The people who wrote the prophecies about the Messiah were the first people to reject him. Think about that for a moment. The very men who had memorized word for word the scrolls of Isaiah, of Daniel, and of the Psalms, the same priests who knew hundreds of messianic prophecies by heart, looked Jesus of Nazareth in the eyes and said, “This is not the Messiah; this is an impostor.”
How is that possible? How can it be that the people who had been waiting for the Messiah for more than a thousand years failed to recognize him when he arrived? This question has followed me for a long time, and what I found when I began researching it seriously left me completely speechless. The answer is not simple. It is not that the Jewish people were blind, ignorant, or evil. The answer is far deeper, far more interesting, and has layers that most believers have never explored.
Today, we are going to do something that very few people have the courage to do: we are going to enter the mind of a first-century rabbi. We are going to see exactly what they expected, why Jesus did not fit that mold, and then we are going to go to the Jewish scriptures themselves—the very ones they held in their hands—and we are going to see what those texts say about the Messiah before Jesus was ever born. There is something no one has told you, something that changes everything. Stay until the end, because what I am going to show you in the final part of this video is something the rabbis of the first century themselves knew, and that the vast majority today would rather not mention.
Let us begin. To understand the rejection, you first have to understand the expectation. To understand the expectation, you have to stand in Jerusalem in the year 30 AD and look at the world through the eyes of someone who has lived their entire life under the boot of Rome. The word “Messiah” in Hebrew is Mashiach. It means “the anointed one.” In the first century, when Jewish people spoke of the Messiah, they had a very specific figure in mind—not a spiritual savior, not someone who would die for the sins of the world, but a king, a warrior king, a new David.
Think about this from their historical perspective. The Jewish people had been dominated by foreign empires for more than six hundred years. Babylon had deported them, Persia had controlled them, and the Greeks had desecrated their temple. Antiochus Epiphanies, in the year 167 BC, entered the temple in Jerusalem, sacrificed a pig on the sacred altar, and banned circumcision and the study of the Torah under penalty of death. Now, Rome had occupied their land, crushed them with taxes, and was executing their countrymen on crosses along public roads as a warning to anyone who dared to resist.
Can you imagine growing up in that world, seeing Roman soldiers in your streets, paying tribute to a pagan emperor who declared himself a god, knowing that your people were chosen by the God of the universe, yet living as a conquered people? In that context, what kind of Messiah were they expecting? They expected someone who would come with armies like Joshua when he took Canaan, someone who would drive out the invaders like Mattathias and his sons in the Maccabean Revolt, who, with a handful of warriors, had defeated the Greek Empire and restored the temple. They expected someone who would restore the kingdom of David, rebuild the temple to its greatest glory, and put Israel at the center of the world, not as a spiritual symbol, but as a concrete political reality.
This expectation was not invented; it was grounded in real biblical texts that they knew by heart. The prophet Amos wrote, “I will restore David’s fallen shelter. I will repair its broken walls and restore its ruins and will rebuild it as it used to be.” (Amos 9:11). Ezekiel promised that the Messiah would be Israel’s prince forever (Ezekiel 37:25). Zechariah spoke of a king who would enter Jerusalem victorious, righteous, and victorious, humble and riding on a donkey (Zechariah 9:9). Psalm 2, one of the most cited in the synagogues, proclaimed that God had anointed his king on Zion, and that the nations would be his inheritance and the ends of the earth his possession.
So when Jesus arrived, the picture he painted was completely different. He brought no armies, he did not drive out the Romans, he did not rebuild the temple, and he did not restore the political kingdom of David. He preached from fishermen’s boats, he healed the sick in remote villages of Galilee—a region that the people of Jerusalem considered the countryside, the place of the uneducated—and he ended up executed on a cross by the very Romans he was supposed to defeat. From the perspective of a first-century Jew, that was not the Messiah. That was a failure, a messianic claimant who died at the hands of the enemy without restoring the kingdom, without defeating Rome, and without rebuilding anything. That man, by every expectation they held, had failed.
It was not the first time someone had come forward with messianic claims and ended up that way. The historian Flavius Josephus documents in his writings at least a dozen messianic figures in the first century who gathered followers, promised liberation, and were crushed by Rome. Judas the Galilean led a revolt when Jesus was born; Theudas promised to divide the Jordan River; an anonymous Egyptian led thirty thousand men to the Mount of Olives. They all died, and they were all forgotten, or they should have been.
