James M. Hamilton: First, I wish to make plain the inductive steps that led to this hypothesis. We inductively observe that there is much messianic speculation in second temple Judaism (both in the NT and the intertestamental literature). We add to this the observation that this speculation is anchored in the OT. We then set aside the possibility that ancient people were stupid, which seems to be an implicit assumption of a good deal of modern scholarship, and we seek a hypothesis that explains the data. Since the authors of these texts are presumably seeking to be persuasive to their contemporaries (see, e.g., John 20:31), it seems to me unlikely that their contemporaries would grant the imposition of new meanings onto these texts. One hypothesis that explains the fact that “Early Christians, rabbinic sources, and the sectarians at Qumran cite the same biblical texts in their portrayals of the royal messiah” (J. J. M. Roberts, “The Old Testament’s Contribution to Messianic Expectations,” in The Messiah [ed. J. H. Charlesworth; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992], 41 n. 2) is that the OT is a messianic document, written from a messianic perspective, to sustain a messianic hope. This would mean that these disparate groups are not imposing a messianic interpretation on these texts but rightly interpreting them. This is not the only available hypothesis, but it seems to me to be the most convincing. I agree with John Sailhamer, who writes, “I believe the messianic thrust of the OT was the whole reason the books of the Hebrew Bible were written. In other words, the Hebrew Bible was not written as the national literature of Israel. It probably also was not written to the nation of Israel as such. It was rather written, in my opinion, as the expression of the deep-seated messianic hope of a small group of faithful prophets and their followers” (“The Messiah and the Hebrew Bible,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 44 [2001]: 23). The variations in messianic expectation show that the developing portrait of the coming Messiah was not crystal clear, but the pervasive expectation supports the hypothesis. My second caveat is that though I am calling this “messianic,” I do recognize that this term seems not to receive a technical meaning until the second temple period. But as Rose has written, “It is a matter of confusing language and thought . . . to conclude on this basis that one can speak of messianic expectations properly only after a particular word was used to refer to the person at the center of these expectations” (W. H. Rose, “Messiah,” in Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch [Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2003], 566). Cf. also John J. Collins, The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 11–12.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 05:50:41 +0000
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