M — Messie

Messiah or Meshiah in Hebrew; Christos or Celomenos in Greek; Unctus in Latin: anointed.

In the Old Testament we see that the name Messiah was often given to idolatrous or infidel princes. We are told¹ that God sent a prophet to anoint Jehu king of Israel; he announced the sacred anointing to Hazael, king of Damascus and Syria, these two princes being the Most High’s Messiahs for the punishment of Ahab’s house.

In the 16th of Isaiah the name Messiah is expressly given to Cyrus: “Thus has the Eternal spoken to Cyrus, his anointed, his Messiah, whose right hand I have taken that I may cast down nations before him, etc.”

In the 28th chapter of his revelations, Ezekiel gives the name Messiah to the king of Tyre, whom he also calls Cherub: “Son of man,” the Eternal says to the prophet, “raise your voice in lamentation over the king of Tyre, and say to him: Thus has the Lord, the Eternal, spoken. You were the seal of the likeness of God, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty; you were the Lord’s garden of Eden (or, according to other versions, you were all the Lord’s delights). Your garments were of sard, topaz, jasper, chrysolite, onyx, beryl, sapphire, carbuncle, emerald, and gold; what your drums and flutes knew how to make was found within you; they were ready on the day you were created; you were a Cherub, a Messiah.”

This name Messiah, Christ, was given to the kings, prophets, and high priests of the Hebrews. In I Kings xii, 3, we read: “The Lord and his Messiah are witnesses”—that is, the Lord and the king he has established. And elsewhere: “Do not touch my anointed, and do my prophets no harm.” David, inspired by the spirit of God, in more than one place gives Saul, his rejected father-in-law who persecuted him, the name and rank of the Lord’s anointed, his Messiah. “God preserve me,” he frequently says, “from laying my hand upon the Lord’s anointed, upon God’s Messiah!”

If the name Messiah, the Eternal’s anointed, has been given to idolatrous kings and rejected men, it has very often been employed in our ancient oracles to designate the Lord’s true anointed, the Messiah above all others, Christ, son of God—in short, God himself.

If all the various oracles ordinarily applied to the Messiah are brought together, some apparent difficulties may result, which the Jews have used to justify their obstinacy, if they could. Several great theologians concede to them that, in the state of oppression under which the Jewish people groaned, and after all the promises the Eternal had so often made them, they might long for the coming of a conquering, liberating Messiah, and are thus in some measure excusable for not at first recognizing this liberator in the person of Jesus.

It was part of eternal wisdom’s plan that spiritual conceptions of the true Messiah should remain unknown to the blind multitude. So unknown were they that Jewish doctors have taken it into their heads to deny that the passages we cite should be understood of the Messiah. Several say that the Messiah has already come in the person of Hezekiah: this was the opinion of the celebrated Hillel. A great many others maintain that belief in the coming of a Messiah is not a fundamental article of faith, and that, since this dogma is found neither in the Decalogue nor in Leviticus, it is only a consoling hope.

Several rabbis tell you they do not doubt that, according to the ancient oracles, the Messiah came at the appointed time, but that he does not grow old, remains hidden on this earth, and waits to reveal himself until Israel has duly observed the Sabbath.

The celebrated Rabbi Solomon Jarchi, or Rashi, who lived at the beginning of the twelfth century, says in his Talmudic writings that the ancient Hebrews believed the Messiah was born on the day of Jerusalem’s last destruction by the Roman armies. This is, as they say, calling the physician after the patient’s death.

Rabbi Kimchi, who also lived in the twelfth century, announced that the Messiah, whose coming he believed very near, would drive from Judea the Christians who then possessed it. It is true that the Christians lost the Holy Land, but it was Saladin who conquered them. Had this conqueror given the Jews the least protection and declared himself for them, they would probably, in their enthusiasm, have made him their Messiah.

The sacred authors, and our Lord Jesus himself, often compare the Messiah’s reign and eternal beatitude to wedding days and feasts; but the Talmudists have strangely abused these parables. According to them, the Messiah will give his people, assembled in the land of Canaan, a meal whose wine will be that which Adam himself made in the earthly paradise, preserved in vast cellars dug by angels at the center of the earth.

