About The Messiah . . .

Lately I’ve been working my way through the joint work of Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins titled King and Messiah as Son of God. While I’m not sure I will be able to cover every chapter in this book, I want to touch on a few that are most interesting to me. I am fascinated by the questions concerning the existence of messianic expectation in Judaism and how such ideas influenced Christian conceptions of Jesus. The authors of this work specify that their particular focus here is “on the specific question of the divinity of the messiah.”

A principal conclusion of the authors is that “the idea of the divinity of the messiah has its roots in the royal ideology of ancient Judah, which in turn was influenced by the Egyptian mythology of kingship.” Rather than merely standing as a metaphorical characterization of God’s adoption of the king, on the one hand, or as representing actual divinity, on the other, the attribution of divine status to the messiah captured both understandings. The Collins’s demonstrate this thesis in eight chapters, with each author contributing four, beginning with John J. Collins.