What is a Messiah? Meaning and Ancient Examples at the Time of Jesus

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

What is a Messiah? The term is used quite often today, even outside explicitly religious contexts. Political leaders, cultural icons, and other figures who inspire extraordinary hope or promise dramatic change are sometimes described as “messianic.” 

Yet the word has a much older and far more complex history, a meaning in Bible contexts that is deeply rooted in ancient Judaism.

To understand what it meant in the world of Jesus (and why it eventually became so central to Christianity) we need to leave these modern associations behind and return to the centuries before and during Jesus’ lifetime, when Jewish communities lived under successive foreign empires and developed a variety of hopes about God, Israel, and the future.

This brings us to what scholars call Second Temple Judaism, a long and remarkably diverse period stretching from the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple in the late 6th century B.C.E. to its destruction by the Romans in 70 C.E. 

As we’ll see, there was no single Jewish understanding of what a future deliverer should be or even a universal expectation that such a figure would appear. Different texts and communities imagined restoration, divine intervention, kingship, priesthood, and the end of foreign domination in different ways. 

Jesus and the earliest Christians emerged from within this complicated (and strongly apocalyptic) landscape. 

Before asking why his followers came to proclaim him as the Messiah and what that meant, then, we first need to ask a more basic historical question: what could “Messiah” mean to Jews living in the centuries surrounding the time of Jesus?

But before we delve into the complex world of Messianic expectations, I’d like to invite you to explore Dr. Jason Staples’ full-semester course, Visions of the End: How Early Jews and Christians Imagined the End of the Age. Across 28 lectures, Dr. Staples examines what “apocalypse” actually meant in early Jewish thought, not simply catastrophe, but the end of an age of wickedness and the beginning of a renewed creation under God’s justice. 

Drawing on the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other early Jewish literature, the course explores competing expectations about messiahs, resurrection, the lost tribes of Israel, the fate of the nations, and the restoration of creation itself. Most importantly for our topic, it shows how these diverse hopes formed the intellectual and religious world from which the Jesus movement emerged and, eventually, Christianity itself.

What Is a Messiah? Etymology and the Historical Origins

In his book The Scepter and the Star, John J. Collins observes:

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Collins’ observation brings us to probably the most important point with which any discussion of the Messiah in ancient Judaism should begin: there was no single, universally accepted Jewish understanding of who or what the Messiah was supposed to be. 

As James H. Charlesworth noted decades ago: “No member of the Princeton Symposium on the Messiah holds that a critical historian can refer to a common Jewish messianic hope during the time of Jesus or in the sayings of Jesus. It may not even be easy to demonstrate a common messianic hope among his earliest followers.”

So, if there was no single definition of the Jewish Messiah in Second Temple Judaism, what can we say about the emergence and development of the idea? 

The best place to begin is with the Hebrew Bible itself. Collins rightly points out:

What does the evidence within the Hebrew Bible tell us? First and foremost, as J. J. M. Roberts emphasizes, none of the 39 occurrences of the Hebrew word māšîaḥ in its original biblical context functions as the technical title of an expected end-time savior. 

The term could designate priests, but, most often, it referred to the contemporary Israelite king as someone chosen and installed by God. 

Most strikingly, Isaiah 45:1 even calls Cyrus, the Persian king, God’s “anointed,” because he had been chosen to carry out a particular role in Israel’s history. In other words, being a “messiah” originally meant being divinely authorized for a particular office or task. 

In other words, it didn’t automatically mean being the future Messiah. Even passages that later became central to Jewish and Christian messianic interpretation (such as Psalm 2) originally belonged to different historical settings. Many were connected with the ideology and enthronement of actual kings rather than predictions of a distant savior.

The decisive development came through Israel’s changing political fortunes. The Davidic monarchy generated a powerful theological tradition according to which God had chosen David and his descendants to rule, while Jerusalem had been chosen as God’s royal city. 

When that political order came under threat and eventually collapsed, these older promises could be reread as promises of restoration. 

Prophetic texts began to envision a new ruler who would embody the virtues associated with an idealized David: justice, wisdom, national restoration, and the reunification of Israel. Yet even here we need to avoid importing the later notion of one final Messiah into these texts. 

Roberts points out that some prophets apparently expected the Davidic dynasty itself to be restored and continued rather than anticipating one last king who would rule forever. 

At the same time, the restoration of Israel could also be imagined through other offices. The destruction of the Temple raised questions about the future of the priesthood, while later texts could expect both royal and priestly agents of God.

Zechariah’s pairing of Zerubbabel, the Davidic governor, and Joshua, the high priest, is significant because it places royal and priestly leadership side by side in the work of Israel’s restoration.

