Messiah and Christos: Studies in the Jewish Origins of Christianity Presented to David Flusser on the Occasion of His Seventy-Fifth Birthday.

• Author: Mason, Steve

Given that the main purpose of these sixteen essays is to honor David Flusser (p. vi), they treat their subject with a remarkable coherence.

Zwi Werblowsky's opening essay on "Jewish Messianism in Comparative Perspective" (pp. 1-13) suggests, inter alia, that Jewish messianism is only one part of the Jewish experience, coming to the fore or fading from view as circumstances require, and that it is a fundamentally historical, never exclusively spiritual, category.

Clemens Thoma begins the more focused studies that characterize the book (pp. 15-29). In debate with the authors of Judaisms and their Messiahs (ed. Jacob Neusner, William S. Green, and Ernst Frerichs [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987] who stress the lateness and variety of early Jewish messianic conceptions, he sketches the contours of a central fund of motifs, which constitute something of a Messiasdefinition for early Judaism, viz.: anointed prophet, priest, king, heavenly figure. This constellation of roles was decisively shaped, he argues, by a common perception of the Hasmonean rulers as prototypes of eschatological figures. Near the end of the first century C.E., Thoma argues, both Judaism and Christianity adjusted an original messianic optimism to include "woes": the Messiah's coming would be a time of suffering (m. Sotah 9.15; Mark 13).

Devorah Dimant contributes a programmatic analysis of Ezekiel's influence on the DSS (pp. 31-51). Her study of both explicit citations and allusions finds that Ezekiel's "priestly-oriented eschatological prophecy" (p. 40, regarding Ezek. 40-48) was basic to the self-definition of the "sons of Zadok" (cf. Ezek. 44:15) at Qumran. They understood their community to inaugurate Ezekiel's future temple, while also reflecting a heavenly temple served by angels (so Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice). Employing the use of Ezekiel as a criterion, Dimant hopes further to confirm that the Qumran documents known as New Jerusalem and Pseudo-Ezekiel did not originate with the community. Although she does not dwell on the implications for the question of the early Church's uniqueness, one might fruitfully compare Ben F. Meyer, "The Temple at the Navel of the Earth" [in Christus Faber: the Master-Builder and the House of God [Allison Park, Pa.: Pickwick, 1992], 217-79).

Michael Fishbane provides a typically sophisticated exegesis (pp. 53-74) of Sifre Deuteronomy 355, with a view to elucidating the relationship between mystical and haggadic-midrashic...