Here comes the first layer of this mystery, and it is something very few people know. There is something the vast majority of believers do not know: before Jesus, many rabbis taught that there would be not one, but two messiahs. Did you hear that? Two messiahs.
The first was called Mashiach ben Yosef, the Messiah son of Joseph. This Messiah would come first, suffer, struggle, and die like Joseph, the son of Jacob, who was sold by his brothers, suffered unjustly in Egypt, and was eventually raised up to save his people. The Messiah son of Joseph would follow that same pattern of rejection, suffering, and death.
The second was called Mashiach ben David, the Messiah son of David. This one would come afterward, glorious, victorious, and preceded by cosmic signs. This Messiah would establish the eternal kingdom, gather the scattered Jewish people from all nations, and bring the era of peace the prophets had promised.
This doctrine is not Christian; it appears in the Babylonian Talmud in the tractate Sukkah 52a. It also appears in the Midrash and in texts from the Second Temple period. It was not invented after Jesus to explain his death; it predates him. Think about what that means. The rabbis, centuries before the Christian-Jewish debate took the form we know today, were already teaching that the first act of the messianic drama would include suffering and death. The Messiah son of Joseph was not a peripheral figure or a footnote in theology; he was a central part of Israel’s messianic hope.
Why did the majority of first-century Jews not connect Jesus with that figure? Part of the answer is that the doctrine of two messiahs was not the only way to interpret the prophecies. First-century Judaism was far more diverse than we imagine. The Pharisees and the Sadducees could not even agree on the resurrection. The Essenes of Qumran had their own messianic expectations. The Zealots wanted a guerrilla fighter. The apocalypticists expected a direct cosmic intervention from God with no human intermediary. It was a world of competing interpretations, not a monolithic faith.
When someone came forward claiming to be the Messiah, he had to be measured against all those expectations simultaneously. Jesus did not fit any of the most popular versions. For the Sadducees, he was a disturber of the order. For the Zealots, he was too peaceful. For the strictest Pharisees, his interpretation of the Sabbath law was scandalous. For the general population, who longed for liberation from Rome, his refusal to be crowned king by force after the multiplication of the loaves was a disappointment that John records clearly (John 6:15).
What that tradition says about the Messiah son of Joseph is extraordinary. The key verse behind this teaching is Zechariah 12:10, and it says something that, when you read it carefully, makes your head spin. It says, with God speaking in the first person, “They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child.” Wait a moment. God says, “Me, the one they have pierced.” How can God be pierced? The rabbis of the Second Temple period, before 70 AD, applied this verse precisely to the Messiah son of Joseph—a Messiah who would die violently, pierced, and for whom the people would mourn as for an only child.
When the followers of Jesus proclaimed that he had risen, what they were saying was this: the Messiah son of Joseph has fulfilled his role. He suffered, died, was pierced, and now, just as Joseph was raised from prison to govern Egypt, the suffering Messiah was raised from death, and he will return as the Messiah son of David, the glorious king, to complete what remains. The problem is that most of the religious leadership of Jerusalem was not looking for the suffering Messiah; they were waiting for the glorious one. When Jesus did not come as the warrior king who would defeat Rome, they dismissed him before the story was over.
If they knew the doctrine of two messiahs, why did they not consider that possibility? That brings us to the next layer. If you sit down today with an Orthodox rabbi and ask him why Judaism does not accept Jesus as the Messiah, he will give you a list of theological objections. These are serious objections, grounded in the Hebrew Bible, and they deserve an equally serious response. There is no point in skimming over them; let us examine them with the same depth with which they are made.
The first objection is that the Messiah must be a biological descendant of David through the paternal line. The Bible is clear that the Messiah would come from the lineage of David. The prophecy in 2 Samuel 7:12-13 says that God will raise up a descendant of David who will come from his own body, and that he will build a house for God, while God will establish his throne forever. The angel Gabriel told Mary that her son would receive the throne of his father David (Luke 1:32). The genealogies of Matthew and Luke trace Jesus’s lineage back to David.
The rabbis, however, point to a problem in Jewish tradition: tribal inheritance and royal lineage are transmitted through the father. If Jesus was born of a virgin, and if Joseph was not his biological father, how does he inherit the Davidic lineage? This is a real objection.
