Wise's book is crisis cults, in particular, a crisis cult called the Judah cult which began in about 76 B.C. A crisis cult is a cult led by a charismatic figure who persuades a group of people who are in crisis that something is going to happen to change their lives for the better. The something in question is a definite event in space and time. In other words, the leaders of these cults make unambiguous predictions that can easily be confirmed or disconfirmed by anyone. Most of the time these predictions do not come true, which causes profound confusion and disappointment in their followers.

The Judah cult began when a priest in Jerusalem found himself on the outs after a change in political power which produced a change in religious power and practices as well. Railing against the new establishment openly, he found himself exiled permanently. The number of his followers kept dwindling until a prediction of his came true, after which the numbers increased dramatically. But they fell to almost nothing when a second prediction, concerning the year 36 B.C., failed to come to pass.

History has forgotten Judah, if indeed he ever existed and if he was named Judah (Wise isn't sure about the name). Wise and his student Michael Douglas discerned that such a person existed, was exiled, and led a cult on the basis of a new and exciting interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of which have turned out to be from the cult and even from Judah himself. One point left unexplained by Wise is why these texts ended up in Qumran, for the group that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls seems entirely separate from the Judah cult (or did I miss something?).

The weakest part is the final chapter, the chapter about the Jesus cult. Throughout the book, Wise talks in general terms about crisis cults and what they are like as well as talking about the Judah cult. Repeatedly, he implies that the Jesus cult is like other crisis cults and that it is like the Judah cult in particular. So I was expecting him to draw certain conclusions about the Jesus cult, which he unaccountably didn't draw. For example, the followers have to decide what to do when the leader's predictions do not come true. I expected Wise to talk about what Christians had to do when Jesus' prediction of returning in the lifetime of the disciples failed to happen. But he says nothing about this. And I expected him to talk about the cultural milieu in which Jesus existed, that he was like other would-be Jewish messiahs in that he felt that the rule of the Romans was the result of sinful practices and that if the Jews could just abandon those practices, then everything would turn out right. Such a messiah would hardly be interested in founding a religion distinct from Judaism. Again, though, Wise says nothing about this. The last chapter is a disappointing end to an otherwise enjoyable book.

Author Wise has done a masterful work showing that the "historical" Jesus could have easily asserted his role as Messiah by virtually proving that 100 years before the time of Jesus there was someone (probably named Judah) who not only made the same claims, but was the one who first POPULARIZED the idea of a semi-divine Messiah.

The book further demonstrates, rather successfully I might say, that in the Dead Sea Scrolls we actually can read this first Messiah's own words... not just the words written decades later by followers.

In fact, for the first time in this reader's experience, in Judah's writings you can see a direct connection with the kinds of spiritual views and "Jewish innovation" that the modern knowledgeable reader might have always seen in Christianity. "Was it Jesus himself who invented so much of the novel theology we call Christianity?" According to this book, the answer is a quiet "no." Some of the basic "planks" of faith of Christianity existed at least 100 years earlier in the works of this First Messiah.

I am sure there are those who would want the book to make a controversial three-way connection between the "Dead Sea Scroll" Judah, Jesus and the Essenes. I am not surprised that the author deliberately chose a conservative approach and refused to fish in those waters in this particular book. But I would not be surprised if the author later follows up with an equally exciting sequel that pursues those matters to the likely satisfaction of all Essene-oriented readers.

This book is a "MUST READ" for anyone who wants to see how coherent a picture the Dead Sea Scrolls CAN make of early Judea when armed with a full understanding of scriptural text and cultural context. Get the book!

Michael Wise's 1999 book is subtitled "Investigating the Savior before Christ." As the subtitle suggests, it seeks to identify the first Jewish "messiah", upon whom Jesus and more than a dozen other individuals based their own ministries. Previous attempts to identify this "original cause" are represented in the works of Knohl and Ellegard to name a few.

Chapter 1 of Wise's book is entitled "Of Messiahs and Myth Dreams" and it covers the history of messiahs and crisis cults. This chapter is well written, interesting, and provocative. Unfortunately Wise is merely descriptive. Had he used the case material he presents as a road map to construct a theory of messianic aspirations, this would have been a seminal text. Instead it is merely a great read.

