Transcription
One of the most important prophecies that the Christian church points to, uh, about Jesus in the Old Testament is the book of Isaiah, chapter 53. They say that this chapter speaks of the coming of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, and it prophesies his death in great detail, his crucifixion, and his resurrection from the dead. And this is an immensely important chapter, and I want to briefly look at it and share with you what mainstream biblical scholarship is saying about this passage because this is little known outside of academia.
But before we look at what they say, I just want to share with you—these are almost at random. I went on Google images and typed in “Isaiah 53 Messiah” or “the Christ.” And so these are almost random. These are clearly Christian, uh, images. Isaiah chapter 53 is a prophecy of the coming Christ or the Messiah being chastened, put to death, resurrected, and the reasons for it very clear. Isaiah 53 is another one. Messiah revealed through the holy prophets, his coming crucifixion and resurrection. There’s a clear prophecy in Isaiah 53 of the coming Messiah. Very explicit. Another one: Isaiah preached about the Messiah. Isaiah 53. The main point: God said the Messiah would be a suffering servant. God’s very explicit and clear. This is what the passage in Isaiah says. An amazing, uh, prophecy. Um, so this is why it’s so important, so influential. I, I hear it mentioned all the time.
And this, uh, is the 12 verses in question. Just get them up. So this is, uh, from the New Revised Standard Version—Isaiah 53, as you can see: “Who has believed what we have heard?” Now I’m not going to read all the way through it. It’s only 12 short verses. You can read it for yourself. You can read it here. You can slow it down, or you can just Google Isaiah 53 very quickly and easily see it for yourself. Very short but immensely, uh, important chapter.
So why am I making a fuss about this great proof text for the truth of the Christian gospel? Well, well, this is the catch. Now, this is not—is not polemical. What I’m saying is not intended to be Muslim polemic or atheist or Jewish polemic. It’s simply looking at the text, doing two things. One is something that people often don’t do, and that is to read the text—just to read it. Does it say what people claim it does say? And secondly, I’m going to share with you, uh, some words from this book. Here we go. The Bible, a historical and literary introduction, uh, by Bart D. Ehrman, who is the distinguished professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States, one of the leading biblical scholars in America. This text is published by Oxford University Press. It’s a standard undergraduate text, and this book is used on undergraduate courses teaching the Bible all over the English-speaking world, and it’s highly respected. Oxford University Press indeed publish it, which they wouldn’t do if unless it was extremely good quality stuff.
So what does, uh, this undergraduate text say about Isaiah 53? And I’m just going to share what he says. And remember this is mainstream scholarship. It’s not meant to attack the Bible or cause doubt or or skepticism. It’s simply looking at it historically and and in terms of its own context. And this, it turns out, makes all the difference, all the difference in the world to what we read. And what I’m going to share with you, if you’re not familiar with it, can be quite shocking and quite disturbing actually if one is a Christian who is not familiar with what Christian scholarship and Jewish scholarship.
So the suffering servant: “No passage of Isaiah has intrigued readers and interpreters, especially among Christians,” writes Ehrman, “more than the four passages that are dedicated to describing a figure known as the suffering servant.” So yes, it’s not just Isaiah 53. There are other sections of Isaiah which also speak of the same suffering servant. It’s really important we grasp this. And he goes on: “Some commentators have called these passages ‘songs’ or ‘songs of the suffering servant.’ These passages are Isaiah 42:1-4, Isaiah 49:1-6, Isaiah 50:4-11, and Isaiah 52:13 to Isaiah 53:12. These are—that last passage is our passage we’re looking at today.” Scholars debate whether these passages were composed at the same time as the rest of the book or whether instead they existed independently of the book, possibly composed earlier by the author himself and were then incorporated into the book in four places. We’re not going to go there. That’s not of interest to us today. In these passages, so these are the four servant songs, the servant of Yahweh is said to have suffered horribly for the sake of others. But God will vindicate him. He, in fact, is the delight of Yahweh and will be used by him to accomplish his will on earth. Isaiah 42 says: “I have put my spirit upon him. He will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth.” Isaiah 42, uh, verses 1-4. Beautiful, uh, beautiful prophecy there. Apparently, the author believes that this unnamed servant shall prosper. He shall be exalted and lifted up. That’s Isaiah 52:13. But the most important, impressive, and well-known comments about the servant involve his horrible sufferings for the sake of others. These comments have been highly important since the times of the New Testament because Christian readers have widely thought that Isaiah was describing the crucifixion of Jesus for the sins of the world. And then he actually quotes Isaiah 53 a couple of verses: “He was despised and rejected by others, a man of suffering acquainted with infirmity and as one from whom others hide their faces. He was despised and we held him of no account. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our sicknesses. And yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. Or we like sheep have gone astray. We have all turned to our own way and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” End quote. That’s Isaiah 53:3-6. So clearly Christians believe this is a prophecy, uh, about Jesus who is to come in the future, the Messiah himself. Ehrman says, the author goes on to say that the servant was silent before his oppressors, that he was cut off from the land of the living, that he made his tomb with the rich, and that it was—and that it was quote “the will of the Lord to crush him with pain” end quote. Doesn’t this sound, says Ehrman, exactly like Jesus? Isn’t this a prophecy about what—what—what would happen to the Messiah? It’s so obvious, isn’t it? Christians have said this to me many times. It’s so obviously about Jesus. How can you not think it’s about Jesus? So obvious.