The answer has two parts. First, the genealogy in Matthew follows the line of Joseph, the legal father of Jesus. In Jewish law, legal adoption conferred all rights of inheritance, including tribal lineage. The Talmud itself recognizes in Sanhedrin 19b that the father who raises a child is considered his father in every legal sense. Joseph raised Jesus, he presented him in the temple, he educated him in the law, and he legally recognized him as his son. That, within Jewish law, would be sufficient for Jesus to inherit the lineage of David through Joseph.
Second, the prophecy in Isaiah 7:14 already anticipated that the birth of the Messiah would be unusual: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son.” In Hebrew, the word Almah can mean both “young woman” and “virgin.” The debates over the exact translation have filled libraries, but the point is this: the prophetic text itself signaled that this birth would not be ordinary. If the Messiah was simply another human king, why would Isaiah announce him with such a specific birth sign?
The second objection is that the Messiah must rebuild the Third Temple. Ezekiel dedicates the last nine chapters of his book, chapters 40 to 48, to a detailed architectural description of a future temple that has never been built—a temple greater than anything Israel has ever known. Its measurements, its gates, its courtyards, and its priestly chambers are all described with the precision of an architect. Zechariah 6:12-13 says explicitly, “Here is the man whose name is the Branch… he will build the temple of the Lord, and he will be clothed with majesty and will sit and rule on his throne.”
If Jesus was the Messiah, where is that temple? The Temple Mount in Jerusalem today has a mosque and a golden dome on it, not the temple of Ezekiel. Furthermore, the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 AD, barely four decades after the death of Jesus. If he was the Messiah, why did God allow the heart of Jewish worship to be burned to the ground by the armies of General Titus? Why did the Ark of the Covenant disappear, the seven-branched menorah be carried to Rome as a war trophy, and the Jewish people be scattered among the nations for nearly two millennia?
This objection carries real historical weight and deserves more than a superficial response. The New Testament points in several directions. Jesus himself said something striking during his ministry: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” (John 2:19). He was speaking of his body, says the text, but there is more. The Apostle Paul writes that in the era inaugurated by the Messiah, the temple would not be made of stone, but of people: “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?” (1 Corinthians 3:16). The book of Hebrews elaborates on this idea in detail, stating that Jesus is the high priest of a greater and more perfect tabernacle, one not made with human hands (Hebrews 9:11).
The system of sacrifices, the priests, the altar, and the incense were all, according to Hebrews, a shadow and figure of something greater. What the stone temple pointed to, the Messiah fulfilled in his own person. As for the destruction of the temple, Jesus himself predicted it with a specificity that is difficult to ignore. In Mark 13:2, as he was leaving the temple, his disciples pointed out the imposing architecture of Herod’s temple, one of the wonders of the ancient world. He responded, “Do you see all these great buildings? Not one stone here will be left on another; everyone will be thrown down.” That was around the year 30. Forty years later, in 70 AD, the Roman armies burned the temple and dismantled the walls stone by stone in search of the gold that had melted and dripped between the blocks during the fire. The prophecy was fulfilled with an astonishing literalness. From the New Testament perspective, the physical temple of Ezekiel will be part of Christ’s future reign, not his first coming. What came in the first coming was the greater priesthood, of which the stone temple was merely a shadow.
The third objection states that the Messiah must gather all scattered Jews back to the land of Israel. Isaiah 43:5-6 says, “From the east I will bring your offspring, and from the west I will gather you. I will say to the north, ‘Give them up!’ and to the south, ‘Do not hold them back.’ Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth.” Deuteronomy 30:3-4 speaks of the return from exile from the four corners of the world. This prophecy was not fulfilled in the first century; the Jewish people remained scattered for nearly two thousand more years. The Christian response points out that the scattering itself was a consequence of the rejection of the Messiah, just as Jesus prophesied in Luke 21:24: “They will fall by the sword and will be taken as prisoners to all the nations.” It points toward a future fulfillment as part of the glorious return.
The fourth objection is perhaps the most powerful: the Messiah must bring universal peace to the world. Isaiah 2:4 is one of the most famous verses in all prophetic scripture: “He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.” Micah 4:3 echoes that vision exactly.
If Jesus was the Messiah, why does the world continue in war? Why was the twentieth century, supposedly under Christian civilization, the bloodiest in human history? Two world wars, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Gulag—hundreds of millions dead. This question has no easy answer, and anyone who claims it does is probably not taking human suffering seriously.
