The Case for the Real Jesus

by Lee Strobel

  THE FIFTH EVANGELIST

  A significant part of Brown’s case for Jesus being the Messiah hinges on the prophecies of Isaiah, who was so prolific in foreshadowing “the anointed one” that he has sometimes been called “the fifth evangelist,” adding him alongside Gospel authors Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

  “According to some counts, the New Testament has over four hundred allusions to [the Book of Isaiah], and parts of forty-seven chapters of Isaiah’s sixty-six are either directly quoted or alluded to in the New Testament,” Walter Kaiser said. “This means that Isaiah is second only to the book of Psalms as the favorite Old Testament book from which the early church drew its predictions of what happened to Christ.”62

  Of special interest is the description of the suffering servant in Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12, which has probably prompted more people to put their trust in Jesus as the Messiah than any other passage in scripture:63

  See, my servant will act wisely;

  he will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted.

  Just as there were many who were appalled at him—

  his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man and his form marred beyond human likeness—

  so will he sprinkle many nations,

  and kings will shut their mouths because of him.

  For what they were not told, they will see,

  And what they have not heard, they will understand.

  Who has believed our message

  and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

  He grew up before him like a tender shoot,

  and like a root out of dry ground.

  He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,

  nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

  He was despised and rejected by men,

  a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.

  Like one from whom men hide their faces

  he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

  Surely he took up our infirmities

  and carried our sorrows,

  yet we considered him stricken by God,

  smitten by him, and afflicted.

  But he was pierced for our transgressions,

  he was crushed for our iniquities;

  the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,

  and by his wounds we are healed.

  We all, like sheep, have gone astray,

  each of us has turned to his own way;

  and the LORD has laid on him

  the iniquity of us all.

  He was oppressed and afflicted,

  yet he did not open his mouth;

  he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,

  and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.

  By oppression and judgment he was taken away.

  And who can speak of his descendants?

  For he was cut off from the land of the living;

  for the transgression of my people he was stricken.

  He was assigned a grave with the wicked,

  and with the rich in his death,

  though he had done no violence,

  nor was any deceit in his mouth.

  Yet it was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,

  and though the LORD makes his life a guilt offering,

  he will see his offspring and prolong his days,

  and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand.

  After the suffering of his soul,

  he will see the light of life and be satisfied;

  by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,

  and he will bear their iniquities.

  Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,

  and he will divide the spoils with the strong,

  because he poured out his life unto death,

  and was numbered with the transgressors.

  For he bore the sin of many,

  and made intercession for the transgressors.

  “Isaiah 52:13–53:12—how important is this passage?” I asked Brown.

  “It’s almost as if God said, ‘I want to make it so absolutely clear Yeshua is the Messiah that it’s undeniable,’” Brown declared. “I almost feel as if God would have to apologize to the human race and to the Jewish people for putting this passage into the scriptures when it so clearly points to Yeshua if he didn’t really mean that.”

  With so much depending on these verses, I decided to raise some of the most frequent objections to its fulfillment in Jesus and see how Brown would respond.

  OBJECTIONS TO ISAIAH

  Some commentators, I pointed out, say this description of the suffering servant applies to the people of Israel as a nation, not to an individual who is the Messiah. “Doesn’t the passage actually deal with the return of the Jewish people from the Babylonian exile, which occurred more than five hundred years before Jesus was born?” I asked.

  “That’s the backdrop of many of the messianic prophecies,” Brown said, quickly dismissing my comment about the exile.

  “Early Jewish interpretations about Isaiah 53 are varied,” Brown went on. “But nowhere in the classical, foundational, authoritative Jewish writings do we find the interpretation that this passage refers to the nation of Israel. References to the servant as a people actually end with Isaiah 48:20.

  “Many traditional Jewish interpreters, from the Targum to today, had no problem seeing this passage as referring to the Messiah,” he said. “They didn’t have any difficulty interpreting it independently of the preceding context of the return from the Babylonian exile. By the sixteenth century, Rabbi Moshe Alshech said, ‘Our rabbis with one voice accept and affirm the opinion that the prophet is speaking of the Messiah, and we shall ourselves also adhere to the same view.’ So he was saying all his contemporaries agreed with the messianic reading—even though it must have been very tempting to deny this because by that time Christians had been claiming for centuries that this passage describes Yeshua.”

  “Why can’t this passage refer to Israel as a whole?”

  “Several reasons,” he said. “The servant of the Lord is righteous and without guile and yet suffers terribly. If this is the nation of Israel, it’s a complete violation of Torah. According to Torah, if the nation is righteous, then it will be blessed. If it’s wicked, it’ll be punished. The idea that the nation as a whole could be righteous and yet punished is completely unacceptable on a scriptural level.”

  “But in another chapter,” I said, “the psalmist himself says Israel suffered at the hands of its enemies even though it was righteous.”64

  “Not so,” he responded. “This is a prayer of the righteous remnant on behalf of the sinning nation. It’s the small group of the godly—the righteous—who are interceding on behalf of the unrighteous, ungodly, suffering majority.”