Beginning in Chapter 2, Wise develops his theory. The original Messiah was the Essene "Teacher of Righteousness". He was 60 years old and his name was Judah. He lived during the late 1st Century BCE, at which time the Jewish nation was at war with itself - Alexander Jannaeus and the Sadducees vs. the Pharisees. Following Alexander's death, the nation was ruled by his widow (Alexandra) and her eldest son, Hyrcanus II. Wise believes that Judah was the author of the Thanksgiving Hymns, written in 76 BCE. He opposed the new rule by the Pharisees, calling them "seekers of accommodation". Eventually he was tried (deserted by his colleagues) and exiled to the wilderness of Damascus. He took with him some 150 followers, and they lived by brigandry (a very interesting section in Wise's book). Eventually the cult withered to a mere handful and the Teacher died in 72 BCE. His followers searched the OT to make sense of his life/death, eventually producing the Manual of Discipline (aka Community Rule) and the Damascus Document. When war broke out with Rome in 65 BCE and Israel lost its independence, Judah's prophecies turned out to be correct and his cult flourished. Wise extrapolates from copies of scripts to numbers of believers (pp 242-243) and shows that the cult grew from 250 to 4000+ believers from 65 BCE to 35 BCE (remember that Josephus' estimate of the number of Essenes in the early 1st Century CE was 4000).

For Wise, the story of Judah (taken from his interpretation of the DSS) created the archetype of the messiah which Jesus (and others) would follow. Wise chronicles this transition in Chapter 10, wherein he describes Jesus as a "scripture prophet"

The book is well written and there are extensive notes. Annoyingly, there is no reference list. Wise certainly knows his material, but he requires "leaps of faith" to follow him in his interpretations. The main benefit of his book is that he documents the fact that messianic ideas were already alive and well when Jesus appeared. But this is hardly new information, and more than one character has been identified as the "prime mover". Wise merely offers a new candidate.

THE FIRST MESSIAH provides interesting speculation regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls that were unearthed in 1948. Many scholars point them out as being the documents of an early Christian community, or possibly the Essenes. A lot of tension has been raised by those who claim to be reverting back to the originial Christian Church structure, closer in keeping with Jesus' teachings. Actually, Jesus' message was bastardized from the start, because such concepts as "if you do not have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one," and the kingdom of heaven being taken by violence, and Christ's admonition to "whosoever will not have me as king over them, drag them forth and slay them before me," did not come to frutition until the medieval period.

The book starts out with a description of various cults and messianic delusions dispersed in world history in many different cultures: David Koresh, the Millerites (19th century version of today's Christian fundamentalism), Cargo cults, Flagellants, the 1890 Ghost Dance, Sabbatai Sevi, etc. One common element in these cults is that the world is about to end [violently], and only those who are in some way mystically united to the cult's leader/Christ figure, who will return from the dead after being persecuted, will survive the apocalypse and be united with the Christ-figure in glory.

In the case of the Dead Sea texts, especially the Thanksgiving Psalms and the Damascus Document, this apparent messiah is known as "Judah." No apparent justification is given to "Judah" being named this, but otherwise the author's speculations are reasonably well based and grounded in original insight into the texts he is analyzing. Judah was a Sadducee, connected to the Jerusalem Temple and the Priesthood around 150 BC. At that time, there was much infighting among the Judeans between the Sadducees (the elite Temple Priesthood and their supporters; we see them on TV as 'the GOP'), and the Pharisees (teachers with their own [false] interpretations of the Pentateuch that garnered widespread popular support; i.e.the Democrats). The Pharisees gained the upper hand, and Judah was brought before them on trial for his un-orthodox teachings. He was exiled from Jerusalem, and a sizable band of his disciples together with their familes fled with him into the wilderness in Syria where they became brigands. Later, Judah attempted to return to Jerusalem but was apparently killed in a battle. His followers expected Judah to come back from the dead, and felt that the world was about to end. Their cult lasted for the next 200 years or so in isolated areas in Palestine and it developed its own religious literature, including their interpretations of Biblical texts along with Judah's own writings and introspections. Judah came to believe himself a messiah, the branch of David, by studying the Bible and convinced a large and sometimes influential group of people to follow him. If above story is true, then the Dead Sea Scrolls tell the first historical account of a radical cult coming into conflict with society led by a charismatic leader which are now notorious in the past 200 years.