The New Testament’s response is that Jesus himself did not promise immediate peace to the world. On the contrary, he said something disturbing: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34). What he brought in his first coming was peace between human beings and God—reconciliation and access to forgiveness. He brought the solution to the deepest problem, which is not political but moral: the separation between the human being and their Creator. The peace of swords turned into plowshares, the world without war, and the era of universal justice are part of what the New Testament calls the millennial kingdom—the physical and glorious reign of Christ, which belongs to the second coming, not the first. It is an answer that requires faith; it requires believing there is a final act in history that has not yet arrived. The rabbis of the first century were not willing to divide the Messiah into two comings; either he came and fulfilled everything at once, or he was not the Messiah. That, at its core, is the root of the division.
Here comes the part that left me speechless when I investigated it deeply. Here comes something that absolutely changes the way you understand this debate. There is a passage in the book of Isaiah that for centuries has been the epicenter of the most important debate in religious history—a passage that medieval and modern rabbis interpret one way, and that the first believers, including many first-century Jews, interpreted in a completely different way. What makes this passage extraordinarily relevant is that its history of interpretation within Judaism itself reveals something that few people have dared to say out loud. It is Isaiah 53.
Before I read it to you, I want you to know something about the physical document where it is found. In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd named Muhammad ed-Dhib threw a stone into a cave near the Dead Sea in the place we now know as Qumran. He heard the sound of something breaking, entered to investigate, and found sealed clay jars containing leather scrolls. What he had found were the Dead Sea Scrolls, the largest collection of ancient biblical texts ever discovered. Among them was the Great Isaiah Scroll, preserved almost completely, more than two thousand years old. Archaeologists dated it to between 125 and 100 BC. In that scroll, which is more than two thousand years old, the text of Isaiah 53 is identical to what we read today, word for word. The transmission was perfect. That text, written four or five centuries before that shepherd found it in the desert and seven hundred years before Christ, says this, and I ask you to listen to every word:
“Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:1-6).
Who is the figure described in that text? It describes someone who was despised, rejected, a man of suffering, pierced for the transgressions of others, who bore the sin of all, and whose wound brought healing to those who rejected him. When was that text written? It was written approximately seven hundred years before Christ. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah found in the caves of Qumran, the famous Great Isaiah Scroll, is more than two thousand years old and contains these words intact, identical to what we read today.
The first Jewish believers—Simon Peter, Andrew, James, John, Mary Magdalene, all of them first-generation Jews—saw in this text an exact description of what had happened with Jesus, and they were not the only ones. Here is what few people have ever told you: the Targum of Jonathan is one of the translations and paraphrases of the Old Testament into Aramaic, the language spoken by first-century Jews, written before or during the period of Jesus. The verse in Isaiah 52:13, just before chapter 53, says, “Behold, my servant will prosper.” The Targum of Jonathan translates that verse with these words: “Behold, my servant the Messiah will prosper.” This Jewish Aramaic text, earlier than or contemporary with Jesus, explicitly identifies the servant of Isaiah as the Messiah.
The Babylonian Talmud, compiled between the third and fifth centuries AD, discusses the name of the Messiah in tractate Sanhedrin 98b, and one of the sages proposes that his name is “the sick one bearing wounds,” quoting Isaiah 53:4: “Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering.” The Messiah is identified as the one who carries the afflictions of the people.
There is more. The Zohar, the central text of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, has a section called Ra’aya Meheimna where it describes the Messiah taking upon himself the sufferings of Israel. It says that the Messiah ascends to heaven and descends, taking upon himself the sufferings of Israel—ascending, descending, and taking the sufferings of Israel upon himself.
When did the official interpretation of Judaism change? When did the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 stop being an individual Messiah and become Israel collectively? After 70 AD, when Jerusalem was destroyed and the temple was burned, the Jewish leadership needed to reorganize radically. What happened at that moment is one of the most extraordinary episodes in the entire history of religion. Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, a leading Pharisaic scholar, managed to escape besieged Jerusalem hidden inside a coffin, feigning death. He reached the Roman camp, obtained permission from General Vespasian to establish a rabbinic academy in the city of Yavne, and from there began the reconstruction of Judaism—without a temple, without priests, and without sacrifices. It was the Judaism of the synagogue and the study of Torah, the Judaism that survived two thousand years of dispersion.
In that process of rebuilding Jewish identity in the face of national catastrophe, and in the face of the growing Christian movement that was citing Isaiah 53 in every public debate, the interpretation of the text was deliberately redirected. Instead of an individual Messiah, the suffering servant began to be interpreted collectively: the servant is Israel itself, the people of Israel who suffer among the nations, who are despised and rejected by the world, and who bear the weight of history.