In Zechariah 4, the two are described as the ‘two anointed ones,’ a formulation that may have helped provide a biblical foundation for later Jewish expectations involving both a royal and a priestly messiah. Prophetic expectations developed alongside these traditions as well, particularly the hope, expressed in Malachi, that Elijah would appear before God’s coming judgment.

By the Second Temple period, therefore, ancient Jewish authors possessed a rich collection of biblical images from which very different expectations could be constructed. 

Burton Mack, in the important collection of scholarly essays Judaisms and Their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era, rightly points out that scholars themselves have often created the impression of a single Jewish “Messiah” by combining features drawn from different texts into one composite figure.

Such a profile might include a divinely chosen ruler who appears in a time of crisis, defeats Israel’s enemies, gathers the righteous, and establishes an ideal society, but no individual text necessarily contains that entire package. 

Mack therefore urges us to take seriously the differences among these ideal figures and the historical settings that produced them.

Some Jewish texts imagined restoration around a king, others around priests or other divinely authorized figures, and still others showed little interest in a future messiah at all. 

The community that left us the famous Dead Sea Scrolls is a great example of a specific type of the Messianic expectation. As Everrett Ferguson notes in his book Backgrounds of Early Christianity:

On the other end of the spectrum there are some sources that seem to suppose an eschatological vindication without the necessity of Messiah. 

As George W. E. Nickelsburg showed, earlier strata of 1 Enoch depict complete scenarios of end-time salvation and judgment without mentioning an "Anointed One" or a Davidic king at all. 

In these earlier texts, salvific and judicial roles are instead carried out by God, archangels, heavenly elements, or human figures (such as Noah or Judas Maccabeus) performing prophetic, priestly, martial, or revelatory duties.

But the important point is that these expectations weren’t abstract theological puzzles. Rather, they were different ways of asking what Israel should look like, who should exercise legitimate authority, and how God might restore a community living through foreign domination, political crisis, and institutional change.

This diversity is crucial for understanding the world into which Christianity emerged. 

Jesus of Nazareth didn’t appear against the background of one fixed Jewish checklist describing who is the Messiah.

Instead, he emerged within a much broader and contested landscape of royal, priestly, prophetic, and eschatological expectations. And it is to Jesus (the figure who more than anyone else would make the title “Messiah” famous in the centuries after the Second Temple period) that we now turn.

What Is a Messiah? Jesus Within Jewish Messianic Expectations

Every discussion of Jesus’ identity and its place within the history of New Testament Christianity must begin by distinguishing between the historical Jesus and the literary Jesus.

As scholars increasingly recognized from the Enlightenment onward, the New Testament Gospels cannot simply be read as objective historical reports describing exactly who Jesus was and everything he said and did. 

They are ancient literary works, written decades after Jesus’ death, and each author presents Jesus according to particular theological, literary, and pastoral concerns. Consequently, historians distinguish, at least to some degree, between the Jesus portrayed by individual New Testament authors and the Jesus who can be reconstructed through critical historical analysis. 

As Mark A. Powell explains:

The Historical Jesus and the Messianic Identity

This distinction brings us to our major (and not particularly simple) question: Did the historical Jesus believe that he was the Messiah? 

Our earliest evidence appears, at the very least, to point in that direction, although it doesn’t settle the matter. As Dale C. Allison notes in his book Constructing Jesus:

Whatever else we conclude, then, the identification of Jesus as Messiah belongs to a remarkably early stage of the Christian movement.

However, we should be careful before concluding that the historical Jesus simply went through the villages of Galilee publicly proclaiming his messianic identity.

The surviving evidence is considerably more ambiguous. Some scholars have argued that Jesus avoided or even rejected the title, while others (e.g., John P. Meier) have maintained that he understood himself in Davidic or royal terms.

The difficulty is that sayings in which Jesus explicitly identifies himself as the Messiah are generally difficult to establish as historical, while traditions such as Peter’s confession, Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, and his interrogation before the high priest are themselves mediated through later Gospel narratives. 

Even Allison, who thinks there are good reasons to connect Jesus with messianic expectations, repeatedly emphasizes that the evidence remains “frustratingly meager.”

The historical question, therefore, isn’t whether later Christians regarded Jesus as Messiah (they clearly did) but whether that conviction developed entirely after his death or had some basis in Jesus’ own understanding of his role.

One plausible way through the evidence is to distinguish between believing oneself already to be a reigning Messiah and believing oneself destined for a future royal role. 

Jesus’ proclamation centered on the approaching Kingdom of God, and the traditions surrounding him suggest that he understood himself as playing an unusually important role in the dramatic events that he expected God soon to bring about.

Yet during his lifetime, Jesus didn’t occupy a throne, command an army, or rule Israel. This matters because, in ancient Jewish royal tradition, kingship was something conferred through accession and anointing rather than simply possessed from birth. 