I echo what other reviewers have said: intriging, not the most dense history text, but well researched.

I want to clear up some points from the other reviews:

1) In the first chapter, he doesn't exactly give a history of crisis cults, but several examples throughout history. The theory could be fleshed out more. I think most readership can fill in the blanks, but it might have been more explicit.

2) I believe he readily admits that he decided to call the person he is referring to "Judah", so as to not have to repeat phrases like 'the person he is referring to' over and over again. I would not make a big deal of it. It helps the story along.

3) He admits that he is extrapolating from the documents, and so the biography is necessarily somewhat speculative. He seldom loses sight of this fact, like some books do. Occasionally, he needs to argue his points better before moving on to the next thing. Those are choices any author has to make, and they will bother some readers more than others. More extensive notes and references might have addressed this better.

4) Related to the last point: in his defence, he includes the quotes on which he is basing his biography. He also indicates where the text is broken. I think the quotes are a very good inclusion. It largely answers those who say his story is speculative.

A few criticisms:

1) As several people mention, the last chapter is not well argued. The thesis seems to be that Jesus, like "Judah", saw a role for himself in the Hebrew literature. In other words, he is arguing against those who say that the connection of Jesus' messiah-ship to the Hebrew scriptures occurred only after Jesus' death, by his followers, trying to make sense of thier master's untimely and horrific death. Unfortunately (as spelled out by other reviews) his argument comes up short.

It is probably worth another book (or at least several chapters). It seems like he is saying that because crisis cult leaders often pour over scriptures to find a role for themselves, re-invent thier role as prophecies fail to come true, etc. that Jesus did this as well. While there may be something in human nature that both explains why crisis cults take a similar form across history and applies to Jesus as well, does that 'something' exclusively explain the development of Christianity? Probably not, and that topic, and the relationship of the crisis cult factor to other factors, is left unexplored.

2) He does not connect the texts he is using for the life of 'Judah' to the other scrolls. He leaves the question of who wrote the Dead Sea scrolls, how they got to where the modern era found etc. alone. He somewhat dismissed it, saying that the scrolls found could have been part of a much larger library (implying that speculation about them is therefore pointless).

3) An intriguing thought was that the idea of a messiah as expressed in Judah and Jesus started with Judah. The assertion is covered in a few paragraphs. Although dense with references, that kind of assertion deserves a refutation of counter-arguments. I thought it was worth a chapter of its own.

4) The method of transmission, as it were, is largely left unexplored. Was it a transmission to John the Baptist to Jesus, with both making personal re-interpretations of the messiah-ship idea and removed it from its 'Judah' source? Or did Judah and his followers release it into the zeitgist of Palestine in the first century BCE? He seems to imply both: the first directly and the second indirectly (through the estimate of growth of the cult after Judah's passing).


Conclusion: As I mentioned above, this is an extremely intruigung read. It will take you down paths that you find yourself wishing the author had explored more in depth.

This book raises several interesting questions, and the author has certainly done extensive research. But it may be worth noting that the teacher of righteousness was not necessarily considered a messiah. The fictional name this book uses for the teacher, Judah, may in fact be the actual historical name--more fully, Judah the Essene, known from the books of Josephus. But the book has excluded relevant information about the Essenes, and that exclusion, in my opinion, distorts its proposed historical reconstruction. What I consider to be this distorting exclusion follows from two mistakes which are not unique to this book. First, some scholars who misunderstood the writing of Pliny on Essenes (or the relevant archaeology) sought to separate the Dead Sea Scrolls from the Essenes who lived at Qumran. Second, though it is often said that the Dead Sea Scrolls don't include the name "Essene" as a self-description, they actually do use the Hebrew form of this name (meaning "observers of torah")-- indeed, including in texts which also involve the teacher of righteousness. Though I found several aspects of the history analysis unpersuasive, the book does make several interesting observations along the way.

