The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David by Thomas L Thompson

Author:Thomas L Thompson [Thompson, Thomas L]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

On this mountain, the Lord of hosts will make a feast for all peoples: a great feast with rich meats and old wines. . . . The veil that is cast over the nations will be destroyed; he will swallow death forever and the God Yahweh will wipe tears away from everyone’s face. He will take away the reproach of his people from the whole earth. (Is 25:6–8)

By having Jesus point ahead to meeting the disciples once again in his father’s kingdom, there to drink the new wine, the gospel writers identify Jesus impending suffering (“his covenant of blood”) with both Israel’s new covenant and their suffering in exile. Similarly, the future evoked—drinking a new wine with God in his kingdom—is Isaiah’s ecstatic future, overcoming death. That the reader’s attention is focused on this future of eating and drinking with God is important. How the Passion story is to be read is at stake. The suffering figure of Jesus plays the Pentateuch’s lost generation. The disciples are with Moses and the elders on Mount Sinai. In their heavenly feast, death is overcome through the rapture the story evokes. As in Jeremiah and Isaiah, so in the gospels, the goal is understanding: a glimpse of the transcendent that resolves human suffering (Jer 31:34; Is 25:9; Mt 26:29). The indirection of reiterative narrative and song allows us to read a story about Jesus and his disciples sharing a cup of wine the night before his death through multiple evocations of figures of suffering. Isaiah’s Jerusalem, the elders of the wilderness and the innocent, righteous one of Israel all contribute to the story’s overtones. Like the figure of the prophetic shepherd from Zechariah, “struck down, scattering the flock” to whom Matthew turns as he has Jesus go up to the Mount of Olives (Mt 26:31; Zech 13:7), all of these figures stand within a universal pedagogy of wisdom through suffering.

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