This interpretation is not completely arbitrary. Israel has indeed suffered as the servant of Isaiah; the Jewish people have indeed been wounded and rejected for centuries. The collective interpretation has a genuine internal logic, born from the real pain of a people who have suffered enormously. This interpretation is today the official position of rabbinic Judaism. The great commentator Rashi in the eleventh century codified it definitively, Maimonades (the Rambam) in the twelfth century adopted it as his foundation, and since then, any Jew who reads Isaiah 53 does so through that lens—the lens of the community that suffers among the nations.
However, the texts you just heard—the Targum of Jonathan, the Talmud, the Zohar—show that before, during, and shortly after the time of Jesus, many rabbis did see in that text an individual messianic figure, a Messiah who would suffer, who would carry the afflictions of the people, who would be despised and pierced. Then the interpretation changed. Why did it change? Part of the answer is theological, part is historical, but part of it—and this must be said with honesty—is political. It was impossible for a Jew from the second century onward to cite Isaiah 53 and not immediately hear the voice of Christian missionaries. The collective interpretation also served as a theological shield against the Christian argument.
Now let me show you something I consider the most unexpected argument in this entire conversation, and I call it unexpected because it comes directly from the book of Daniel. When you see it in context, it produces a kind of vertigo. In the book of Daniel, chapter 9, the prophet receives a vision from the angel Gabriel while he is praying, and Gabriel delivers to him a prophecy of time—a mathematical revelation about when certain decisive events in history would occur.
The angel says in verse 24, “Seventy sevens are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the most holy place.” Then in verse 25, “Know and understand this: From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven sevens, and sixty-two sevens.” Seven weeks plus sixty-two weeks total sixty-nine weeks. In Hebrew, these are not weeks of days; they are Shabuim, weeks of years. Each week is a period of seven years. It is the same system used in Leviticus 25 for the Sabbath year and the year of Jubilee; seven years constitute a week of years. Sixty-nine weeks of years equals sixty-nine multiplied by seven, which is 483 years.
The text says that from the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the anointed ruler, there will be 483 years. When was that decree issued? Nehemiah 2:1-8 describes the exact moment: the month of Nisan in the twentieth year of the reign of the Persian king Artaxerxes. Historians place that moment in the year 445 or 444 BC. If you count 483 years from 445 BC using the prophetic calendar of 360 days per year—which was the standard of the ancient world in Daniel’s time—you arrive at approximately 30 to 33 AD, the year Jesus entered Jerusalem in triumph, the year of his crucifixion.
Let me be precise with the numbers so you can verify it yourself. The decree of Artaxerxes was issued in the month of Nisan in 445 BC. Sixty-nine weeks of years equal 483 years of 360 days each, which adds up to 173,880 days. If you take that number of days from the first of Nisan of 445 BC and convert them to the Gregorian calendar, you arrive at April 6 of the year 32 AD, which, according to the calculations of researcher Robert Anderson, corresponds to Palm Sunday—the day Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey while the crowd hailed him as the Davidic king.
The exact calculations can vary depending on the system used, the precise year of the decree, and the methodology for converting between calendars. Some scholars arrive at the year 30, others at 33; there is legitimate debate about the details, but the central point remains intact. The prophecy places the arrival of the anointed ruler in a period that coincides exactly with the ministry of Jesus—not with the period of the Maccabees, not with the era of the kings of Israel, not with the return from the Babylonian exile, but with Jesus. If the Messiah had to appear in that period, and the temple had to be destroyed after his death, and the temple was destroyed in 70 AD, then the mathematical logic of Daniel 9 is uncomfortable for anyone who wants to look for the Messiah anywhere else or at any other time.
Now comes verse 26 of Daniel 9, and this is the verse that causes the most discomfort in the debate: “After the sixty-two sevens, the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing.” The Messiah would be executed, not for his own crimes. His life would be taken, not in glorious battle, but cut off, eliminated, without having established the kingdom. The verse continues, “The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary.” After the death of the Messiah, the city and the temple would be destroyed. That is exactly what happened; the temple was destroyed in 70 AD, forty years after the death of Jesus.
When you see that for the first time, there is a moment of silence because what Daniel 9 describes is a very specific sequence: 483 years from the decree of Artaxerxes, the appearance of the anointed ruler, the death of the Messiah without establishing the kingdom, and the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. That sequence occurred in exactly that order between the year 30 and the year 70 AD.
