Was the prophesied Messiah really Jesus?

First, some digressions. (Actually, this post is mainly digressions. Consider yourself warned.)

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There were in the time of Elijah two rival cults in Israel. The first worshiped a God who may originally have had a name (contemporary scholarship suggests Hadad or Ishkur) but was generally known simply as "the Lord"; the second gave their God a proper name -- but, after centuries of superstitious refusal to pronounce that name or even to write it with its proper vowel points, its precise form is no longer known. Thus it has come about that, in our English Bibles, it is the second of these Gods that is called "the Lord"; while for the first -- the one that the Israelites called "the Lord" -- that Hebrew word is simply transliterated and used as if it were a proper name.

For my part, I shall use the title "Lord" as the Israelites did and deal with the uncertain name of the other God by means of the same expedient resorted to by Victor Hugo, Freud, and others when they had reason to avoid spelling out a particular proper name. Even choosing an initial presents some difficulties, since the Hebrew letter in question can be transliterated as I, J, or Y. Out of deference to Dante (see Paradiso XXVI, 133-138) and to English translations of Moses (Exodus 3:14), I have chosen the first option.

Regarding the detailed differences between the two cults, all we can say for sure is that the followers of the Lord used religious statuary in their worship, while those of I---- tended towards iconoclasm. Any other differences in religious belief or practice are a matter of conjecture.

Everyone will be familiar with the story of the showdown between these two cults on Mount Carmel, instigated by Elijah (whose name means "My God is I----"). The story is related in 1 Kings 18; except for punctuation, paragraphing, and the rectification of names explained above, I follow the King James Version.

And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, "How long halt ye between two opinions? if I---- be God, follow him: but if the Lord, then follow him."

And the people answered him not a word.

Then said Elijah unto the people, "I, even I only, remain a prophet of I----; but the Lord’s prophets are 450 men. Let them therefore give us two bullocks; and let them choose one bullock for themselves, and cut it in pieces, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under: and I will dress the other bullock, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under. And call ye on the name of your God, and I will call on the name of I----: and the God that answereth by fire, let him be God."

And all the people answered and said, "It is well spoken."

When the prophets of the Lord were unsuccessful in obtaining an "answer by fire," Elijah ridiculed them and their God.

And they took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed it, and called on the name of the Lord from morning even until noon, saying, "O Lord, hear us." 

But there was no voice, nor any that answered. And they leaped upon the altar which was made.

And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, "Cry aloud: for he is a God; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked."

Elijah was, of course, more successful in eliciting from his God an apparently supernatural conflagration. (We are told that the fire consumed even the stones of the altar!)

And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, "I----, he is the God; I----, he is the God." 

And Elijah said unto them, "Take the prophets of the Lord; let not one of them escape."

And they took them: and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there.

Of course that wasn't the end of the conflict. Magic tricks never really converted anyone, nor has making martyrs ever been an effective way of stamping out an unwanted religion. Attempts were naturally made to avenge the 450 murdered prophets, and the feud between the two religions continued for some centuries. In the end, though, so complete was the victory of I---- that in modern languages it is he who is known simply as "the Lord," while his onetime rival, his cult now long extinct, is remembered only as a cartoonish devil once worshiped by idiots in the distant past.

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One or two centuries after Elijah, the prophet known as Epimenides appeared in Crete. No one really knows where he came from; the story that has come down to us is that he just emerged from a cave one day, having slept there for 57 years. Although his line "Cretans, always liars" later became the basis of a logical paradox ("If a Cretan says Cretans always lie, is he telling the truth?"), it seems highly unlikely that this tattoo-covered shaman was in fact an ethnic Cretan. We can only speculate as to his true origins, but to me such sparse information as we have suggests that he may have been of Scythian extraction. At any rate, he actually put the line "Cretans, always liars" in the mouth of Minos -- a genuine Cretan -- in one of his poems, so the paradox is saved. In the poem, Minos berates his countrymen for having dared to maintain a "tomb of Zeus."

They fashioned a tomb for you, holy and high one,
Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies.
But you are not dead: you live and abide forever,
For in you we live and move and have our being.

Zeus is supposed to have been born in Crete, and apparently he once had a tomb there as well! Could "Zeus" have been a real man who lived and died in Crete in the distant past, one of such blessed memory that he was gradually deified in the minds of those who survived him, coming to be thought of as a god, and eventually as God? It's interesting to speculate, but at any rate, by the time Epimenides came along, Zeus was God and God was Zeus, and a "tomb of Zeus" was blasphemous
nonsense.

Later, around the 3rd century BC, Aratus of Soli began his Phaenomena, a didactic poem on the rather unpromising subjects of astronomy and meteorology, with a prayer to Zeus:

From Zeus let us begin; him do we mortals never leave unnamed; full of Zeus are all the streets and all the market-places of men; full is the sea and the havens thereof; always we all have need of Zeus. For we are also his offspring; [. . .] Wherefore him do men ever worship first and last. Hail, O Father, mighty marvel, mighty blessing unto men. Hail to thee and to the Elder Race! Hail, ye Muses, right kindly, every one! But for me, too, in answer to my prayer direct all my lay, even as is meet, to tell the stars.