For the first course the famous fish called the great Leviathan will be served. It swallows in a single gulp a smaller fish, which is nevertheless three hundred leagues long. The entire mass of the waters rests upon Leviathan. In the beginning God created one male and one female; but fearing that they would overturn the earth and fill the universe with their kind, God killed the female and salted her for the Messiah’s feast.

The rabbis add that for this meal the bull Behemoth will be killed, so huge that every day he eats the hay of a thousand mountains. This bull’s female was killed at the beginning of the world so that so prodigious a species would not multiply, which could only have harmed the other creatures. But they assure us that the Eternal did not salt her, because salted cow is not as good as salted female leviathan. The Jews still put such faith in all these rabbinical dreams that they often swear by their share of the ox Behemoth.

After such crude ideas about the Messiah’s coming and reign, should we be surprised that the Jews, ancient and modern alike, and even several of the first Christians, unhappily imbued with all these dreams, could not rise to the idea of the divine nature of the Lord’s Anointed and did not attribute the quality of God to the Messiah? See how the Jews express themselves on this subject in the work entitled Judaei Lusitani quaestiones ad christianos.² “To acknowledge a man-God,” they say, “is to deceive oneself, to fashion a monster, a centaur, the strange compound of two natures that cannot unite.” They add that the prophets do not teach that the Messiah is a man-God; that they expressly distinguish between God and David, declaring the first master and the second servant, etc.

It is well known that the Jews, slaves to the letter, have never penetrated the meaning of the Scriptures as we have.

When the Savior appeared, Jewish prejudices rose against him. Jesus Christ himself, so as not to revolt their blinded minds, seems extremely reserved on the subject of his divinity. He wished, says St. Chrysostom, to accustom his hearers imperceptibly to believe a mystery so far above reason. If he assumes God’s authority by forgiving sins, the action rouses all its witnesses against him; his most evident miracles cannot convince even those for whose benefit he performs them of his divinity. When, before the high priest’s tribunal, he acknowledges with modest indirection that he is the son of God, the high priest tears his robe and cries blasphemy. Before the sending of the Holy Spirit, the apostles do not even suspect their master’s divinity. He asks them what the people think of him; they reply that some take him for Elijah, others for Jeremiah or some other prophet. St. Peter needs a particular revelation to know that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God.

The Jews, rebelling against the divinity of Jesus Christ, have resorted to every sort of means to destroy this great mystery. They twist the sense of their own oracles or do not apply them to the Messiah. They maintain that the name God, Eloi, is not peculiar to the divinity, and that the sacred authors even give it to judges, magistrates, and in general those raised to authority. They do indeed cite a very great number of passages from Holy Scripture that justify this observation, but do not in any way impair the express terms of the ancient oracles concerning the Messiah.

Finally they maintain that if the Savior, and after him the evangelists, apostles, and first Christians, call Jesus the son of God, this august term in Gospel times meant nothing but the opposite of the sons of Belial—that is, a good man, a servant of God, as opposed to a wicked man, a man who does not fear God.

If the Jews have disputed Jesus Christ’s rank as Messiah and his divinity, they have also left nothing undone to make him contemptible, to cast upon his birth, life, and death all the ridicule and disgrace their criminal fury could imagine.

Of all the works produced by Jewish blindness, none is more odious or extravagant than the ancient book entitled Sepher Toldos Jeschut, brought out of the dust by Mr. Wagenseil in the second volume of his work entitled Tela ignea, etc.

In this Sepher Toldos Jeschut we read a monstrous history of our Savior’s life, forged with every possible passion and bad faith. Thus, for example, they have dared to write that a man named Panther or Pandera, an inhabitant of Bethlehem, fell in love with a young woman married to Jochaman. From this impure union he had a son named Jesua or Jesu. The child’s father was obliged to flee and withdrew to Babylon. As for young Jesu, he was sent to school; but, the author adds, he had the insolence to raise his head and uncover himself before the priests, instead of appearing before them with lowered head and covered face, as was customary. This boldness was sharply rebuked and led to an examination of his birth, which was found impure and soon exposed him to ignominy.

This detestable book, Sepher Toldos Jeschut, was known as early as the second century. Celsus confidently quotes it, and Origen refutes it in chapter nine.