There are contemporary rabbis who acknowledge the difficulty this passage presents for the traditional Jewish interpretation. The great Nahmanides, known as the Rambam, one of the most important rabbis of the thirteenth century, admitted in his famous debate with the friar Pablo Christiani in Barcelona in 1263 that Daniel 9 was one of the most difficult passages to refute in the Christian argument. Rashi in the eleventh century tried to redirect the prophecy toward the return from the Babylonian exile in the Maccabean period, but the numbers do not work in that interpretation in any way that stands up to serious mathematical examination. Do you know what the Jewish tradition did with Daniel 9? The Talmud in the tractate Sanhedrin 97b contains an extraordinary phrase: “May the bones of those who calculate the end rot”—a curse against those who would try to calculate the date of the Messiah’s coming using the prophecies of Daniel. Why? Because every time someone did the calculation honestly, the numbers led them to Jesus, and that was theologically unacceptable.
If the rejection were only theological, if it were only a matter of interpretations and calculations, perhaps it would have played out differently, because the rejection of Jesus also had a very human dimension—a very political one, very understandable from the perspective of the men who made the decisions. The high priest in 30 AD was Caiaphas. His full name was Joseph bar Caiaphas, and Caiaphas was not simply a spiritual leader; he was a first-rate political operator in an extraordinarily delicate system built on a precarious balance between Roman power and local Jewish leadership.
The Romans allowed the high priest to maintain his position and authority over the Jewish people as long as there was order. The tacit agreement was simple: the high priest managed the people, the Romans maintained the peace, and both benefited from the status quo. Any popular movement that threatened that stability could provoke a brutal Roman reprisal, and Rome was not subtle when it came to suppressing dissent. Flavius Josephus documents at least three massacres that took place in the temple courts during the feast periods when crowds became agitated and soldiers intervened from the walls. Caiaphas knew those stories; he knew them by name and date.
Jesus was exactly that threat, not because he was an armed revolutionary. On the contrary, when Peter drew his sword in the garden of Gethsemane and cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant, Jesus ordered him to put it away and healed the wounded man. However, Jesus had masses of followers; thousands of people followed him across the northern region of the country. He had driven out the money changers from the temple with a symbolic violence that touched the economic interests of the priestly establishment directly. When he entered Jerusalem at Passover, when the city was full of pilgrims who had come from across the Jewish world, the crowd hailed him as king: “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Matthew 21:9).
At Passover, Jerusalem could hold up to two hundred thousand people; the city normally had perhaps forty thousand residents. The Passover period was the most politically tense time of year precisely because it recalled the liberation from Egypt, and that ignited nationalist fervor. The Romans reinforced the garrison at the Antonia Fortress—the military stronghold attached to the temple—precisely during that week. In that context, a crowd hailing someone as the Davidic king was a spark that could ignite a fire. Caiaphas saw it with the eyes of a politician, and he made a crisis-management decision. John 11:49-50 records his exact words before the Sanhedrin, and they are words that any student of political history recognizes immediately:
“You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”
It was not a reasoned theological condemnation; it was a cold political calculation. It was more convenient to sacrifice one man than to risk the stability of the people. It was the logic of someone who holds power and fears losing it, the logic of someone who has spent years managing an occupation and knows exactly how much can be endured before everything falls apart. In that sense, Caiaphas’s rejection was not the rejection of the Jewish people; it was the rejection of an institution that had become an instrument of Roman power.
The high priesthood of that era was itself bought and sold by the Roman governors at their convenience. Caiaphas held the position for eighteen years, from 18 to 36 AD—an unusually long term that demonstrates just how useful he was to Roman interests. His father-in-law, Annas, had been high priest before him and remained the real power behind the scenes. It was a political family, not a spiritual one in the most genuine sense.
This is crucial to understand: the rejection by the leaders of Jerusalem did not represent the entire Jewish people. The New Testament itself records that on the day of Pentecost, fifty days after the resurrection, around three thousand people—all of them Jewish—believed in Jesus and were baptized in a single day (Acts 2:41). That number kept growing; Acts 4:4 speaks of five thousand men, and Acts 21:20 records that in Jerusalem there were tens of thousands of Jews who believed in Jesus. The Messianic movement of the first century was massively Jewish. The twelve apostles were Jewish, and the first churches were primarily communities of Jews who recognized Jesus as the promised Messiah. Paul, the most prolific writer of the New Testament, was a Pharisee, a student of Rabbi Gamaliel, who was one of the most respected teachers of his generation. The rejection belonged to the institutional leadership of Jerusalem, operating under specific political pressures in a specific historical moment; it was not the rejection of an entire people.
