--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Richard M" <compost...@...> wrote: <snip> > Thanks for posting this. I had no idea that there was such an > "anticipation" of the Jesus story in Isaiah.
Not exactly a slam-dunk, though (see below). > I wonder if this lends support to the idea that Jesus > and his followers "deliberately" set up some of the New > Testament events so as to to engineer the fulfilment > of the prophecies? Or deliberately altered the specifics of those events after the fact as the tales of Jesus's life were being codified into the New Testament canon. In any case, it should be noted that in Judaism, the "suffering servant" passages from Isaiah are regarded as referring to the "righteous remnant" of Israel; and there's quite a bit of serious scholarship that comes to this conclusion as well. Even the translations of some contemporary Christian Bibles acknowledge this (such as the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), the New Jerusalem Bible, and The Oxford Study Bible). For a sample, see: http://www.messiahtruth.com/isaiah53a.html To start with: "...Many Christians, particularly evangelical Christian missionaries, consider the Fourth Servant Song to be one of the most important Christian messianic prophecies, so-called 'proof texts', in the Bible. The New Testament, with its many references to 'Isaiah 53', provides for them a record of the fulfillment of the prophecy of a suffering and dying Messiah and his eventual return, triumph, and glory. Curiously, though, this is all being believed even though the common reference terms used in the Hebrew Bible for the promised Messiah, such as David, son of David, or king, are conspicuously absent from the text. Moreover, a suffering and dying Messiah is not part of the traditional Jewish messianic paradigm, which describes a Messiah that shows up only once, and one who will succeed in executing the messianic agenda, as it is described in the Hebrew Bible, during his reign as king of a unified Israel." You might even make the case that Isaiah 53 is a prophesy of the Holocaust... We'll almost certainly never know, but it behooves us to recognize that none of the possible interpretations is a slam-dunk.