It’s possible to think of Jesus as a messias designatus (a Messiah-designate or king-in-waiting) who may have regarded kingship as his future destiny rather than his present achievement.

Such a reconstruction would also help explain why the resurrection became so closely connected with Jesus’ messianic status in very early Christian proclamation: his followers could understand God’s vindication of Jesus as the decisive confirmation that the hoped-for king had now been exalted.

This remains a historical reconstruction rather than a certainty, and several alternatives remain possible: Jesus may have encouraged messianic expectations without openly claiming the title, deliberately kept his identity ambiguous, or reshaped traditional Davidic expectations around his own understanding of God’s coming Kingdom.

What seems considerably firmer is that messianic language became attached to Jesus extremely early and that this development is difficult to separate completely from the eschatological expectations surrounding his ministry. 

But that is the historical Jesus. To see what happened when early Christian authors began telling the story of Jesus as Messiah, we now need to turn to the literary Jesus, and, as our prime example, to the earliest surviving Gospel: the Gospel of Mark.

What Is a Messiah? Jesus in the Gospel of Mark

The Jesus of the New Testament doesn’t emerge as a single, unified literary portrait. Far from it. Each Gospel author worked with inherited traditions and sources, selected and rearranged material, and emphasized different aspects of Jesus’ identity and significance. 

A full comparison of all four canonical Gospels would take us well beyond the scope of this article, so here it makes sense to focus on our earliest surviving narrative source: the Gospel of Mark.

Usually dated to around 70 C.E., Mark was probably written by a second-generation Greek-speaking Christian who lived outside Palestine and composed his account for a particular Christian audience facing its own social and religious challenges. 

Does Mark present Jesus as the Messiah? The answer is an unequivocal yes. From the opening of the Gospel, the reader is told that this is the story of “Jesus Christ”—that is, Jesus the Messiah—and the narrative that follows is designed to explain what that title actually means.

The difficulty, as Bart D. Ehrman and Hugo Mendez explain, is that Mark’s Jesus doesn’t look like the sort of triumphant deliverer many Jews might have associated with messianic hopes. He doesn’t defeat Rome, establish an independent Jewish kingdom, or arrive as a victorious heavenly warrior. 

Instead, he is arrested, humiliated, and executed. Mark’s narrative therefore revolves around a striking paradox: Jesus really is the Messiah, but almost everyone in the story misunderstands what that means. 

The turning point comes in Mark 8, when Peter finally answers Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” by declaring, “You are the Christ.” Yet Peter’s insight is only partial. 

Immediately afterward, Jesus announces that he must suffer, be rejected, killed, and then raised, and Peter objects. In Mark’s literary construction, Peter has identified Jesus correctly while misunderstanding the very nature of his messiahship. 

For Mark, messiahship isn’t invalidated by suffering; rather, suffering becomes essential to its meaning. 

This is precisely why Jesus responds so sharply to Peter’s resistance: the attempt to imagine a Messiah without suffering represents, within Mark’s theological logic, a fundamental failure to understand Jesus.

That tension also helps explain one of the most famous features of Mark’s Gospel: the so-called “Messianic Secret.” 

Jesus repeatedly commands demons, people he has healed, and even his own disciples not to reveal who he is. The phenomenon has occupied scholars for more than a century. 

Udo Schnelle, in his Einleitung in das Neue Testament (Introduction to the New Testament), summarizes the history of the debate this way:

Whatever one makes of Wrede’s historical reconstruction, the literary function of the secrecy motif inside Mark is clearer. Jesus’ identity cannot properly be announced until the reader understands what kind of Messiah he is.

The title must be interpreted through suffering, rejection, crucifixion, and ultimately divine vindication.

This reinterpretation reaches its climax in the Passion narrative. Mark’s Jesus is interrogated about whether he is “the Christ,” handed over to Pilate under the charge of claiming to be “King of the Jews,” mocked in royal terms, and finally crucified. 

His disciples never fully grasp the point. They flee, deny him, and watch their expectations collapse. Yet at the very moment of apparent defeat, the narrative reveals its deepest irony: a Roman centurion, standing before the crucified Jesus, identifies him as God’s Son. 

For Mark, then, Jesus isn’t simply one more messianic claimant fitted into an existing Jewish template. The Gospel reshapes messianic identity around a Messiah who suffers, dies, and is vindicated by God

It’s a literary and theological configuration which is a distinctively Christian development rather than something clearly attested in pre-Christian Jewish expectations. 

Yet Jesus was hardly the only figure around whom hopes of divine deliverance, kingship, restoration, or eschatological change gathered. To appreciate just how varied the landscape was, we now need to turn to some other messianic and Messiah-like figures in ancient Judaism.

