Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/66

Rh 56 M E S M E S Maccabee revival. It is this national feeling that, claim ing a leader against the Romans as well as deliverance from the Sadducee aristocracy, again sets the idea of the kingship rather than that of resurrection and individual retribution in the central place which it had lost since the captivity. Henceforward the doctrine of the Messiah is at once the centre of popular hope and the object of theological culture. The New Testament is the best evidence of its influence on the masses (see especially Matt. xxi. 9) ; and the exegesis of the Targums, which in its beginnings doubtless reaches back before the time of Christ, shows how it was fostered by the Rabbins and preached in the synagogues. 1 Its diffusion far beyond Palestine, and in circles least accessible to such ideas, is proved by the fact that Philo himself (De Prs&m. et Pcen., 16) gives a Messianic interpretation of Num. xxiv. 27 (LXX.). It must not indeed be supposed that the doctrine was as yet the undisputed part of Hebrew faith which it became when the fall of the state and the antithesis to Christianity threw all Jewish thought into the lines of the Pharisees. It has, for example, no place in the Assumptio Mosis or the Book of Jubilees. But, as the fatal struggle with Rome became more and more imminent, the eschato- logical hopes which increasingly absorbed the Hebrew mind all group themselves round the person of the Messiah. In the later parts of the Book of Enoch (the &quot;symbols&quot; of chaps, xlv. sq.) the judgment day of the Messiah (identified with Daniel s &quot;Son of Man&quot;) stands in the forefront of the eschatological picture. Josephus (B. J. vi. 5, 4) testifies that the belief in the immediate appearance of the Messianic king gave the chief impulse to the war that ended in the destruction of the Jewish state; after the fall of the temple the last apocalypses (Baruch, 4 Ezra} still loudly proclaim the near victory of the God-sent king ; and Bar Cochebas, the leader of the revolt against Hadrian, was actually greeted as the Messiah by Rabbi Akiba (comp. Luke xxi. 8). These hopes were again quenched in blood ; the political idea of the Messiah, the restorer of the Jewish state, still finds utterance in the daily prayer of every Jew (the Sh mdne Esre), and is en shrined in the system of Rabbinical theology ; but its his torical significance was buried in the ruins of Jerusalem. 2 But the proof written in fire and blood on the fair face of Palestine that the true kingdom of God could not be realized in the forms of an earthly state, and under the limitations of national particularism, was not the final refutation of the hope of the Old Testament. Amidst the last convulsions of political Judaism a new and spiritual conception of the kingdom of God, of salvation, and of the Saviour of God s anointing, had shaped itself through the preaching, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. As applied to Jesus the name of Messiah lost all its political and national significance, for His victory over the world, whereby He approved himself the true captain of salvation, was consummated, not amidst the flash of earthly swords or the lurid glare of the lightnings of Elias, 1 The Targumic passages that speak of the Messiah are registered by Buxtorf, Lex. Chald., s.v. 2 False Messiahs have continued from time to time to appear among the Jews. Such was Serenus of Syria (circa 720 A.D.). Soon after, Messianic hopes were active at the time of the fall of the Omay- yads, and led to a serious rising under Abu Isa of Ispahan, who called himself forerunner of the Messiah. The false Messiah David Alrui (Alroy) appeared among the warlike Jews in Azerbi.jan in the middle of the 12th century. The Messianic claims of Abraham Abu- lafia of Saragossa (born 1240) had a cabalistic basis, and the same studies encouraged the wildest hopes at a later time. Thus Abarbanel calculated the coming of the Messiah for 1503 A.D. ; the year 1500 was in many places observed as a preparatory season of penance ; and throughout the 16th century the Jews were much stirred and more than one false Messiah appeared. For the false Messiah Sabbathai, see vol. xiii. p. 681. but in the atoning death through which He entered into the heavenly glory. Between the Messiah of the Jews and the Son of Man who came not to be ministered to but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many, there was on the surface little resemblance ; and from their