There is another book, also entitled Toledos Jesu, published in 1705 by Mr. Huldric, which follows the Gospel of the Infancy more closely, but continually commits the grossest anachronisms and errors. It has Jesus Christ born and dying under the reign of Herod the Great; it claims that complaints about the adultery of Panther and Mary, Jesus’s mother, were made to this prince.

The author, who assumes the name Jonathan, claims to be a contemporary of Jesus Christ living in Jerusalem, and asserts that Herod consulted the senators of a town in the land of Caesarea about Jesus Christ. We shall not follow so absurd an author through all his contradictions.

Nevertheless it is with the aid of all these calumnies that the Jews sustain their implacable hatred of Christians and the Gospel. They have neglected nothing to alter the chronology of the Old Testament and spread doubts and difficulties concerning the time of our Savior’s coming.

Ahmed-ben-Cassum-al-Andacousy, a Moor of Granada who lived toward the end of the sixteenth century, cites an ancient Arabic manuscript found with sixteen lead plates engraved with Arabic characters in a cave near Granada. Don Pedro y Quiñones, archbishop of Granada, himself testified to it. These lead plates, called the plates of Granada, were later taken to Rome, where, after an examination lasting several years, they were finally condemned as apocryphal under the pontificate of Alexander VII. They contain only fabulous stories concerning the lives of Mary and her son.

The name Messiah, accompanied by the epithet false, is also given to those impostors who at various times have sought to deceive the Jewish nation. There were such false Messiahs even before the coming of God’s true anointed. The wise Gamaliel speaks³ of a certain Theudas, whose history is found in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, book 20, chap. 2. He boasted that he would cross the Jordan dry-shod. He drew many followers, but the Romans fell upon his little band, scattered it, cut off their unhappy leader’s head, and displayed it in Jerusalem.

Gamaliel also speaks of Judas the Galilean, doubtless the same man Josephus mentions in the 12th chapter of the second book of The Jewish War. He says that this false prophet had gathered nearly thirty thousand men; but hyperbole is the Jewish historian’s distinguishing trait.

As early as apostolic times there was Simon, surnamed the Magician,⁴ who had so seduced the inhabitants of Samaria that they regarded him as the power of God.

In the following century, in the years 178 and 179 of the Christian era, under Hadrian’s rule, the false Messiah Bar-Kokhba appeared at the head of an army. The emperor sent Julius Severus against him; after several encounters, he shut the rebels up in the town of Bither. It sustained an obstinate siege and was taken; Bar-Kokhba was captured there and put to death. Hadrian thought he could best prevent the Jews’ continual revolts by issuing an edict forbidding them to go to Jerusalem. He even stationed guards at the city gates to bar entry to the remnants of the people of Israel.

In the ecclesiastical historian Socrates⁵ we read that in the year 434 a false Messiah appeared on the island of Crete, calling himself Moses. He claimed to be the Hebrews’ ancient liberator, risen from the dead to deliver them again.

A century later, in 530, there was a false Messiah in Palestine named Julian. He proclaimed himself a great conqueror who, at the head of his nation, would destroy the whole Christian people by force of arms. Seduced by his promises, the armed Jews massacred several Christians. The emperor Justinian sent troops against him; battle was given to the false Christ, who was captured and condemned to death.

At the beginning of the eighth century, Serenus, a Spanish Jew, proclaimed himself Messiah, preached, acquired disciples, and died, like them, in poverty.

Several false Messiahs arose in the twelfth century. One appeared in France under Louis the Young; he and his adherents were hanged, without the names of either master or disciples ever becoming known.

The thirteenth century was fertile in false Messiahs. Seven or eight are counted, appearing in Arabia, Persia, Spain, and Moravia. One of them, named David el Re, is said to have been a very great magician. He seduced the Jews and found himself at the head of a considerable party; but this Messiah was murdered.

Jacques Zieglerne of Moravia, who lived in the middle of the sixteenth century, announced the imminent manifestation of the Messiah. Born fourteen years earlier, so he maintained, the Messiah had been seen by him, he said, in Strasbourg. He looked carefully at a sword and scepter, intending to place them in his hands as soon as he was old enough to teach.

In 1624 another Zieglerne confirmed the first man’s prediction.

