Book Review: Messianic Exegesis

Well, I just fin­ished read­ing Mes­sianic Exe­ge­sis and thought I should post a quick review for any­one who was inter­ested. It’ll be short; don’t worry.

Every once and a while I like to read a book that’s way over my head. Most of the books I read are over my head, but some­times I read ones that are so far over my head that I have a lot of trou­ble read­ing them. Mes­sianic Exe­ge­sis was one of them.

It basi­cally tried to trace through what Jew­ish peo­ple believed the Mes­siah would be ver­sus what the New Tes­ta­ment said He was. It’s a bit more com­pli­cated than that, though. It was specif­i­cally writ­ten to address the issue of how the New Tes­ta­ment authors read the Old Tes­ta­ment. They clearly believed that the Old Tes­ta­ment was about Jesus, but their pre­cise meth­ods of inter­pret­ing Scrip­ture as being about Jesus are a bit hard to understand.

One of the really help­ful points the book made was that we have a mis­con­cep­tion about the New Tes­ta­ment. Most of us fig­ure that the ref­er­ences in the Gospels (and the rest of the New Tes­ta­ment) to the Old Tes­ta­ment as being about Jesus are there to prove that Jesus was the Mes­siah. Mes­sianic Exe­ge­sis makes the point that they weren’t so much con­cerned with prov­ing Jesus to be any­thing. They started with the assump­tion that Jesus was the Mes­siah (based pri­mar­ily on His res­ur­rec­tion from the dead) and were using the Old Tes­ta­ment pri­mar­ily to fig­ure out and explain what exactly it meant that Jesus was the Messiah.

All in all, while I can’t hon­estly say I got every­thing out of it that some­one more learned or smart would have, I found it well worth the read. I’ll be read­ing some sim­i­lar books on the same topic, though. If they’re any eas­ier to fol­low, I may rec­om­mend them over this one since it was so technical.

By the way, this post is from my old blog. It was orig­i­nally writ­ten around a year ago. I uploaded it here so I could keep it with my other posts.