So this is where it gets interesting. In response to that common Christian interpretation, several points are important to make. And this is the heart of this video. It gives us pause, food for thought, and a different way of viewing these verses from an historical critical—it’s called the historical critical method. It’s a way of approaching the text that pays very close attention to what he actually says. Remarkable, isn’t it? Anyway, one—this is the, uh, the point he wants to make. Now, point number one: “It is to be remembered that the prophets of the Hebrew Bible were not predicting things that were to happen hundreds of years in advance. They were speaking into their own contexts and delivering a message for their own people to hear about their own immediate futures.” This is a really important point about the prophets in general. They weren’t speaking of events in thousands of years’ time. They were speaking of things that would happen in their own context, in their own time. Usually important background information there.
Number two, in this case, the author is not predicting that someone will suffer in the future for other people’s sins at all. What? How can this be the case? Many readers fail to consider the verb tenses in these passages. Verb tenses. Interesting. They do not indicate—the verses do not indicate that someone will come along at a later time and suffer in the future. They are talking about past suffering. The servant has already suffered, although he will be vindicated. And so this is not about a future suffering Messiah. It is so obvious, isn’t it, when you think about it? If you read Isaiah 53 and notice the tense, is it the past? Is it the present? Is it the future? What is talking about? And he’s talking about a figure in the past. So, it’s not a prediction. It’s such an elementary point that’s overlooked by everyone when they read this if they don’t look at it carefully, uh, and attentively looking to what the words actually say.
Point number three, and for me this point is so obvious when you get it, but it’s very, very unexpected. Who would have guessed what point number three is? The fact—it’s in fact, he says—it is not about the Messiah at all. This is a point frequently overlooked in discussions of the passage. If you will look and have a look now, viewer, have a look at Isaiah 53. Now you will notice that the term “messiah” never occurs in the passage. This is not predicting what the Messiah will be. How can this be? Look, remember this passage: “Look, Isaiah 53 is a prophecy of the coming of the Messiah.” And look at this: “Isaiah preached about the Messiah.” He explicitly mentions the Messiah. God said the Messiah would be a suffering servant. So, how can they be so wrong? Well, have a look. Have a look at the passage. It never mentions a Messiah, and Christians don’t see that. They, they come to the text with a preformed idea of what should be in it because they’re priests and pastors and evangelists have told them it’s all about the Messiah. And so, they just see it there. But if you step back, pause, take a deep breath, and look at the passage, it never mentions a Messiah. Interesting, isn’t it?
Number four. Point number four. If the passage is not referring to the Messiah and is not referring to someone in the future who is going to suffer, who is it talking about? This is a really interesting question here. There really—here there really should be very little ambiguity. He says, as I mentioned, this particular passage Isaiah 53 is one of the four servant songs of Isaiah. And so the question is whom does Isaiah himself indicate that the servant is? Because he does tell us. This is not a mystery. This is not a conspiracy theory. He actually states repeatedly who the servant is. Amazing, isn’t it? Is that obvious? A careful reading of the passages will makes the identification quite clear. And then he tells us—he actually quotes—this is the—this is the book, The Bible, a historical and literary introduction, published by Oxford University Press—got some good, good reviews from, uh, other academics on the back. So who is the identity of the servant? And then he quotes various passages in Isaiah. But now here—“O Jacob, my servant, Israel whom I have chosen.” This is one of the servant songs. Isaiah 44:1. “Remember these things, O Jacob and Israel, for you are my servant.” This is Isaiah 44 verse 21. And he said to me, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.” Isaiah 49:3. The book of Isaiah itself indicates who the servant of the Lord is. It is Israel, says, uh, Ehrman—God’s people. In Isaiah 53, when the author describes the servant’s past sufferings—the tense—past tense—he is talking about the sufferings they have experienced by being destroyed and exiled by the Babylonians. This is the historical context of the passage. This is a suffering that has come about because of sins—that the suffering will be vindicated because God will now restore Israel and bring them back to the land and enter into a new relationship with them.
