Little Messiah/Big Messiah

The most important thing to understand in terms of the difference between Judaism and Christianity is the concept of the term, "Messiah" (which means, "the Anointed One" one in Hebrew; "Christos" is the Greek translation of the word). First of all, it originally referred to the person selected by a prophet (who in turn was inwardly directed by God) by anointing upon the head with holy oil to be the leader of the Hebrew Nation. Thus King Saul and King David were, in this sense, "messiahs"; this is what I playfully mean by "little messiah", as they were worldly practical leaders of a free and independent nation. Later, when the Jewish people came under the domination of others (Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, etc.), the Jewish prophets began to evolve a new concept of the messiah. This is what I playfully refer to as the "Big Messiah". This new sort of messiah was someone who would come to liberate the Jews from their bondage under another nation. Arguably, the Maccabees were the first such messiahs, freeing the Jews from the religious and political oppression of Hellenistic overlords. Then of course later, there were men such as Bar Kochba, who arose to liberate Judea from the Romans; he was proclaimed "Messiah", and he gave the Romans a real run for their money despite his ultimate failure. His revolt was really a question of a tiny nation fighting very well with such resources as they had against the vast resources of the most powerful empire the world had ever known. And yet, there was another concept of "Big Messiah" that had been evolving (and would continue to evolve) among Jewish prophets, rabbis, exegetical scholars, and mystics, which had truly cosmic implications: there would one day arrive a messiah to end all messiahs. This Messiah would not merely liberate the Jewish People politically, but bring peace and justice and prosperity to the whole world forever. When Jesus died (and perhaps while he yet lived -- the acclamations of later written accounts not withstanding), there was a group of Jews that decided he fulfilled this mystical notion of messiah. Most Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah, because when he died, the Jews had not been liberated from the Romans, and there still remained injustice and oppression in the world. The Christian Jews rebutted this argument by saying that Jesus' Kingdom, whether on Heaven or Earth, was a transcendental one: it was a kingdom of higher vision and conscience that bound together increasing numbers of people in a spiritual siblinghood. These Jewish Christians felt that this messianic kingdom (while obtained by every person of faith in the afterlife) would also one day encompass the whole world of the living, because what Jesus did while he yet lived on Earth was merely to start the beginning of the process of spiritual renewal of the world. Yet this interpretation was not compelling to most of their fellow Jews, especially after the Fall of the Second Temple, when most were forced out of Judea by the repression and tightening military control of the Romans. To lose their most holy place, Jerusalem, and their remaining collective claims on the province that had once been their sovereign kingdom was simply too much for most any Jew to ever imagine that Jesus had been the Messiah, even if his supporters claimed the liberation he brought was more an inward one for each individual of faith and only gradually would become also political by sheer propensity of shared belief and social being. This was the first true divide between Jews and Christians; Emperor Constantine would create a second divide by setting up an imperial authoritarian Church with exclusive political claims to salvation and ratification of humanity, which in effect branded Jews the chief impediment to the promise of the Messiah. If there had been any possibility that Jesus might have been honored in some Jewish circles as at least a credible Jewish prophet, misunderstood by Christians as the Messiah, that possible means of connection between the two faiths was now destroyed by this political perversion of Christianity. The figure of Jesus would now be used as a weapon by Catholic/Orthodox Christianity against the Jews. What a terrible and incredible irony.