There is a verse in the Jewish scriptures that I want you to hear with your full attention. It is Zechariah 12:10. I already mentioned it in connection with the Messiah son of Joseph, but now I want to stop there calmly because it contains something that, in my research, I found genuinely disturbing. God himself is speaking in the first person. The text leaves no room for ambiguity about who is speaking:
“And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son.”
Three phrases, each of which raises an enormous question on its own. “They will look on me, the one they have pierced”—God is speaking, meaning God was pierced. How can God be pierced? “They will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child”—that exact phrase, “only child,” is the same one John uses to describe Jesus in the most famous verse in the New Testament. The context of Zechariah 12 is a future event, the day when all nations will gather against Jerusalem and God himself will intervene to defend his city. On that final day, they will look on me, the one they have pierced.
The Talmud in Sukkah 52a, as I already mentioned, applies this verse to the Messiah son of Joseph—the Messiah who dies, who is pierced, and for whom Israel will mourn as for an only child. The New Testament in Revelation 1:7 quotes Zechariah 12:10 directly: “Look, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and all peoples on earth will mourn because of him.” The final book of the New Testament describes the return of Jesus using the exact words of Zechariah. What Zechariah describes is the moment when the people who pierced him will see him and mourn—not in condemnation, but in recognition, in a grief that finally becomes understanding.
The Apostle Paul was a Pharisee. He was not an ignorant fisherman from Galilee; he had studied in Jerusalem under Gamaliel and knew the scriptures with the precision of someone who had dedicated his entire life to them. Paul, speaking to his fellow Jews in the letter to the Romans, does not condemn them. He does not call them hopelessly blind, and he does not say God has abandoned them forever. He says something that for centuries the church has preferred to ignore, or at least has greatly underemphasized. In Romans chapters 9, 10, and 11, Paul makes an argument that spans three complete chapters and culminates in one of the most surprising declarations in all of the New Testament. He says that the hardening of Israel is not permanent; it is partial: “Israel has experienced a hardening in part” (Romans 11:25), and it is temporary, “until the full number of the Gentiles has come in.”
There is a moment in history when that partial and temporary hardening ends, and then, in verse 26, comes this: “And in this way all Israel will be saved.” All Israel will be saved. Paul uses the image of an olive tree. Israel is the cultivated olive tree planted and cared for by God for centuries. The non-Jewish nations are branches of a wild olive tree that were grafted into that olive tree through faith in the Jewish Messiah of Israel. However, the natural branches—the Jewish people—were not destroyed. They were cut off temporarily because of unbelief, and the day will come when they will be grafted back into their own olive tree, “for God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). God has not abandoned his people. The covenant he made with Abraham, with Isaac, with Jacob, and with David is still in effect; it has not been canceled or replaced. The Messiah of Israel is also the Savior of the world, and history is not over.
There is something extraordinary happening in the world right now that few people connect to these prophecies. In the first century, the movement of Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah was massively Jewish. As the centuries passed, the Christian faith moved away from its Jewish roots, adopting symbols and forms from the Greco-Roman world, and the Jewish people moved away from Jesus for reasons that go far beyond theology. There is a part of this story that believers need to hear with humility: for centuries, the name of Jesus was associated for the Jewish people not with love and salvation, but with persecution.
The Crusades of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries began with massacres of Jewish communities along the Rhine before ever reaching the Holy Land. The Spanish Inquisition in 1492 forced Jews to convert or go into exile, and many were burned alive. The pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, frequently instigated by local church leaders, left hundreds of thousands dead between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries. Finally, the Holocaust was perpetrated in the most Christian Europe of the world, where the killers wore crosses on their military uniforms and where too many religious leaders stayed silent or collaborated. For a Jew of the twentieth century, the name Jesus was not the name of God’s love; it was the name under which their grandparents had been murdered. The gulf between the Jewish people and Jesus cannot be explained by theology alone; it is explained by centuries of pain, of blood spilled in his name, and of betrayal committed in his name.