  “Okay,” I said, conceding the point. “I interrupted you—you said there were several reasons why this passage doesn’t refer to the nation of Israel.”

  “Yes, the second reason is because the text says the servant will be highly exalted, even to where kings stand in awe. That’s not true of Israel, but it is true of Yeshua, who’s worshiped by kings and leaders around the world. Third, the passage offers the picture of a totally righteous, guileless servant of God. But nobody can point to a time when Israel, as a nation, had no deceit on its lips or was a righteous servant of God. And fourth, Isaiah says the servant’s sufferings brought healing to the people. Now, has Israel suffered through the ages? Yes, but our sufferings did not bring healing to the nations that afflicted us.”

  “All right, this passage might refer to an individual—but it can’t be Yeshua,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Let me give you several reasons.” I consulted the series of objections I had jotted on my clipboard. “First, the Isaiah passage says nobody was attracted to the servant of the Lord, but we know that Jesus attracted huge throngs to himself—thousands of people flock
ed to him at times.”

  “Actually, Isaiah 53 first refers to his origins, which were very lowly and inauspicious—‘He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground.’ That’s a consistent theme in the New Testament—‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth? The carpenter’s son? Him? How could this be?’ 65

  “Isaiah says, ‘He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,’ and certainly there’s nothing recorded about the appearance of Jesus that would contradict that. Besides, the crowds around Jesus were very fickle—they shouted, ‘Crown him!’ one day and “Crucify him!’ the next. But the primary thrust of Isaiah 53 is his rejection, suffering, and death—at that time, he’s utterly forsaken. Yeshua fulfills all of that very well.”

  “His death?” I said. “Critics claim that the passage doesn’t specifically and unambiguously say the servant would die.”

  “There’s an accumulation of words that are used,” Brown said. “He’s stricken by God, he’s smitten, he’s pierced, he’s crushed, he’s oppressed, he’s afflicted, he’s led like a lamb to the slaughter, he’s taken away, he’s cut off from the land of the living, he’s assigned a grave, he poured out his life unto death, he’s with the rich in his death—what are all those phrases referring to, if not the fact that he did truly die?”

  “But what about the resurrection?” I pressed. “Show me where that word is used.”

  “It’s not—but it’s plainly implied,” replied Brown. “How does someone die and yet ‘prolong his days’? Clearly, the passage speaks of the servant’s continued activities after his death. And there’s only one explanation for that—resurrection!”

  WHO BUT JESUS?

  Brown’s answers seemed persuasive enough, but there were still other reasons why critics reject Isaiah 53’s fulfillment in Jesus. For instance, while the Isaiah passage refers to the nonviolence of God’s servant, the Gospels describe Jesus as using a whip to drive money-changers out of the temple.

  “That sounds like a violent act that would get a person arrested today,” I said. “Wouldn’t that disqualify Jesus from being the Messiah?”

  “When the Hebrew scriptures speak of violence, which in Hebrew is hamas, it’s describing illegal aggression like murder, bloodshed, and robbery—none of which Yeshua ever committed,” Brown said. “Jesus’ nonviolence was so well known that Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. modeled their nonviolent resistance after him. When Peter drew a sword and cut off the ear of one of the guards who came to arrest Jesus, he was rebuked by Jesus—who then healed the guard’s ear.”

  While that was true, it seemed to me he was skirting the question. “Specifically, what about the temple cleansing?” I asked.

  “As for the temple incident—or incidents, since there may have been two separate events—this was praiseworthy and motivated by zeal for God,” Brown replied. “If he wanted to hurt someone, he would have used a sword, but instead he made a whip out of cords, which was apparently used for the animals. The money-changers only got a verbal rebuke for making the temple ‘a den of robbers.’66 There’s no record of anyone being injured, and this incident wasn’t even brought up at Jesus’ trial, where nobody could accuse him of wrongdoing.”

  I raised yet another issue. “Isaiah 53 says the Lord’s servant will not lift up his voice or cry out, yet Jesus cried out several times on the cross,” I said.

  “Again, let’s look at the context,” Brown said. “The passage says he did not open his mouth but was led away like a lamb to the slaughter. Interestingly, the New Testament specifically applies this text to Jesus.67 All through his ordeal—his arrest, his trial, his flogging, his crucifixion—he doesn’t try to defend himself, he doesn’t protest, he doesn’t fight: just like a lamb being led to the slaughter. He truly turns the other cheek, as he taught in the Sermon on the Mount.68 Is he crying out when he says on the cross, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit’? Is he crying out when he says, ‘Father, forgive them’? Or is that also being like a lamb? The point is, he never fought what was happening to him.”

  I glanced down at my notes: only one significant objection remained. “Isaiah 53 says the servant of the Lord will have descendants—or ‘see seed’ in the Hebrew,” I said. “Jesus never married or had children, so he can’t be the Messiah, can he?”

  Brown smiled at a memory. “A rabbi once told me in a debate that every single time the term ‘see seed’ exists in scripture, it specifically refers to physical progeny. The only hole in that argument is that this is the only time the idiom occurs!” Brown said with a laugh.

