The Messiah Before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls (review)

This short book (74 pages of text) by a professor of Bible at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, has received a fair amount of attention in some segments of the popular media. In the preface, Knohl recognizes that although the book deals primarily with a reconstruction of certain aspects of Judaism in the first century B.C.E., it will attract interest mainly because of what it claims about Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity.

In the first three pages Knohl boldly sketches out his thesis. In the generation before Jesus, there was a Jew in Jerusalem who claimed to be a messiah who would deliver his people from Rome. In a hymn that he wrote, this figure described himself as a “beloved of the king, a companion of the holy ones” with a status more exalted than that of the angels; yet he also presented himself as the “suffering servant” of Isaiah 52–53, one despised and enduring evil. Because of these audacious claims, he was rejected by other Jews and killed. His followers claimed that he rose after three days and went up to heaven, and that his suffering and death had all been part of God’s plan. In the next generation, Jesus of Nazareth inherited this idea of a “catastrophic messianism” that combined both divinity and suffering and so was able to understand his own life and death in terms of this paradigm. Knohl concludes by claiming that in this recovery of the slain Messiah he has now uncovered “the missing link in our understanding of the way Christianity emerged from Judaism” (p. 3).

The rest of the book expands on various elements of this thesis and adds a few more details. Most significantly, in chapter 3, Knohl proposes a specific historical identification for this Messiah: he was Menahem the Essene. This is the Menahem who is described in a passage in Josephus (Ant. 15.372–79), in which Menahem foretells that Herod will become king and thus wins Herod’s favor for the Essenes. Knohl further identifies him with the Menahem mentioned in a cryptic passage in the Mishnah and Talmud (Hagiga 2.2; 77b) who, at the time of Hillel, “went out,” that is, was excommunicated along with eighty pairs of Torah scholars. Knohl allows that the specific identification of Menahem the Essene is “only a hypothesis” (p. 51) and that the main thesis of a pre-Christian messiahship of divinity and suffering could stand independently, but the whole thrust of the book is to take this identification as a given. Furthermore, Knohl makes a link with the passage in John 14:16 where “another Paraclete” is promised; he proposes that the Greek paraclete (‘comforter’) is a translation of menah.em, so that Jesus is seen as a second Menahem to be followed by yet another in a chain of redeemers. In this way Knohl finds further support for “the chief claim of this book, which is that Jesus was the heir and successor of the Messiah of Qumran” (p. 71).

In examining how Knohl is able to “discover” this Messiah who has not been recognized by any other scholar in the past two thousand years, we come to see both the strengths and weaknesses of this book. What Knohl has done is to draw on certain Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts that have only recently been published and combine these with an eclectic selection of other texts, previously known but never brought together or interpreted in quite this way. From a hymn that is preserved in one recension in the Thanksgiving Psalms (4QHodayot^a and 4QHodayot^e) and in another recension in one copy of the War Scroll (4Q491, 11 i), Knohl discovers a Messiah that has “divine status” (p. 19) and through his suffering “atones for the sins of all the members of his sect” (p. 24). Almost every element in this interpretation of...