Why the Jews Reject Jesus and What it Means

The Jewish people cannot and do not accept that Jesus Christ is their messiah. He may have been a good man, a prophet, a miracle worker, a healer, an observant Jew, or all of these, but they continue to insist that he was not their messiah. Many reasons are usually given for this rejection, but there is one reason that has persisted from the times of Jesus himself and therefore presents itself as the main reason: it is simply that Jesus did not accomplish what the Jewish people expected their messiah to accomplish. 1 He simply did not do the task expected of him. And since nobody else has been able to fulfil their messianic expectations since then, the Jews are still waiting. This takes us to the question of what exactly do the Jewish people expect their messiah to do. The most precise and authoritative answer to this question was formulated, for the orthodox Jews at least, by Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon, or Rambam, in the form of a religious law: “King Messiah will arise and restore the kingdom of David to its former state and original sovereignty. He will rebuild the sanctuary and gather the dispersed of Israel. All the ancient laws will be reinstituted in his days; sacrifices will again be offered; the Sabbatical and Jubilee years will again be observed in accordance with the commandments set forth in the Law.” (The Code of Maimonides or Mishneh Torah, Book 14: Book of Judges; Treatise 5: Kings and Wars, ch. XI). This outline of the Messiah’s task is further clarified by Maimonides, to help faithful Jews distinguish possible candidates from the real one: “If there arise a king from the House of David who meditates on the Torah, occupies himself with the commandments, as did his ancestor David, observes the precepts prescribed in the Written and Oral Law, prevails upon Israel to walk in the way of the Torah and to repair its breaches, and fights the battles of the Lord, it may be assumed that he is the Messiah. If he does these things and succeeds, rebuilds the sanctuary on its site, and gathers all the dispersed of Israel, he is beyond all doubt the Messiah. He will prepare the whole world to serve the Lord with one accord...” (ibid.). The messianic profile outlined by Maimonides is very ancient. Important elements of his description can be found in the existing text of chapter 53 in the Aramaic Targum of Jonathan to the Prophet Isaiah, which has been dated to the first part of the second century AD, less than one hundred years after the advent of Jesus Christ (Christ is the term for ‘messiah’ in Greek). 2 Furthermore, literary studies leave no doubt that the dominant form of messianic expectation among the Jews, from the first century before Christ up to the suppression of the second Jewish revolt in 135 AD, was indeed for a triumphant militant messiah. 3 In the New Testament Gospels, Christ resisted the temptation to rule over an earthly kingdom (Mt 4,8-10; Lk 4,5-8); later he shows he was aware of the popular messianic expectation and actively avoided embracing it (Jn 6,15). Until the end of his life, he was also extremely reluctant to expose his own messianic identity to the public (Mk 9,29-30; Mt 16,16.20; Jn 7,3-11;10,24; Mk 14,60-62). The difference between Christ’s own messianic