The First Messiah: Investigating the Savior Before Jesus

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 for Wise and Knohl, 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.

And, decisively, neither of these claimants was a 'successful' Messiah. Therefore not a Messiah. Where are thir legacies now?

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 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 there is the crushing collapse of Wise's argument when he relates this also to 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 repeat that Judah's followers saw the year 34 BC, forty years after Judah's death, as the time of his triumphant return. 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", on how Jesus of Nazareth came after Judah, as another prophet. To do so would be to exegete the entire 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.

Interesting questions, but questionable as history. (0/0 people found this helpful)

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.

The First Messiah: Investigating the Savior Before Jesus

Michael Owen Wise

Reader Reviews:

Not Michael Wise's Judah, nor Israel Knohl's Menahem, but Jesus of Nazareth is the First and Only Messiah (0/0 people found this helpful)

Interesting questions, but questionable as history. (0/0 people found this helpful)

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