William Horbury considers the issue of messianism as it arises in Jewish and Christian tradition. Whilst Horbury's primary focus is the Herodian period and the New Testament, he presents a broader historical trajectory, looking back to the Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, and onward to Judaism and Christianity in the Roman empire. Within this framework Horbury treats such central themes as messianism in the Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, the Son of man and Pauline hopes for a new Jerusalem, and Jewish and Christian messianism in the second century. Neglected topics are also given due consideration, including suffering and messianism in synagogue poetry, and the relation of Christian and Jewish messianism with conceptions of the church and of antichrist and with the cult of Christ and of the saints. Throughout, Horbury sets messianism in a broader religious and political context and explores its setting in religion and in the conflict of political theories. This new edition features a new extended introduction which updates and resituates the volume within the context of current scholarship.

Jewish and Christian messianic thought and activism in the Reformation era in the Ashkenazic world. Disputed Messiahs: Jewish and Christian Messianism in the Ashkenazic Worldduring the Reformation is the first comprehensive study that situates Jewish messianism in its broader cultural, social, and religious contexts within the surrounding Christian society. By doing so, Rebekka Voß shows how the expressions of Jewish and Christian end-time expectation informed one another. Although the two groups disputed the different messiahs they awaited, they shared principal hopes and fears relating to the end of days. Drawing on a great variety of both Jewish and Christian sources in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and Latin, the book examines how Jewish and Christian messianic ideology and politics were deeply linked. It explores how Jews and Christians each reacted to the other's messianic claims, apocalyptic beliefs, and eschatological interpretations, and how they adapted their own views of the last days accordingly. This comparative study of the messianic expectations of Jews and Christians in the Ashkenazic world during the Reformation and their entanglements contributes a new facet to our understanding of cultural transfer between Jews and Christians in the early modern period. Disputed Messiahs includes four main parts. The first part characterizes the specific context of Jewish messianism in Germany and defines the Christian perception of Jewish messianic hope. The next two parts deal with case studies of Jewish messianic expectation in Germany, Italy and Poland. While the second part focuses on the messianic phenomenon of the prophet Asher Lemlein, part 3 is divided into five chapters, each devoted to a case of interconnected Jewish-Christian apocalyptic belief and activity. Each case study is a representative example used to demonstrate the interplay of Jewish and Christian eschatological expectations. The final part presents Voß's general conclusions, carving out the remarkable paradox of a relationship between Jewish and Christian messianism that is controversial, albeit fertile. Scholars and students of history, culture, and religion are the intended audience for this book.

Redemption and Resistance brings together an eminent cast of contributors to provide a state-of-the-art discussion of Messianism as a topic of political and religious commitment and controversy. By surveying this motif over nearly a thousand years with the help of a focused historical and political searchlight, this volume is sure to break fresh ground. It will serve as an attractive contribution to the history of ancient Judaism and Christianity, of the complex and often problematic relationship between them, and of the conflicting loyalties their hopes for redemption created vis-à-vis a public order that was at first pagan and later Christian. Although each chapter is designed to stand on its own as an introduction to the topic at hand, the overall argument unfolds a coherent history. The first two parts, on pre-Christian Jewish and primitive Christian Messianism, set the stage by identifying two entities that in Part III are then addressed in the development of their explicit relationship in a Graeco-Roman world marked by violent persecution of Jewish and Christian hopes and loyalties. The story is then explored beyond the Constantinian turn and its abortive reversal under Julian, to the Christian Empire up to the rise of Islam.

William Horbury demonstrates that there were more messianic beliefs in Judaism at the time of Jesus than is commonly recognised.

In this book, Novenson gives a revisionist account of messianism in antiquity. He shows that, for the ancient Jews and Christians who used the term, a messiah was not an article of faith but a manner of speaking: a scriptural figure of speech useful for thinking kinds of political order.

A self-proclaimed Messianic Jew discusses the growth and dangers of the Messianic Judaism movement, reiterating God's intention for his church to serve as "one new man" and advocating unity among the body of believers.