In 1666, Sabbatai Zevi, born in Aleppo, called himself the Messiah foretold by the Zieglernes. He began by preaching on highways and in the open country. The Turks laughed at him while his disciples admired him. He does not seem to have gained the support of the bulk of the Jewish nation at first, since the leaders of the synagogue of Smyrna passed a death sentence against him; but he escaped with a fright and banishment.

He contracted three marriages and is said to have consummated none, declaring that it was beneath him. He associated with a man named Nathan Levi, who played the part of the prophet Elijah, destined to precede the Messiah. They went to Jerusalem, where Nathan proclaimed Sabbatai Zevi the liberator of nations. The Jewish populace declared for them, but those with something to lose anathematized them.

To escape the storm, Zevi withdrew to Constantinople and from there to Smyrna. Nathan Levi sent him four ambassadors, who publicly acknowledged and saluted him as Messiah. This embassy impressed the people and even some doctors, who declared Sabbatai Zevi Messiah and king of the Hebrews. But the synagogue of Smyrna condemned its king to be impaled.

Sabbatai placed himself under the protection of the cadi of Smyrna and soon had the whole Jewish people on his side. He had two thrones erected, one for himself and the other for his favorite wife; he assumed the name king of kings, and gave his brother Joseph Zevi that of king of Judah. He promised the Jews the certain conquest of the Ottoman Empire. He even carried his insolence so far as to have the emperor’s name removed from the Jewish liturgy and his own substituted.

He was imprisoned in the Dardanelles. The Jews spread the report that his life was spared only because the Turks knew very well that he was immortal. The governor of the Dardanelles grew rich from the gifts the Jews lavished on him to visit their king, their imprisoned Messiah, who preserved all his dignity in chains and had his feet kissed.

Meanwhile the sultan, who held his court at Adrianople, wanted to put an end to this comedy. He sent for Zevi and told him that if he were Messiah, he must be invulnerable. Zevi agreed. The Grand Signor had him set up as a target for his pages’ arrows. The Messiah admitted that he was not invulnerable and protested that God had sent him only to bear witness to the holy Muslim religion. Flogged by the ministers of the law, he became a Mohammedan, and lived and died equally despised by Jews and Muslims. This so thoroughly discredited the profession of false Messiah that Zevi is the last to have appeared.

1 iv. Reg. viij. 12. 13. 14.

2 Quæst. 1. 2. 4. 23. &c.

3 Act. Apost. c. v. 34. 35. 36.

4 Act. Apost. c. 8. 9.

5 Socr. hist. eccl. l. 2. chap. 38.

Hebrew has Messiah or Meshiah; Greek has Christos or Celomenos; Latin has Unctus. The meaning is Anointed.

The Old Testament often calls rulers Messiah even when they worship idols or don’t believe. It tells us¹ that God sent a prophet to anoint Israel’s king Jehu. He announced the sacred anointing to Hazael, king of Damascus and Syria. These two rulers were the Most High’s Messiahs, charged with punishing Ahab’s house.

Isaiah’s 16th chapter specifically calls Cyrus Messiah. “The Eternal has spoken this way to Cyrus, his anointed, his Messiah. I’ve taken his right hand so I can crush the nations before him, and so on.”

In chapter 28 of his revelations, Ezekiel calls Tyre’s king Messiah, and also cherub. “Son of man,” the Eternal tells the prophet, “raise a lament aloud over the king of Tyre. Tell him: The Lord, the Eternal, has spoken this way. You were the seal of God’s likeness, full of wisdom, perfect in beauty. You were the Lord’s garden of Eden (or, in other versions, you were all the Lord’s delights). Your clothes were carnelian, topaz, jasper, chrysolite, onyx, beryl, sapphire, carbuncle, emerald, and gold. What your drums and flutes could do was done in your home. They were ready the day you were created. You were a cherub, a Messiah.”

Hebrew kings, prophets, and high priests received this name, Messiah, Christ. I. Kings xij. 3. says, “The Lord and his Messiah are witnesses.” That means the Lord and the king he’s appointed. Another passage says, “Don’t touch my anointed ones. Don’t harm my prophets.” God’s spirit inspired David to call Saul the Lord’s anointed, his Messiah, in several passages. Saul was his father-in-law, rejected by God, and persecuted him. David often says, “God keep me from raising a hand against the Lord’s anointed, God’s Messiah!”