Now, pause here for a sec. The reason why many Christians don’t see it is because they parachute into the Bible, into Isaiah and Isaiah 53. They don’t look at the chapters leading up to it, and they don’t read the chapters after it. They don’t read the context. So they, they are robbed of key indicators of who the servant is. They effectively ignore it. They don’t read chapter 44. They don’t read chapter 49. They just parachute, as I say, right into this—what these 12 verses—and don’t look at the the bit before and the bit after. They don’t see the clues. They don’t see what Isaiah is actually saying. And this decontextualized, de-historical, unhistorical reading is why they can add their own content and make it say something it never originally meant, actually. And we’ll come to that in a sec.
So Ehrman continues: “It may be fairly objected that the servant, with a capital ‘S,’ is said to suffer for our sins and not his sins. Scholars have resolved, uh, that problem in a number of ways.” He writes: “It may be that the author is thinking that the portion of the people taken into exile have suffered for the sins of those in the land, those who remain behind. Some of them suffering for the sins of all. Those who have take—those who have been taken into captivity have suffered displacement, loss, and exile for the sake of the sins of the nation. But now the servant, Israel, clearly identified—Israel itself—will be exalted and restored to a close relationship with God and will be used by him to bring about justice throughout the earth.” See, this is a different reading, a different interpretation. Once you strip away later tradition—ideas that are not in the text—and you kind of listen to the words, the context as it is in Isaiah, you suddenly have a different reading of this whole story. No longer is God predicting that the Messiah will come to earth and die. There’s no mention of a future prophecy. There’s no mention of the Messiah anyway. And the last problem—sorry, the last passage there—may be problems with this interpretation. Ehrman says, as there always are with every interpretation, but the facts remain that the suffering servant is never described as the Messiah. His suffering is portrayed as past instead of future, and he is explicitly identified on several occasions as Israel. Later readers who have taken the passage as a reference to the Messiah then have seen Jesus as one who fills out or fulfills its original meaning, giving it a new meaning it did not originally have.
Now, on—on this point, I, I spoke to two, uh, Catholic, uh, Christians at Speaker’s Corner on Sunday. We discussed this very passage, and inshallah this video will be uploaded in the next day or two. Um, and I made this point, and, and you see Catholics have a particular doctrine called the sensus plenior—this greater or fuller meaning. So a Catholic, uh, scholar could acknowledge what Ehrman has said: “Yes, in the historical context it doesn’t refer to Jesus, but the fuller meaning uncovered by the inspiration of the Catholic Church can identify Jesus also in a secondary sense.” There’s a fuller, further sense of the meaning of Isaiah. Perhaps Isaiah didn’t know this, but it’s kind of there in the text. Now, you can argue that—and by the way, you could have no objection to Muslims seeing, uh, the Prophet Muhammad (upon whom be peace) in many passages in the Bible, then as well if you argue that way. But the thing is the passage itself—Isaiah 53—doesn’t say—doesn’t mention the Messiah. It is in the past tense. It—the—the servant himself is clearly identified as Israel. So this is very much a, a meaning that’s not there, and you really have to read into the text—do—is Jesus—or—I see Jesus as one wag put it—rather than exegesis, uh, where you’re reading out of the text the meaning that is there, hopefully, and that is biblical scholarship—is where you read things into things, and you see Jesus everywhere in the Bible, and Christians do this—the problem is it’s not there originally—you have to bring it into the text to make it say things that are not there. Isaiah 42, to change the subject, um, has, uh, as a prophecy of the Prophet Muhammad (upon him be peace) is much more plausible because it really connects with elements in the Sira, in the life of the Prophet Muhammad (upon him be peace), and it is a prediction—so—but I’m not going to talk about that in this video. I want to focus on Isaiah 53—so this most amazing of all—remember—let’s go back—here we go—“Isaiah preached about the Messiah”—no, he didn’t—again, I’m not being polemical. I’m not saying this because I’m a Muslim, or anyone else could say this. It simply never mentions the Messiah. “Isaiah 53, Messiah revealed through the holy prophets.” “Chapter 53 is a prophecy of the coming Messiah. The Christ.” No, it’s not, because it doesn’t mention the Christ. It doesn’t mention the Messiah. These words mean the same thing. Of course, an anointed—an anointed one—doesn’t mention them in the passage at all.
So that’s what I wanted to, uh, share with you. I do recommend this book, uh, if you want a, a good solid introductory, uh, undergraduate level, um, introduction to the, uh, the Bible—the whole of the Bible—from the Christian Bible included as well as the Jewish Bible—is pretty good. I do recommend—I do use it in my own, uh, teaching as well. So I hope you found that interesting. Any Christians watching this, please comment below, uh, what you think of this—this is the mainstream historical way of understanding Isaiah 53. Do you agree with it? If you don’t, please let me know why you think it’s mistaken or where it’s at fault. Thank you. Until next time.