I have just re-read Wise's book, The First Messiah - Investigating the Saviour Before Jesus. It mingles scholarship and guesswork in such a way that it fails to achieve its aims.

The first major flaw in Wise's thesis is that he invents an almost entirely fictitious biography for the Teacher of Righteousness of the Dead Sea Scrolls, whom he identifies as his `First Messiah'. Furthermore, the TOR never calls himself Messiah, and none of his followers, either during his lifetime or after his death, ever called him Messiah.

Given the discussions about the meaning of `Messiah' in Vermes, Fitzmyer, Brown, Charlesworth, JJ Collins, Lim, Brooke, etc., Wise needs to have more clearly defined why he would call his `Judah' a Messiah. Fr Raymond Browns says: "... we know of no historical Jew who ever claimed to be the Messiah or was called the Messiah except Jesus of Nazareth" (An Introduction to New Testament Christology, p. 159).

I can sympathize with Wise's belief that the TOR showed some of the characteristics of the Messiah/Prophet/Priest/Teacher/King/Saviour/Shepherd/Isaianic-servant/Righteous-sufferer/Melchizedek/Son of God/Son of Man/Son of the Most High, hoped for and sketched out in the OT, the DSS, and the other Intertestamental literature.

In fact this is the only really valuable contribution made by Wise. He and Israel Knohl, who published his `The Messiah Before Jesus' at exactly the same time as Wise (see my Review of Knohl) confirm decisively that there is not a single New Testament reference to the person and work of the Divine Messiah Jesus Christ that can any longer be ruled out as contrary to the 'Judaisms' of the late second Temple period.

Unfortunately, from the same DSS data, for his `First Messiah' Wise chooses a `Judah', the TOR, who died in 72 BC, while Knohl chooses an `invented' Menahem, a different Qumranite leader, killed in 4 BC by the Romans during a Jewish revolt following Herod's death. Too many claimants for the same position.

But more decisively, not one of these claimants was a successful `Messiah'. Therefore not a Messiah.

In contrast, the writings of the New Testament show irrefutably that one such Messianic figure did emerge and leave an everlasting legacy - Jesus of Nazareth. On grounds of pure biblical scholarship, DSS research strengthens, beyond cavil, the Christian claims for the divine Messiahship of Jesus of Nazareth, because no other successful Jewish claimant can be produced, while every claim made for any such other claimant is `successfully' (my italics) exemplified in Jesus.

More problems with Wise's case.

Throughout his book Wise keeps making out that his Judah is similar to the `crisis cult' figures he has discussed in his first chapter. I think this `crisis cult' comparison is a grave methodological mistake. "Though every Messiah is a prophet, not every prophet is a messiah. Mambu was a prophet, as was William Miller: Konrad Schmid and Sabbatai Sevi were messiahs" (p. 30). I won't have this. Anyone can `claim' (my italics) to be a prophet or a messiah - meaning what? My definition of either such personage, to be meaningful, must be prefaced by the adjective `successful' (my italics). Even less convincingly, and never with any shadow of evidence, he also often places Jesus of Nazareth as well in that same line of `crisis cult' charismatics. No.

Again, though he identifies his `Judah' with the Teacher of Righteousness, Wise, against the consensus, never shows the ToR functioning in the Essene community at Qumran. He says bluntly: "In fact, there is no reason to believe that Judah was ever in Qumran" (p. 306, note 4). Wise uses the word `Essene' only once in his book. He never explains why the writings (especially Hymns) of his ToR Judah form part of the `Dead Sea Scrolls'. His Judah has no connection with the Essenes, with Qumran, or a Dead Sea library. Instead, he invents a lengthy biography for Judah that is pure fiction. The ToR dies/is killed in 72 BC. His group rapidly swells to about 4,000 following the Roman invasion of 63 BC, because they apocalyptically prophesy the End of Days in the year 34 BC (all pure fiction). In face of the non-fulfilment of this prophecy, they fade away.

And one still has to deal with the even more audacious claim that Wise makes for his `First Messiah' Judah in the sub-title of his book: namely, that he is "the Savior Before Christ". I must be brief.