The name Messiah, the Eternal’s anointed, has been given to idol-worshipping kings and men rejected by God. But our ancient prophecies very often use it for the Lord’s true anointed. This is the supreme Messiah: Christ, God’s son, indeed God himself.

Bring together the various prophecies usually taken to concern the Messiah. Some apparent difficulties may emerge. The Jews have used them to try to justify their stubbornness. Several great theologians make an allowance for them. The Jewish people groaned under oppression, and the Eternal had made them so many promises, so often. They could long for a conquering Messiah who’d set them free. That makes it somewhat excusable that they didn’t immediately recognize their liberator in Jesus.

Eternal wisdom planned that the blinded masses wouldn’t understand the spiritual conception of the true Messiah. They understood it so little that Jewish teachers went so far as to deny that our quoted passages referred to the Messiah. Several say he’s already come as Hezekiah. That was the famous Hillel’s view. Many others say belief in a coming Messiah isn’t a basic article of faith. The doctrine appears neither in the Ten Commandments nor in Leviticus. They say it’s just a comforting hope.

Several rabbis tell you they’re sure the Messiah came at the appointed times, as the ancient prophecies said. But he never grows old. He stays hidden here on earth. Before revealing himself, he’s waiting for Israel to observe the Sabbath properly.

The famous Rabbi Solomon Jarchy, or Raschy, lived early in the twelfth century. His Talmudic writings say the ancient Hebrews believed the Messiah was born the very day the Roman armies last destroyed Jerusalem. As people say, that’s calling the doctor after the patient’s dead.

Rabbi Kimchi also lived in the twelfth century. He said the Messiah would expel the Christians then holding Judea, and thought he’d come very soon. The Christians did lose the Holy Land, but Saladin defeated them. Had this conqueror shown the Jews a little protection and taken their side, they’d probably have enthusiastically made him their Messiah.

The sacred writers, and our Lord Jesus himself, often compare the Messiah’s reign and eternal bliss to weddings and feasts. But the Talmudists have strangely misused these parables. They say the Messiah will gather his people in Canaan for a meal. He’ll serve wine that Adam himself made in the earthly Paradise. Angels dug huge cellars at the earth’s center, where it’s kept.

The first course will be that famous fish, the great Leviathan. In one gulp it swallows another, smaller fish, which is nonetheless three hundred leagues long. Leviathan supports the entire mass of water. God created a male and a female at the beginning. But he feared they’d overturn the earth and fill the universe with their kind. He killed the female and salted her for the Messiah’s feast.

The rabbis say they’ll also slaughter the bull Behemoth for the meal. He’s so big that he eats the hay of a thousand mountains every day. His female was killed when the world began. Otherwise this enormous species would’ve multiplied, which could only have harmed other creatures. But they assure us the Eternal didn’t salt her. Salted cow doesn’t taste as good as female Leviathan. The Jews still believe these rabbinical fantasies so firmly that they often swear by their share of Behemoth the ox.

With such crude ideas of the Messiah’s arrival and reign, is what follows surprising? Ancient and modern Jews, and even several early Christians, were unfortunately steeped in these fantasies. They couldn’t grasp that the Lord’s Anointed had a divine nature. They didn’t recognize the Messiah as God. See what the Jews say about this in Judæi Lusitani quæstiones ad christianos.² “To accept a man who is God,” they say, “is to fool yourself. It’s to invent a monster, a centaur, a bizarre mixture of two natures that can’t combine.” They add that the prophets don’t teach that the Messiah is a man who is God. The prophets specifically distinguish God from David. They call the first master and the second servant, and so on.

Everyone knows the Jews are slaves to the literal text. They’ve never understood Scripture’s meaning as we have.

Jewish prejudices turned against the Savior when he appeared. Even Jesus Christ seems extremely cautious about his divinity, so as not to anger their blinded minds. Saint Chrysostom says he wanted “to ease his listeners gradually into believing a mystery so far beyond reason.” When he forgives sins, he claims a god’s authority. Everyone who sees this is outraged. Even his clearest miracles fail to convince the very people he helps that he’s divine. At the high priest’s court, he modestly and indirectly admits he’s God’s son. The high priest tears his robe and shouts blasphemy. Before the Holy Spirit was sent, the apostles didn’t even suspect their master was divine. He asks who people think he is. They say some think he’s Elijah, others Jeremiah or another prophet. Saint Peter needs a special revelation to recognize Jesus as the Christ, the living God’s son.