  “The question is, can ‘seed’ be used metaphorically, in terms of spiritual offspring?” he asked. “Isaiah himself uses it that way in other chapters; for example, he calls Israel ‘a seed of evildoers.’69 If we follow a standard Hebrew lexicon, we see that ‘seed of evildoers’ would mean ‘a community of evildoers’ or ‘evildoers to the core.’70 In the context of Isaiah 53, ‘seed’ would mean the servant of the Lord would see godly, spiritual posterity, true disciples transformed by means of his labors on their behalf.

  “Also, the Hebrew word for ‘seed’ can mean ‘a future generation’ without reference to specific descendants of one individual in particular. It’s used this way in Psalm 22. In the context of Isaiah 53, this would mean the servant of the Lord would see future generations of his people serving the Lord. One more point,” he added. “Isaiah 53 doesn’t say he’ll see his seed. That’s important. So I think it’s entirely appropriate to interpret this metaphorically.”

  “Overall, then, you feel like Isaiah 53 remains the passage with the most clarity—,” I began, but Brown interrupted.

  “With all due respect to those who come up with objections, they’re really swatting at flies,” he said. “Any time I can get someone to read this passage, I ask, ‘Of whom does this speak?’ If you can read it in Hebrew, all the better. You’d be amazed at the reaction. I remember one time showing it to a respectful Jewish man. He read it, got red in the face, and yelled out: ‘Jesus Christ!’ It was an expression of anger, but I thought, ‘How ironic is that?’

  “Because who but Jesus could it be describing?”71

  BORN OF A VIRGIN?

  One of the most controversial prophecies is found elsewhere in Isaiah. In his Gospel, Matthew points to Isaiah 7:14 as being fulfilled in Jesus: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel,” which means “God with us.”72

  But critics claim several flaws. First, they say the word Isaiah used to describe the mother, ‘almah, doesn’t mean “virgin”—and if he had wanted to convey the idea of virginity, he would have used a better word: betulah. Second, they deny this is a messianic prophecy at all, but it referred to a sign that God gave King Ahaz of Judah some seven hundred years before Jesus’ birth. Third, this prophecy can’t refer to Jesus because he wasn’t given the name Immanuel.

  “Those are pretty tough issues,” I said to Brown after summarizing the objections. “Did Matthew misinterpret this?”

  “It’s a tough passage,” Brown conceded. “I’ve analyzed Isaiah in general and this passage in particular for thirty years.”

  “What’s your conclusion?” I asked.

  “That it’s impossible to determine exactly what the prophecy meant to the original hearers when it was delivered.”

  I was a little relieved that it was as murky to others as it was to me. “What’s the background of it?” I asked.

  “The people of Judah were being threatened by the Israelites in the north, who were joined by the Arameans,” Brown said. “Their intent was to seize Jerusalem and remove the reigning king, Ahaz, who was from the line of David. This was a frontal attack on the dynasty from which the Messiah would come.

  “Unfortunately, Ahaz was a faithless ruler. The Lord sent the prophet Isaiah to reassure him that his enemies would be defeated if he would trust in God alone. He refused to stand firm in his faith
. Isaiah told him to ask God for a sign to assure him, but Ahaz didn’t. So God unilaterally provides him a sign: the ‘almah will give birth to a son and he will be called Immanuel. And incidentally, Ahaz was being addressed not simply as the king but as a representative of the house of David, and in two verses he was referred to in the plural, so Azah was not being addressed alone.”

  “How did Matthew see this promise?” I asked.

  “I’m sure he didn’t see it in isolation. I believe he read it in the broader context of Isaiah 7–11, one of the key prophetic sections that point toward Jesus as Messiah. In Isaiah 7, he is about to be born; in Isaiah 9, he is already born and declared ‘mighty God,’ the divine king; and in Isaiah 11 he is ruling and reigning in the supernatural power of the Spirit.

  “As Matthew looked back at these prophecies, it would have been apparent that these chapters were linked together and that the promises of a worldwide, glorious reign of the promised Messiah were not yet realized. In chapter 8, Maher-Slalal-Hash-Baz is born. It seems that for Isaiah’s contemporaries, this birth virtually took the place of the birth of Immanuel, leaving this important prophetic announcement without any record of fulfillment for more than seven hundred years.”

  Something didn’t seem right to me. “If Immanuel’s birth was supposed to be a sign for Ahaz,” I said, “then it wouldn’t make sense that it would refer to the birth of Jesus seven centuries later.”

  “That fails to account for a few things,” said Brown. “First, this was a promise to the house of David as a whole, and promises to Davidic kings often had meaning beyond their own generations. Second, the birth of Maher-Slalal-Hash-Baz seems to take the place of the Immanuel prophecy in terms of the immediate historical context. Third, the prophecy is shrouded in obscurity, and so Matthew could legitimately examine it afresh and seek its deeper meaning.”

  “So you think Matthew’s interpretation was legitimate?”

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “He sees the supernatural birth, this Immanuel figure, as part of a larger messianic complex of passages, and he applies this difficult part of scripture with genuine insight to Yeshua.”