standpoint the Pharisees reasoned not amiss that the marks of the Messiah were conspicuously absent from this Christ. But when we look at the deeper side of the Messianic conception in the Psalter of Solomon, at the heartfelt longing for a leader in the way of righteousness and acceptance with God which underlies the aspira tions after political deliverance, we see that it was in no mere spirit of accommodation to prevailing language that Jesus did not disdain the name in which all the hopes of the Old Testament were gathered up. The kingdom of God is the centre of all spiritual faith, and the perception that that kingdom can never be realized without a personal centre, a representative of God with man and man with God, was the thought, reaching far beyond the narrow range of Pharisaic legalism, which was the last lesson of the vicissitudes of the Old Testament dispensation, the spiritual truth that lay beneath that last movement of Judaism which concentrated the hope of Israel in the person of the anointed of Jehovah. It would carry us too far to consider in this place the details of the Jewish conception of the Messiah and the Messianic times as they appear in the later apocalypses or in Rabbinical theology. See for the former the excellent summary of Schiirer, NTliche Zcit- gcschichtc, 28, 29 (Leipsic, 1874), and for the latter, besides the older books catalogued by Schiirer (of which Schoettgen, Hone, 1742, and Bertholdt, Christologia Judseorum, 1811, may be specially named), Weber, Altsynagogalc Thcologic (Leipsic, 1880). For the whole subject see also Drummond, The Jewish Messiah (London. 1877), and Kuenen, Religion of Israel, chap. xii. For the Messianic hopes of the Pharisees and the Psalter of Solomon see especially Wellhausen, Pharisder und Sadducaer (Greifswald, 1874). In its ultimate form the Messianic hope of the Jews is the centre of the whole eschatology, embracing the doctrine of the last troubles of Israel (called by the Rabbins the &quot;birth pangs of the Messiah &quot;), the appearing of the anointed king, the annihilation of the hostile enemy, the return of the dispersed of Israel, the glory and world- sovereignty of the elect, the new world, the resurrection of the dead, and the last judgment. But even the final form of Jewish theology shows much vacillation as to these details, especially as regards their sequence and mutual relation, thus betraying the inadequacy of the harmonistic method by which they were derived from the Old Testament and the stormy excitement in which the Messianic idea was developed. It is, for example, an open question among the Rabbins whether the days of the Messiah belong to the old or to the new world (Hjri DTiyn or X3H DPiyil), whether the resurrec tion embraces all men or only the righteous, whether it precedes or follows the Messianic age. Compare MILLENNIUM. We must also pass over the very important questions that arise as to the gradual extrication of the New Testament idea of the Christ from the elements of Jewish political doctrine which had so strong a hold of many of the first disciples the relation, for ex ample, of the New Testament Apocalypse to contemporary Jewish thought. A word, however, is necessary as to the Rabbinical doc trine of the Messiah who suffers and dies for Israel, the Messiah son of Joseph or son of Ephraim, who in Jewish theology is distinguished from and subordinate to the victorious son of David. The devel oped form of this idea is almost certainly a product of the polemic with Christianity, in which the Rabbins were hard pressed by argu ments from passages (especially Isa. liii.) which their own exegesis admitted to be Messianic, though it did not accept the Christian inferences as to the atoning death of the Messianic king. That the Jews in the time of Christ believed in a suffering and atoning Messiah is, to say the least, unproved and highly improbable. See, besides the books above cited, De Wette, Opuscula ; Wiinsche, Die Leiden dcs Mcssias, 1870. The opposite argument of King, The Yalkut on Zcchariah (Cambridge, 1882), App. A, does not really prove more than that the doctrine of the Messiah Ben Joseph found points of attachment in older thought. ( W. R. S. ) MESSINA, a city and seaport at the north-east corner of Sicily, capital of the province of the same name, 3 is 3 The province occupies the north-east corner of the island, and is 60 miles in length by 30 in breadth. It is chierly occupied witii moun tain ranges and valleys ; there are few plains. The largest river is the