The Jews objected to Jesus Christ’s divinity. They’ve tried every way to destroy this great mystery. They twist their own prophecies or say they don’t concern the Messiah. They claim that the name God, Eloi, isn’t reserved for the deity. Sacred writers use it for judges, magistrates, and anyone in authority. They do quote very many passages of Holy Scripture supporting this point. But these don’t weaken the clear wording of the ancient prophecies about the Messiah.

Finally, they make this claim about the Savior and, after him, the evangelists, apostles, and first Christians calling Jesus God’s son. In Gospel times, they say, this lofty title meant only the opposite of sons of Belial. It meant a good man, God’s servant, rather than a wicked man without fear of God.

The Jews haven’t just denied that Jesus Christ is Messiah and divine. They’ve done everything to make him despised. Their criminal hatred has invented every possible mockery and disgrace to heap on his birth, life, and death.

Jewish blindness has produced many books. None is more hateful or more outlandish than the old Sepher Toldos Jeschut. Mr. Wagenseil dug it out of the dust for volume two of his Tela ignea &c.

The Sepher Toldos Jeschut tells a monstrous story of our Savior’s life. Its authors made it up with all the passion and deliberate dishonesty imaginable. For instance, they dared write of a man called Panther, or Pandera, who lived in Bethlehem. He fell in love with a young woman married to Jochaman. Their impure affair produced a son called Jesua, or Jesu. The child’s father had to flee to Babylon. Young Jesu was sent to school. But the author adds that he insolently raised his head and uncovered his face before the priests. Custom required him to lower his head and cover his face before them. They scolded him harshly for his boldness. This led to an investigation of his birth. They found it impure, and it soon brought him disgrace.

That detestable Sepher Toldos Jeschut was already known in the second century. Celsus quoted it confidently. Origen refutes it in chapter nine.

Mr. Huldric published another book, also called Toledos Jesu, in 1705. It follows the Gospel of the Infancy more closely. But it constantly makes the crudest mistakes and puts events in the wrong periods. It places Jesus Christ’s birth and death under Herod the Great. It says complaints about the adultery of Panther and Mary, Jesus’s mother, went to that ruler.

The author calls himself Jonathan. He claims to have lived in Jerusalem in Jesus Christ’s time. He says Herod consulted the senators of a town in Caesarea’s territory about Jesus Christ. We won’t follow such an absurd writer through all his contradictions.

Still, these slanders help the Jews maintain their relentless hatred of Christians and the Gospel. They’ve done all they can to change the Old Testament’s chronology. They’ve spread doubts and difficulties about when our Savior came.

Ahmed-ben-Cassum-al-Andacousy was a Moor from Granada living late in the 16th century. He cites an old Arabic manuscript found in a cave near Granada. It lay with sixteen lead plates engraved with Arabic characters. Granada’s archbishop, Dom Pedro y Quinones, testified to this himself. These so-called Granada plates were later taken to Rome. There, after several years’ examination, they were finally condemned as apocryphal under Pope Alexander VII. They contain only invented stories about Mary’s life and her son’s.

The title Messiah, with false added, also applies to impostors who’ve tried at various times to deceive the Jewish nation. Such false Messiahs existed even before God’s true anointed came. The wise Gamaliel mentions³ a man called Theudas. Josephus tells his story in Jewish Antiquities, liv. 20. chap. 2. He boasted he could walk across the Jordan on dry ground. Many people followed him. But the Romans attacked and scattered his small band. They beheaded the unfortunate leader and displayed his head in Jerusalem.

Gamaliel also mentions Judas the Galilean. He’s surely the man Josephus mentions in the 12. chap. of his second book of The Jewish War. He says this false prophet had assembled nearly thirty thousand men. But exaggeration is typical of the Jewish historian.

In the apostles’ time, Simon, nicknamed the Magician,⁴ had already won over Samaria’s people. He deceived them so thoroughly that they thought him the power of God.

