Commenting
on the Messianic prophecy in Dan 9:24-27, Roy Shoeman, a Jewish convert to
Roman Catholicism, wrote the following:
When the
Messiah would come
In a class by itself is the prophecy found in
Daniel 9, which appears to predict that the Messiah will appear about A.D. 26,
precisely the date that many scholars give for Jesus’ baptism by John and hence
the beginning of His public ministry. The prophecy then states that He will be
killed between three and four years later—also precisely fulfilled, since Jesus
was crucified three and one-third years after His baptism by John. The prophecy
concludes with the prediction that a short time later the Temple would be
destroyed—again fulfilled by the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in .D.
70. The passage however, takes a bit of effort to understand (Daniel 9:24-27) .
. .A few keys are necessary to decipher this passage. The Hebrew for “week” is
the same word as for “seven”, and a day represents one year; hence “seven weeks”
is 49 years, “sixty-two weeks” is 434 years, and “seventy weeks” is 490 years.
The “going forth of the word to restore and build Jerusalem recorded in Ezra
7:11-26, which was given in 458 B.C. It
took exactly “seven weeks”, or 49 years, to complete the building of the walls
of Jerusalem, indicated by the fact that 49 years after Artaxerxes’ decree, or
in 409 B.C., Nehemiah ended his appointment as governor of Judah. Adding
another sixty-two weeks, or 434 years, brings us to A.D. 26, which is the year
which many, including the ancient Church historian Bishop Eusebius, give as the
date of Jesus’ baptism in thee Jordan and the beginning of His public ministry.
Then, in the “half of the week”—that is, three and a half years later—the “the
victim and the sacrifice shall fail”. And it was about three years and four
months after Jesus’ baptism that He was crucified, at which time the Temple
veil was rent in two as a sign that the Temple sacrifices would henceforth fail
. . . Then within a generation, the Romans came and destroyed the Temple and
the entire city of Jerusalem and sent the Jews into exile, fulfilling the verse
“a people with their leader that shall come, shall destroy the city and the
sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be waste, and after the end of the war the
appointed desolation”. (Roy H. Schoeman, Salvation
is From the Jews: The Role of Judaism in Salvation History from Abraham to the
Second Coming [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003], 81-83)
Elsewhere,
in a discussion of the Messiah in the Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 31b) wrote:
Both the Talmud and the Zohar contain
accounts of how, in the days of the Temple, the High Priest would once a year—on
Yom Kippur, or the “Day of Atonement”—enter
the Holy of Holies and offer sacrifice for the atonement of the sins of all
Israel. Both mention the “miracle of the scarlet thread”, in which a scarlet
thread would miraculously turn white as the sign that God had accepted the
sacrifice. From the account in the Zohar (Vayikra,
Section 3, condensed):
All the sins are [taken] away . . . on this
day, the defilement of the soul and of the body . . . All that day . . . God
makes atonement for Israel and purifies them from all their sins and they are
not accused before Him . . . On this day the priest . . . makes atonement for
himself and his house and the priests and the sanctuary and all Israel . . .
They used to know by a certain thread of scarlet if the priest had been
successful . . . [I]t was known by the thread changing in color to white, when
there was rejoicing above and below. If it did not, however, all were
distressed, knowing that their prayer had not been accepted.
The scarlet thread turning white would be the
sign that God had accepted the sacrifice and forgiven the Jewish people their
sins (“though your sins be like scarlet, they may become white as snow; through
they be crimson red, they may become white as wool”—Isaiah 1:18). Yet the Talmud
itself reports that forty years before the Temple was destroyed,, this great miracle,
which gave divine confirmation that the High Priest’s sacrifice had been accepted
taking away the sins of the Jewish people, ceased to occur. The passage from
the Talmud reads (Rosh Hashanah 31b):
Originally they used to fasten the thread of
scarlet on the door of the [Temple] court on the outside. If I turned white the
people used to rejoice, and if it did not turn white they were sad . . . for
forty years before the destruction of the Temple the thread of scarlet never
turned white but it remained red.
The Temple was destroyed about A.D. 70; hence
the miracle ceased to occur about A.D. 30, which is precisely when the
crucifixion took place—the crucifixion that replaced the sacrifice of the Old
Covenant with that of Jesus on the Cross. According to the New Testament at the
very moment that Jesus died on the Cross the curtain of the Temple that
separated off the Holy of Holies was rent in two, symbolizing the end of the
efficacy of the sacrifices of the Old Covenant (cf. Matthew 27:51; Mark 15:38;
Luke 23:45). It is the Talmud itself that unwittingly confirms this when it
recounts that from that time on—forty years before the destruction of the
Temple in A.D. 70—the scarlet thread never again turned white. (Ibid., 130-32)
In Yoma
39b, also in the Talmud, the miracle of the scarlet thread, and the
fact that it ceased to occur about A.D. 30, is also recounted:
. . . Without the presence of Shimon HaTzaddik among them, the
Jewish people were no longer worthy of the many miracles that had occurred
during his lifetime. For this reason, following his death, his brethren, the
priests, refrained from blessing the Jewish people with the explicit
name of God in the priestly blessing. The
Sages taught: During the tenure of Shimon
HaTzaddik, the lot for God always arose in the High Priest’s right hand; after
his death, it occurred only occasionally; but during the forty years prior
to the destruction of the Second Temple, the lot for God did
not arise in the High Priest’s right hand at all. So too, the
strip of crimson wool that was tied to the head of the goat that was sent
to Azazel did not turn white, and the westernmost lamp of the
candelabrum did not burn continually . . .
In both the
Old Testament and Talmudic literature, the Messiah would come before A.D. 70
and the destruction of the Second Temple. Furthermore, in light of Yoma 39b and Rosh Hashanah 31b, the efficacy of the repetitive sacrifices of the
Temple ceased around the time of Jesus’ death. This fits perfectly, not just
the chronology, but the theology of the New Testament. As we read in Hebrews:
Since the law has
only a shadow of the good things to come and not the true form of these
realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered
year after year, make perfect those who approach. Otherwise, would they not
have ceased being offered, since the worshipers, cleansed once for all, would
no longer have any consciousness of sin? But in these sacrifices there is a
reminder of sin year after year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls
and goats to take away sins. Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he
said, "Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have
prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no
pleasure. Then I said, 'See, God, I have come to do your will, O God' (in the
scroll of the book it is written of me)." When he said above, "You
have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt
offerings and sin offerings" (these are offered according to the law),
then he added, "See, I have come to do your will." He abolishes the
first in order to establish the second. And it is by God's will that we have
been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
And every priest stands day after day at his service, offering again and again
the same sacrifices that can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered
for all time a single sacrifice for sins, "he sat down at the right hand
of God," and since then has been waiting "until his enemies would be
made a footstool for his feet." For by a single offering he has perfected
for all time those who are sanctified. (Heb 10:1-14 NRSV)
Ιησούς χριστός!