As readers versed in the New Testament will already have divined, the only reason such obscure figures as Epimenides and Aratus are on my radar is that they are quoted there, in Paul's sermon at the Areopagus in Athens as reported in Acts 17.

Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.

God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: For in him "we live, and move, and have our being;" as certain also of your own poets have said, "For we are also his offspring." 

Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device. And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent: Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.

Although Paul begins with his famous reference to the Unknown God -- implying that the true God is someone over and above the named and "known" gods of the Greek pantheon -- he goes on to quote with approval two different poems about Zeus as if they are about the true God -- which, in my judgment, they are. Where an Elijah would have held Zeus up to ridicule and insisted that his own, better God be worshiped instead, Paul took a different tack. Never did he say that Zeus was a false god, a devil, or a figment of his worshipers imagination. He did not stoop so low as to quibble over names. (As recently as the 18th century, certain French pamphleteers were maintaining that their Dieu -- etymologically, Zeus! -- was the true deity, while the English God was nothing but another name for Lucifer; before you laugh, think if you have ever been guilty of the same thing.) Paul took it for granted that the Athenians already worshiped God and attempted only to correct and expand their ideas regarding him. So Dante says of the Greek pagans not that they worshiped false gods but that "they did not worship God in fitting ways."

Paul, like Elijah, triumphed in the end. It took a century or two, but his God eventually supplanted Zeus entirely.

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Well, whose approach was right? Was Zeus God? Was Baal? Is Allah? . . . Is Yahweh?

Logically, either answer to each of those questions can be made consistent with the same facts, since there is no logical difference between believing in something that does not exist and believing false things about something that does exist. When, as often happens, I receive a letter addressed to Mr. Tychanievich or Mr. Pychonievich, is that the name of a person who does not exist, or is it my own name, spelt wrong? Is it more correct for a Yuletide spoilsport to say "there's no such thing as Santa Claus" or "You have some inaccurate beliefs about Saint Nicholas of Myra"? Should I call myself an atheist (which I am, when theism is narrowly defined) or simply say that my beliefs about God are somewhat unorthodox?

The question of which approach to take, then -- of whether to be an Elijah or a Paul -- is a practical rather than a factual one, a question of rhetorical or pedagogical technique, and different situations may call for different approaches. Looking back, and setting aside our squeamishness about mass murder, we can perhaps say that both Elijah and Paul made the choices that were strategically "right."

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Which brings me -- finally! -- to Jesus and to the question posed in the title of this post. My current understanding is that, no, the prophesied Messiah was not "really" Jesus. The Hebrew prophets did not foresee Jesus, did not write about Jesus, and did not expect the coming of anyone very much like Jesus. Nor did Jesus really do most of the things the anticipated Messiah was supposed to do -- which is why believers in his Messianic character have granted him an extension with the idea of a Second Coming.

The Messianic prophecies were about Jesus in the same sense that the poetry of Epimenides and Aratus was about God. Jesus could have said, "There's no Messiah coming. Instead you get me"; or he could with equal justice have said (and generally did say), "I'm the Messiah, but 'Messiah' doesn't quite mean what you think it does." This explains the fact that Jesus did sometimes claim directly to be the Messiah but at other times seemed to be uncomfortable with the title and to discourage its use. (Particularly in the Gospel of Mark, he seems always to be saying, "Now, don't go around telling everyone I'm the Messiah!")

I would go even farther and say that Yahweh was no more (and no less!) "God" than Zeus was -- but perhaps few would be willing to follow me quite that far from orthodoxy. If that makes me an atheist, so be it; I have never denied the charge.

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Note: Synchronicity alert: Just after writing the Epimenides part of this post, which mentions in passing the Liar Paradox associated with his name, I checked Bruce Charlton's blog and read his then-new post "Does the I Ching have a personality?" He quoted an interview of Philip K. Dick by someone called Mike, including this exchange:

Phil: No, I don’t use the I Ching anymore. I’ll tell ya, the I Ching told me more lies than anybody else I’ve ever known. [. . .] One time I really zapped it. I asked it if it was the devil. And it said yes. And then I asked it if it spoke for God, and it said no. It said I am a complete liar. I mean that was the interpretation. 

In other words I set it up. I set it up. I asked two questions simultaneously and it said I speak with forked tongue, is what it said. And then it said, oops, I didn’t mean to say that. But it had already –

Mike: Then you get a paradox. [. . .] That’s the paradox. It’s lying when it says it’s lying.

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Note added: I should make it clear that the form of my question is deliberate: not "Was Jesus really the Messiah?" but "Was the Messiah really Jesus?" I wanted it to have the same form as "Is Zeus really God?" -- where the status of Zeus is being questioned by asking if he is God, the status of God being taken for granted. In the same way, I am taking the divinity of Jesus for granted and questioning the idea of the Messiah, not vice versa.