The Handbook / JUD
The Messiah of Israel.
Isaiah does call Israel God's servant, but he also describes a servant who is sent to restore Israel, who is innocent, who suffers silently and willingly for 'my people', dies, is buried and then lives again. Those details fit an individual who represents Israel better than the nation as a whole. Several ancient Jewish sources applied the passage to the Messiah, and Jesus fulfils it in remarkable detail.
The objection is right that Jesus has not yet finished the Messiah's work. But the Hebrew Bible itself describes the Messiah in two ways: humble and suffering, and glorious and reigning. Some rabbis also noticed this tension. Jesus fulfilled the first set of promises, opened the knowledge of Israel's God to the nations, and promised to return to complete the rest. A Messiah who comes twice is not a Christian evasion; it is how the scriptural portraits fit together.
Christians affirm the Shema completely. Jesus called it the first commandment, and the apostles never stopped confessing that there is one God. The question is what kind of oneness the Shema teaches. The Hebrew Scriptures themselves speak of the LORD appearing in human form, of a divine figure beside God, and of God's Word and Spirit acting as God. Early Jewish followers of Jesus did not abandon the Shema; they found Jesus within it.
Interpreters honestly disagree about the details of Daniel 9: the starting point, the calendar, and how the weeks divide. But on almost any traditional reading the passage expects an 'anointed one' to be cut off before the city and sanctuary are destroyed, and it promises an end to sin and the bringing in of everlasting righteousness. Jesus was cut off a generation before the Temple fell in AD 70, and his death is explained as atonement for sin.
Jesus, his apostles and the entire first generation of his followers were Jews who worshiped in the Temple and kept the customs of Israel. They saw faith in Jesus not as leaving Judaism but as trusting Israel's Messiah. The Church's later hostility to Jews was a betrayal of its own roots and must be confessed. In the New Testament, a Jewish person who follows Jesus remains a son or daughter of Abraham and part of Israel's story, not a deserter from it.