For starters, the word `Savior' does not even appear in Wise's index. He simply does not treat the subject! The nearest he comes to the topic is in his Chapter 9, "Reckoned with the Gods". (Nevertheless, here, like Knohl, Wise does a great service to DSS scholarship, by stressing that the claims made by and for Jesus of Nazareth in the NT, once condemned as Christian inventions after the death of Jesus, were in fact powerfully present in Qumran.) But Wise can produce absolutely nothing for 'Judah' to correspond to the NT's foundation statement, endlessly repeated, that Jesus is our Saviour through his death and resurrection. There is not one word to show that Judah saved his followers from their sins, and that it is through him that they will come to the glory of heaven.

Wise's case also fails when he attempts to equate the deaths of 'Judah' and Jesus. Wise says: "What had happened to Judah after his death? According to the redaction of the Thanksgiving Hymns, just what Christian tradition was to claim for Jesus. He had taken his seat at the right hand of God. For Judah's followers, he was now semidivine, the highest angel, just as for certain early Christian groups ... Jesus assumed the role after the resurrection" (p. 224). I reject this claim for Judah. There is simply nothing to indicate that Judah's followers ever looked on their dead leader in this light, whereas the whole of the NT record is that after Jesus' death his followers saw him exactly and only in a divine light.

Wise ends his Chapter 9 thus (p. 252): "Judah led a crisis-cult reaction [to Alexandra's promotion of the Pharisees] that was in so many ways similar to other crisis cults. Yet Judah's was different from earlier movements in a crucial way. Not content merely to be a prophet, a mouthpiece for God's new laws, Judah would be their centrepiece. With that move of paranormal audacity, he became the first messiah known to history".

This is an astonishing claim, and it must be rejected. Wise himself clearly states that Judah's life with all its promise, and his movement, ended in tragic failure, and disappeared: "With the advent of a generation that had never known the upstroke [the popular, successful stage of Judah's movement, before his death], the Society [Judah's] passed from this world, though it did not die before etching Judah into the myth-dream" (p. 252).

I cannot deal here in detail with Wise's last chapter, "The Other Messiah", which presents Jesus of Nazareth as another prophet, coming after Judah. To do justice to the case for Jesus of Nazareth one would have to comment on every verse in the New Testament, and write the two-thousand-year history of Christianity. But to see no essential difference between the failed Judah and the massively supported claims for the success of the Messiahship of Jesus of Nazareth speaks volumes for the methodological weakness of Wise's thesis.

Micheal Wise worked with Robert Eisenman on the 'Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered". It is interesting that in this book Wise does not mention 'James the Brother of Jesus' or any other of Eisenman's solo books at all, and come to that Eisenman's 'James the Brother of Jesus' ignores this book. But then their readings of the scrolls are totally different.

Wise reads closely the Thankgiving hymns, the MMT, the Damascus Document, the Melchizedek dosument etc and contructs an hypothesis that the Teacher of Righteousness lived in the 70s BCE under the rule of Alexander Jannaeus and his widow Alexandria. Wise calls the man 'Judah' but not give reasons. Judah, a reactionary in opposition to temple innovations introduced by the Pharisees and who had visions of himself at the right-hand side of God, was convicted of heresy and exiled to the 'land of Damascus' where he and his followers became brigands. A few years later he was killed. However his writings were taken to prophesy the Roman invasion of the next decade, and his cult took off.

The hypothesis is well argued in itself, but Wise does not engage with Eisenman's hypotheis that James, the brother of the Lord, is the Teacher of Righteousness; nor with Isreal Knohl's 'The Messiah Before Jesus' which uses the same material to construct the hypothesis that Menahem at the court of the first Herod is the Teacher of Righteousness. All threee hypotheses have merit, and we need a book that does a comparative evaluation of the hypotheses.

In his final chapter, Wise compares Judah to Jesus, and the quality of the book falls enormously. Wise ignores the wealth of books published on the (non)historicity of Jesus and writes as he might for a church sermon. He simply accepts the gospel Jesus, and that he was a carpenter and came from a viaage called Nazareth, as if these are not enormous stumbling blocks.

Read this book, but also read Knohl and Eisenman.