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Israel Knohl

The Messiah before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls Paperback – February 26, 2002

by Israel Knohl (Author), David Maisel (Author)

3.4 27 ratings

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In a work that challenges notions that have dominated New Testament scholarship for more than a hundred years, Israel Knohl gives startling evidence for a messianic precursor to Jesus who is described as the "Suffering Servant" in recently published fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Messiah before Jesus clarifies many formerly incomprehensible aspects of Jesus' life and confirms the story in the New Testament about his messianic awareness. The book shows that, around the time of Jesus' birth, there came into being a conception of "catastrophic" messianism in which the suffering, humiliation, and death of the messiah were regarded as an integral part of the redemptive process.

Scholars have long argued that Jesus could not have foreseen his suffering, death, and resurrection because the concept of a slain savior who rises from the dead was alien to the Judaism of his time. But, on the basis of hymns found at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Knohl argues that, one generation before Jesus, a messianic leader arose in the Qumran sect who was regarded by his followers as ushering in an era of redemption and forgiveness. This messianic leader was killed by Roman soldiers in the course of a revolt that broke out in Jerusalem in 4 B.C.E. The Romans forbade his body to be buried and after the third day his disciples believed that he was resurrected and rose to heaven. This formed the basis for Jesus' messianic consciousness, Knohl argues; it was because of this model that Jesus anticipated he would suffer, die, and be resurrected after three days.

Knohl takes his fascinating inquiry one step further by suggesting that this messiah was a figure known to us from historical sources of the period. This identification may shed new light on the mystery of the "Paraclete" in the Gospel of John. A pathbreaking study, The Messiah before Jesus will reshape our understanding of Christianity and its relationship to Judaism.

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Print length

160 pages
Language

English
Publisher

University of California Press
Publication date

February 26, 2002
Dimensions

5.4 x 0.4 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0520234006
ISBN-13

978-0520234000
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Ralf
Excellent
Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2023
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Condition of the book was excellent, better than described.

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Elsie Ward
Confused and inaccurate history
Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2022
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I did not care for this book because it is highly inaccurate and confused in its historical timeline. I have found so much history in my own research that totally goes against everything written in this book. I am very disappointed.

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Steven Dunn
Creative and engaging scholarship
Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2013
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Israel Knohl offers engaging scholarship that is accessible to a wide audience and offers some challenging and plausible theories regarding Jewish Messianic beliefs. For the price this volume is very slim, but I recommend this for anyone interested in exploring Jewish messianic beleifs in the period just preceding and contemporary with early Christianity. I find this work quite interesting; it helps Christian readers to better appreciate the Jewish context of early Christian belief.

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Santi Tafarella
Well written, scholarly, and important
Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2005
Israel Knohl's "The Messiah Before Jesus" is a University of California publication and has a promotional blurb from a number of big-gun scholars on its back cover, including Emanuel Tov, the Editor-in-Chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Project. It's a good thing, because the thesis of the book has the potential of overturning many assumptions about early Christianity and might be dismissed if proposed by a less respected scholar. The thesis of Knoll's book is that the most recent fragments coming out of the Dead Sea Scrolls project reveal that the Qumran community believed that the Messiah would suffer, be pierced, and rise again on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. This has been the long-anxiety of Orthodox Christians, that the Dead Sea scrolls would prove to undermine the uniqueness of Jesus, or somehow anticipate the central doctrines of Christianity, making them less "special." And Knoll's thesis, and the evidence he supports it with, is compelling and ought to be of grave concern to those who style themselves "Christian apologists." Knoll believes that the Qumran community not only anticipated an Isaiah 53-style "suffering servant" Messiah, but that the leader of their sect believed that he was that Messiah. Knoll further postulates that this Messiah had in fact acted out his beliefs, was martyred, and that the Qumran community believed that he had been raised from the dead and taken up to heaven. This Messiah, according to Knoll, did this a full generation prior to Jesus. Knoll gathers several lines of persuasive evidence for these assertions. Some of his arguments, however, are circumstantial, but if you buy his stronger lines of evidence, they become possible. Two circumstantial lines of evidence that I found interesting (and that can be looked at directly by anyone with a Bible) come from the books of Revelation and John. In Revelation, for example, there seems to have been retained a memory of not one, but two messianic witnesses who die in Jerusalem and are raised from the dead (Revelation 11:10-12). And the gospel of John seems to have retained (in a distorted form) Jesus' messianic-lineage consciousness. In the gospel of John Jesus tells his disciples that he will send them "another Comforter" after he is gone (John 14:16). The word translated "comforter" in Greek is "paraclete." This is the word used to translate the Hebrew word "menahem." It just so happens that a man named Menahem is the leader of the Qumran sect a generation before Jesus. It is this Menahem (mentioned also in Josephus) who Knohl postulates was the first suffering servant of the Qumran community. Thus John's gospel retains the memory of Jesus telling his disciples that he was a "Menahem" and that he, being in a line of "Menahem" would send "another Menahem" after his death.