The false Messiah Bar-Kokhba appeared with an army in the next century. This was in 178 and 179 of the Christian era, under Hadrian. The emperor sent Julius Severus against him. After several clashes, Severus trapped the rebels in Bither. The town held out stubbornly under siege before being stormed. Bar-Kokhba was captured there and killed. Hadrian thought an edict banning Jews from Jerusalem was the best way to stop their continual rebellions. He even put guards at the gates to keep out what remained of Israel’s people.

The church historian Socrates⁵ tells of a false Messiah named Moses on Candia in 434. He claimed to be the Hebrews’ ancient liberator, risen from the dead to free them again.

A century later, in 530, a false Messiah called Julian appeared in Palestine. He claimed to be a great conqueror. Leading his nation, he’d destroy all Christians by force of arms. His promises deceived the Jews, who took up arms and massacred several Christians. Emperor Justinian sent troops against him. They fought the false Christ, captured him, and sentenced him to death.

Early in the 8th century, a Spanish Jew called Serenus claimed to be Messiah. He preached and gained disciples. Like them, he died in poverty.

Several false Messiahs emerged in the twelfth century. One appeared in France under Louis the Young. He and his followers were hanged. No one has ever known either the master’s name or his disciples’ names.

The thirteenth century produced plenty of false Messiahs. People count seven or eight in Arabia, Persia, Spain, and Moravia. One, David el Re, is said to have been a very powerful magician. He deceived the Jews and gained a large following. But this Messiah was murdered.

Jacques Zieglerne of Moravia lived in the middle of the 16th century. He announced that the Messiah would reveal himself soon. He said the Messiah was fourteen years old, and he’d seen him in Strasbourg. He kept a careful eye on a sword and a scepter. He’d put them in the Messiah’s hands once he was old enough to teach.

Another Zieglerne confirmed this prediction in 1624.

In 1666, Sabbatai Sevi, born in Aleppo, claimed to be the Messiah the Zieglernes had predicted. He started preaching along the main roads and out in the countryside. Turks laughed at him; his disciples admired him. He apparently failed at first to win over most Jews. Smyrna’s synagogue leaders even sentenced him to death. But he escaped with banishment and a fright.

He married three times. People say he never consummated any marriage, claiming it was beneath him. He joined forces with Nathan-Levi, who played the prophet Elijah. Elijah was supposed to come before the Messiah. They went to Jerusalem. There Nathan proclaimed Sabbatai Sevi the liberator of nations. The Jewish rabble backed them, but anyone with something to lose put them under a religious curse.

Sevi fled the storm to Constantinople, then Smyrna. Nathan-Levi sent four ambassadors. They publicly acknowledged and greeted him as Messiah. Their mission impressed the people, and even some teachers. These declared Sabbatai Sevi Messiah and king of the Hebrews. But Smyrna’s synagogue sentenced its king to be impaled.

Sabbatai sought protection from Smyrna’s cadi. Soon all the Jewish people supported him. He had two thrones built, one for himself, one for his favorite wife. He called himself king of kings. He named his brother Joseph-Sevi king of Judah. He promised the Jews they’d certainly conquer the Ottoman Empire. He even insolently had the emperor’s name replaced with his own in the Jewish liturgy.

They imprisoned him at the Dardanelles. The Jews announced that the Turks spared him only because they knew he couldn’t die. Jews showered the Dardanelles’ governor with gifts to visit their captive king, their Messiah. The governor grew rich. Their king kept his full dignity even in chains and made people kiss his feet.

Meanwhile, the sultan held court at Adrianople. He wanted this comedy stopped. He summoned Sevi and said a Messiah must be impossible to wound. Sevi agreed. The sultan had him placed as a target for his palace pages’ arrows. The Messiah admitted he could be wounded. He insisted God had sent him only to testify to the holy Muslim religion. The officials of the law flogged him, and he became a Muslim. He lived and died equally despised by Jews and Muslims. This so discredited the business of being a false Messiah that Sevi is the last to have appeared.

1 iv. Reg. viij. 12. 13. 14.

2 Quæst. 1. 2. 4. 23. &c.

3 Act. Apost. c. v. 34. 35. 36.

4 Act. Apost. c. 8. 9.

5 Socr. hist. eccl. l. 2. chap. 38.