The One Who Is to Come

Properly speaking, the concept of the Messiah or the Coming One belongs to the genre of Old Testament theology; yet it is also true to say that perhaps no concept such as Messiah has been so glibly interpreted or misunderstood. Messiah is one of the most popular and most contested terms in Christian reflection, with many often reading the concept back into early Old Testament texts. In this magisterial work, Joseph Fitzmyer has carefully and comprehensively contradicted this misreading, tracing the emergence of messianism to a much later date—the second century B.C. This work begins with a linguistic discussion of the term Messiah and seeks to address its use and misuse; it then seeks to demonstrate the gradual emergence of the idea of a future, dynasty-continuing David, then moves on to examine the use of the term Messiah or Anointed One in Dan 9, which many scholars believe to be the latest text in the Hebrew Bible. It also explores the use of the term in the Septuagint and extrabiblical Jewish writings, as well as the New Testament, Targums, and the Mishnah. At the outset, it may be noted that, Fitzmyer has intended that his work should be seen as an update to the seminal work by Sigmund Mowinckel, which was entitled He That Cometh and has had a great influence among scholars of all persuasions. However, it is to be seen not only as an update but also as a corrective to that work, in that it grants a greater understanding to a number of passages that Mowinckel treated and that in this current work are elucidated more correctly. [Full Review]

Take a closer look at the cover design of Joseph A. Fitzmyer’s book. The photograph you see is that of a mustached, bearded man with closed eyes and a slightly open mouth. The man’s head seems to be slumped forward, and across his cheeks and nose are the words “The one who is to come.” For any reader familiar with the history of Christian art, the image is clearly the cropped head of a statue of Jesus—a Jesus who has just died on the cross. But the juxtaposition of the book’s title with the iconic figure of the dead Christ could not be further from Fitzmyer’s argument. His is not a book that argues for or seeks to prove that Jesus was the Messiah prophesied by Jewish Scriptures. Fitzmyer’s study of the word “messiah” in ancient Judaism is not a Christian apologia. As he argues in his opening chapter, “in modern discussions ‘messianism’ or ‘the messianic’ has become ‘a rubber-band concept’ that is made to embrace far more than ‘Messiah’ was ever meant to denote when it first emerged” (6). Thus his study focuses especially on establishing the pre-Christian Jewish and postbiblical Jewish meaning of the word when it had “not been slanted by Christian ‘messianic’ hindsight” (7). The title of this book is an obvious allusion to Sigmund Mowinckel’s groundbreaking 1951 study of messianism entitled Han som kommer (translated into English as He That Cometh), republished by Eerdmans just two years before the release of this book. [Full Review]