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"bergsie"
Not a new idea - but will open up avenues.
Reviewed in the United States on October 26, 2000
A Messiah before Jesus is not a new idea. After all, this is what the main crux of the Dead Sea Scrolls is all about, where we have an Essene Teacher of Righteousness whose life not only paralles that of the life of Jesus, but appears to pre-date the Christian saviour. What is more, the Wisdom of Solomon, found in the Catholic Bible but not in the Protestant, if part and parcel of the Old Testament and not the New, suggests in chapters 2 & 3 that not only was there a Messiah before Jesus, but chapter 3 implies that there were many. The Dead Sea Scrolls in turn, "Manual of Discipline: Rules of the Order," also appears to support this view where it states, and I quote from the Millar Burrows translation:
"They shall not depart from any counsel of the law, walking in all the stubbornness of their hearts; but they shall be judged by the first judgments by which the men of the community began to be disciplined, until there shall come a prophet and the Messiahs of Aaron and Israel."
What the Manual of Discipline appears to suggest, was that there was not one or two Messiahs, one pre-dating the other, but rather there was a belief in many Messiahs, this being possibly a group, or "Messianic Order." However, on a more positive note regarding "The Messiah Before Jesus," Israel Knohl's view will certainly open up more avenues for thought, discussion and insight into what really was the situation in Palestine during this period in history.

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trini
Qumran Messiah or Christian Messiah?
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 1, 2007
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The Synopsis says: "Knohl gives evidence for a messianic precursor to Jesus who is described as the `Suffering Servant' in recently published fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls". These do show that claims for a human-divine, suffering, dying, rising and glorified redeemer/saviour leader were in fact already being made in the first century before Christ. Knohl applies these texts to a hypothetical Qumran leader called Menahem, and calls him (p. 8) "the Messiah, who is the `nasi' (leader) of the [Qumran] community", the "Qumran Messiah before Christ", killed in 4 BC leading a revolt against the Romans on the death of Herod. This Menahem had been a friend of Herod, but also a secret enemy of Rome. However, Knohl's linking of the terms Messiah and messianism to this hypothetical `Menahem' (also supposed by Knohl to be the author of these DSS hymns) does not convince. None of this is certain. Josephus's account of this revolt does not mention any Essene Menahem as a messianic leader killed by Rome.

Referring to the two witnesses, killed, their bodies lying for three and a half days in the street, then raised back to life, in Rev. 11.1-12, Knohl says (p. 68): "Menahem was probably one of these two messianic witnesses". Margaret Barker mentions no such thing in her commentary on this passage in her book The Revelation of Jesus Christ. Knohl again (p. 42): "One can therefore assume that one of the two Messiahs killed in 4 BCE was the hero of the messianic hymns from Qumran." All guesswork.

Knohl goes on: "The disciples believed that the humiliated and pierced Messiah had been resurrected after three days and that he was due to reappear on earth as redeemer, victor and judge" (p. 45). But one must ask: where is the redemption wrought by this slain Qumran Messiah? Jewish writers claim that Jesus cannot be the Messiah because he did not lead his people to military victory, nor inaugurate a visible Kingdom of God, a new age of justice and peace. The "Qumran Messiah" certainly fails this test.

Knohl's identification of an actual Qumran-Messiah is very problematical. But he is to be congratulated for stating boldly that the New Testament claims for the Person and Work of Jesus Christ are not Christian inventions, but were already part of the Essene expectations. The Synopsis ends thus: "This book should reshape our understanding of Christianity and its relationship to Judaism." It does - but it reshapes it by solidly supporting Christianity's claims for its Messiah. Knohl quotes Geza Vermes from Jesus the Jew, (1981): "Neither the suffering of the Messiah, nor his death and resurrection, appear to have been part of the faith of first-century Judaism' (Knohl, p. 106, Notes). Knohl says (p.2): "In this book I intend to counter these claims. I propose to show that Jesus really did regard himself as the Messiah and truly expected the Messiah to be rejected, killed, and resurrected after three days, for this is precisely what was believed to have happened to a messianic leader who had lived one generation before Jesus". This is sensational. However, while the Church and the New Testament exist as historical authentications of Jesus' messianic claims, one must ask, humbly but bluntly: what is there to authenticate Knohl's claim that an actual Qumran Messiah was killed but then believed by his followers to have been resurrected after three days and to have risen to heaven in a cloud (p. 45)? Proofs for this belief (Knohl quotes only Revelation 11.12, and Lactantius) and for this resurrection simply do not exist.

A further point. In The Way of the Lord - Christological Exegesis of the Old Testament in the Gospel of Mark (T & T Clark, 1992), Joel Marcus adduces the influence of not only the Suffering Servant, but also Daniel 7, Zechariah 9-14, Psalms 2 and 110, and a very large number of Psalms of the Righteous Sufferer. This is the wide OT sourcing for the NT vision of the Suffering and Rising Messiah. So these latest DSS hymns confirm, but do not originate or create, the NT view of Jesus the Messiah. Jesus did not need the Qumran Messiah's example. His role is already, solidly, in the OT, though one welcomes its further development in the Intertestamental literature.

A final `cri de coeur'. Everything that I have read in the Dead Sea Scrolls debate serves only to confirm the Christian view of Jesus Christ. John summarizes his Gospel thus: "These signs are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His Name" (John 20.31). It is time for the methodology of this scholarly discipline to accept as a `'fait acquis', as the central point now beyond dispute, the authenticity of the New Testament picture of the Messiah. This is the unshakable (certainly unshaken) and inescapable conclusion of every discussion, hostile, neutral or friendly, of the relationship between the Dead Sea Scrolls and Christianity. The New Testament must be accepted as the most detailed and best historically grounded treatment of Messianism - not the DSS, and not the Mishnah and the Talmuds that date from two hundred to six hundred years after Christ. Luke's Gospel has (7.20-23): "John the Baptist has sent us to you [Jesus] to ask: `Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?' Jesus had just cured many people of diseases, plagues, and evil spirits, and had given sight to many who were blind. And he answered them: 'Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them [ptochoi evangelizontai]. And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me [hos ean me skandalisthe en emoi]'".

Messiah has come. Jesus does not 'follow' Menahem. He will have no successor (see Hebr 1.1,2).

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