THE IDEA OF THE MESSIAH IN THE THEOLOGY OF THOMAS HOBBES Robert P. Kraynak in his political treatises Hobbes elaborates a conception of theMessiah that is unusual because it seems to combine Jewish and Christian elements. He asserts that Jesus is theMessiah in the sense of being the earthly king of the Jews as well as the Son of God and king of heaven. To clarifyHobbes's po sition and to highlight its strangeness, it is compared with the views ofMoses and Blaise Pascal. Hobbes emerges from this comparison as a Maimonides spokesman for a kind of "Jewish Christianity," whose purpose is not to return to the early Jewish sects that embraced Jesus as a new Moses but to humanize theMessiah and to redefine Christianity for a new age of secular happiness. Hobbes thereby inaugurates a new kind of biblical criticism which the Deists of the enlightenment era developed and which continues today.
This question has preoccupied Who and what is theMessiah? Jews the and Christians for centuries. For the Jews of the Old Testament, idea of the Messiah was hardly a settled doctrine or fixed belief. For
itwas a vague promise of an ideal king, like King David, who save the Jewish nation from its enemies; while for others it in cluded prophetic visions of a new age of peace and harmony inwhich the natural order would be transformed. For Jews of later periods, the Messiah and messianism were connected with a variety of phenomena, led by Bar such as the political rebellion against Roman domination of in the second century A.D., or the bizarre cult movements Kokhba
many would
Sabbatai Zevi in the seventeenth century, or with modern Zionism and in Palestine. the restoration of a Jewish homeland The question of who and what is the Messiah was, of course, the central issue that separated (and still separates) Jews from Christians. When Christ Jesus appeared, he claimed to fulfill the promise of the but in a new and unheard of way, as Old Testament about theMessiah the Son of God who would
Christians
be the savior and redeemer of all mankind. of the messianic the meaning age in
later dispute
would
of seeking to establish the Kingdom the Trinity and the Second Coming. are and between Jews and Christians
various millennialist movements about and in controversies
God
Su(ch
controversies
among
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