Note 2 — I THE INFLUENCE OF PARSEEISM ON THE BELIEF IN A MESSIAH

Messiah—that is, the Anointed (in Greek, Christos)—originally signified the king as representative of Jahwe before the people and of the people before Jahwe. According to 2 Sam. vii. 13 sq., he was placed in the same relation of an obedient “son” to his “father,” in which the whole people was conscious of standing.2 Then the opposition between the holy dignity of the “Anointed” of God and the humanly imperfect personality of the Jewish kings led to the ideal of the Messiah being transferred to the future and the complete realisation of the rule of Jahwe over his people being expected only then. In this sense the ancient prophets had already celebrated the Messiah as an ideal King of the future, who would experience in the fullest sense the high assurances of Jahwe’s favour, of which David had been deemed worthy, since he would be completely worthy of them. They had described him as the Hero, who would be more than Moses and Joshua, who would establish the promised glory of Israel, dispose the people anew, and bring Jahwe’s religion even to the heathen.3 They had glorified him in that he would span the heavens afresh, establish a new earth, and make Israel Lord over all nations.4 In this they had at first understood the Messiah only as a human being, as a new David or of his seed—theocratic king, divinely favoured prince of peace and just ruler over his people, just as the Persian Saoshyant was to be a man of the seed of Zarathustra. In this sense a Cyrus, the deliverer of the people from the Babylonian captivity, the rescuer and overlord of Israel, had been acclaimed Messiah.5 But just as Saoshyant had been undesignedly transfigured in the imagination of the people into a divine being and made one with the figure of Mithras,6 so also among the prophets the Messiah was more and more assigned the part of a divine king. He was called “divine hero,” “Father of Eternity,” and the prophet Isaiah indulged in a description of his kingdom of peace, in which the wolf would lie down by the lamb, men would no longer die before their time, and would enjoy the fruit of their fields without tithe, while right and justice would reign upon earth under this king of a golden age as it had never done before.7 Secret and supernatural, as was his nature, so should the birth of the Messiah be. Though a divine child, he was to be born in lowly state.8 The personality of the Messiah mingled with that of Jahwe himself, as though it were God himself of whose ascending the throne and journey heavenwards the Psalmists sing.9