Other Messiah-Like Figures and Expectations

In their book Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements in the Time of Jesus, Richard A. Horsley and John S. Hanson note:

Seen through the lens of later Christianity, it’s easy to imagine Jesus as standing virtually alone as the great messianic figure of 1st-century Palestine. Historically, however, the situation was much more complicated. 

The century witnessed numerous Jewish leaders who gathered followers around promises of liberation, divine intervention, or restored Jewish sovereignty. 

Yet some methodological caution is essential: not every prophet, rebel, or charismatic leader was a “Messiah.” Our sources do not apply that title to all of them, and different kinds of Jewish restoration movements need to be distinguished rather than collapsed into a single category.

Consider Judas the Galilean, who led resistance to the Roman census associated with Quirinius around 6 C.E. 

According to Josephus, Judas and a Pharisee named Saddok encouraged resistance by portraying Roman taxation as a form of slavery and calling Jews to defend their liberty. 

His movement consequently combined religious conviction with resistance to imperial authority and gave rise to what Josephus calls the “Fourth Philosophy,” a tradition that would remain associated with opposition to Roman rule. 

But calling Judas himself a Messiah would go beyond our evidence. Horsley and Hanson explicitly acknowledge that there is no evidence that Judas made a messianic claim.

The same distinction becomes important with Theudas, who appeared during the procuratorship of Cuspius Fadus, probably in the mid-40s C.E. 

Josephus says that Theudas claimed to be a prophet, gathered a large following, and promised that at his command the Jordan River would divide so that his followers could cross it. Roman cavalry destroyed the movement, captured Theudas, and brought his severed head to Jerusalem. 

The imagery strongly evokes Israel’s foundational stories of miraculous passage and deliverance, but Josephus calls Theudas a prophet, not a Messiah or king. He is therefore better described as a Messiah-like or eschatological deliverer than as a securely attested messianic claimant.

More explicit royal claims appear during the great Jewish revolt against Rome beginning in 66 C.E. 

Menahem, a descendant of Judas the Galilean and a leader associated with the Sicarii, seized weapons from Herod’s former arsenal at Masada, armed his followers, and returned to Jerusalem “as a king,” according to Josephus. 

Horsley and Hanson therefore regard Menahem’s behavior as a genuinely messianic episode, while emphasizing that such claims had not characterized Judas the Galilean or the movement generally before him. 

Even more striking was Simon bar Giora, who emerged as one of the principal leaders of the revolt. 

Simon commanded a substantial military force, attracted large numbers of followers who treated him “as a king,” captured Hebron, and eventually entered Jerusalem in 69 C.E., where he was welcomed as a “savior and guardian.” 

His movement also had a pronounced social dimension: his proclamation of freedom for slaves and rewards for the free suggests that resistance to Rome could merge with hopes for a transformed social order in which oppression and economic inequality would be overturned.

These examples reveal just how diverse the landscape surrounding Jesus really was. 

1st-century Jews could rally around anti-imperial teachers such as Judas, prophetic deliverers such as Theudas, or far more explicitly royal figures such as Menahem and Simon bar Giora. 

What united them wasn’t adherence to one standardized doctrine of “the Messiah,” but the conviction, expressed in different forms, that Israel’s present condition under foreign domination wasn’t the way things ought to be and that dramatic change might be imminent. 

In some movements, that change was expected through miraculous divine intervention. In others, through armed resistance and the emergence of a new king. 

This variety returns us to the central point with which we began: there was no single Jewish messianic template into which Jesus or any other first-century figure could simply be inserted. 

The remarkable historical development was that one particular claimant, Jesus of Nazareth, came to be identified so decisively as the Messiah that Christos eventually became the standard title by which his followers proclaimed his significance.

Conclusion

What is a Messiah? As we saw, this question is far from being a simple, one-dimensional one. 

The Hebrew term originally referred broadly to someone “anointed” for a particular role, while later Jewish traditions developed a wide range of expectations involving kings, priests, prophets, heavenly agents, and other figures through whom God might restore Israel. 

By the Second Temple period, there was therefore no single messianic blueprint shared by all Jews, and some Jewish texts did not require a Messiah at all.

Jesus emerged within this diverse landscape, and the historical evidence leaves open important questions about how explicitly he understood his own role in messianic terms. What is much clearer is that his followers identified him as Messiah very early and that New Testament authors, especially Mark, reshaped the title around suffering, crucifixion, and divine vindication. 

Nor was Jesus the only 1st-century Jewish figure associated with hopes of liberation and restoration: Judas the Galilean, Theudas, Menahem, and Simon bar Giora illustrate just how varied such movements could be. 

What ultimately made Jesus historically distinctive wasn’t that he introduced the idea of a Messiah, but that the movement formed around him survived his execution, reinterpreted that execution as part of his messianic mission, and eventually made the title Christos, “Messiah,” so inseparable from Jesus that for billions of people today it functions almost as part of his name.