Yet, despite all of that, from the 1960s, something began to change. A movement arose that today has a name: Messianic Judaism. These are Jewish people by birth, by culture, and by tradition who believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah promised by the Hebrew scriptures, who follow him, who celebrate the Sabbath and the biblical feasts, who read the Torah and the prophets, and who in those texts see their Messiah. Today, it is estimated that there are between 350,000 and 500,000 Messianic Jews in the world. In Israel, where for decades their number was nearly nonexistent, today there are an estimated 15,000 to 30,000 believers—the largest number in Israel since the first century.
These men and women read Isaiah 53 and see their Messiah; they calculate Daniel 9 and see the clock that stopped at the precise moment; they read Zechariah 12:10 and understand who it is talking about; and they read Romans 11 and know that history is not over. The prophecy in Zechariah speaks of the day when the house of David will look on the one they pierced and mourn for him as for an only child. That day, according to the New Testament and according to the tradition of the Talmud itself, is still ahead of us. It is not looking back in guilt; it is looking forward in hope. This is not a story of condemnation—it never was. It is a story of love, a love so deep that it can wait centuries to restore a relationship, a love that used the rejection of Israel to open the door to the nations of the world, and that will use the return of the nations to the Messiah of Israel to awaken in the Jewish people the recognition of someone who was always there in their own scriptures.
Today, we covered something extraordinary, and I want you to take with you what is essential before this video ends.
We saw that the Jewish people of the first century did not reject Jesus out of ignorance; they rejected an image of the Messiah that did not match their political expectations—expectations that were completely understandable after six hundred years of foreign domination. When you spend six centuries waiting for a warrior king and a carpenter from Galilee shows up who ends up hanging on a Roman cross, the disappointment is understandable. It is not cruelty; it is the pain of a people who are waiting and do not see what they were waiting for.
We saw that their own tradition—the Talmud, the Zohar, the Targum of Jonathan, texts that are the backbone of Judaism—contained teachings that applied Isaiah 53 to an individual Messiah before the debate with Christianity led them to redirect that interpretation. Their own sages spoke of a Messiah who would suffer, who would die, and who would be pierced, using the phrase “only child” in exactly the same way John used it in the most famous verse in the New Testament.
We saw that Daniel 9 has a mathematical precision that places the arrival of the anointed ruler exactly in the period of Jesus, establishing that after his death the temple would be destroyed, which is exactly what happened. We also saw that the Talmud itself cursed those who did that calculation because the numbers arrived at a conclusion that post-70 AD Judaism could not accept.
We saw that the rejection was primarily by the political-religious leadership of Jerusalem operating under very concrete pressures and under the weight of Rome’s interests; it was not the rejection of an entire people. Thousands of first-century Jews did recognize Jesus as the Messiah; the Messianic movement of the first century was Jewish at its heart.
We saw that the history of the distance between the Jewish people and Jesus is not only a story of theology, but also a story of pain, of blood shed in his name over centuries, of crosses misused, and of love misrepresented. That history deserves humility on our part, not condemnation on theirs.
We saw that in the letter to the Romans, the most erudite Pharisee of the first century wrote that the hardening of Israel is partial and temporary, and that the day will come when all Israel will be saved. The gifts and calling of God are irrevocable, meaning the covenant people have not been abandoned.
We saw that today, in the twenty-first century, something that can only be called prophetic is happening: tens of thousands of Jewish people are rediscovering Jesus, not as the God of those who persecuted them, but as the Messiah of their own scriptures—reading Isaiah 53 with their own eyes, calculating Daniel 9, and finding in Zechariah 12:10 the description of someone they recognize. History is not over; the final chapter has not yet been written.
Let me close with something personal. There is a question I asked myself when I began researching this topic, and I think it is worth asking yourself too. It is an honest question with no trap, and it deserves an honest answer:
If the Messiah described by the prophets was supposed to suffer, to be pierced, to bear the sin of others, to appear mathematically in the exact period of the first century, and to be rejected by his own people, what candidate in all of history fulfills that profile more precisely than Jesus of Nazareth?
I am not asking you to answer automatically; I am asking you to think about it. The Jewish people did not reject him by accident, out of malice, or out of absolute spiritual blindness. They rejected him because they were expecting something different, because their leaders had powerful political incentives to do so, and because the interpretive theology that solidified after 70 AD built a hermeneutical wall around the most uncomfortable texts. But the prophecies are still there. Isaiah 53 is still in the two-thousand-year-old scroll, and Daniel 9 still points directly to the chronological timeline of his life.
