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This chapter explores the main disagreement that exists between Judaism and Christianity: whether Jesus of Nazareth was or was not (is or is not) the Messiah. before, during, and after the time of Jesus. Today, Jesus' Jewishness and that of nearly all his original interpreters is acknowledged by all, yet many still fail to locate early christology within its Jewish context, or to inquire as to its relationship to other Jewish messianic formulations. It is argued that Christianity — as one of the Judaisms of the 1st century — must be considered within its proper intellectual and spiritual environment. Examined in this manner, its messianism, far from being alien to Jewish thought patterns, may be revealed as one expression of the varied world of historic hopes and mythic visions that is Israelite messianic speculation.

Halevi’s work is partly a reaction to the deteriorating political and intellectual conditions of the time, the former undermining the Jewish claim to a special covenant with God, and the latter portraying individual religions as mere social contrivances. The Kuzari grounds Jewish claims to special status on their gift for prophecy. In Halevi’s poetry, this status is expressed in themes of competition with Christianity and Islam. (The claim of Israel’s superiority complicated Halevi’s attitude toward Arabic-style Hebrew poetry, which he came to see as debasing the holy tongue; he probably did not, however, vow to abstain from writing poetry.) Halevi wrote extensive poetry dealing with the messianic redemption. But his pilgrimage was not a messianic gesture; rather, it reflects his embrace of quietism, the national counterpart to the theme of trust in God so prominent in his personal poetry. The chapter concludes with three poems that exemplify these themes.

New World populations call into question all definitions of identity that rest on clear oppositions between those recognizably like and those unlike a predefined European self. Though the New World has no monopoly on hybridity, the sheer numbers of people brought together through conquest, enslavement, transportation, and voluntary immigration make hybridity an essential concept for understanding the history and culture of the Americas, and one that has stimulated some of its most powerful literary texts. As pointed out in the first chapter, millennial discourse is an eschatechnology inherent to structures of power in the Americas. When it confronts itself in hybridized form, paranoia and panic are inevitable and tend to get played out in the confusion between Messiah and Antichrist. Messiahs of the New World are painfully aware of themselves as simultaneously Self and Other, as I will show in this chapter, and their messianism seeks a symbolic resolution to this conflict. Melville’s Captain Ahab is presented as the archetype of the hybrid messiah, which then guides the chapter’s remaining study examples of Nat Turner, Louis Riel, Wovoka, Antônio Conselheiro, Jim Jones, and David Koresh, both as historical persons and as literary characters.

This chapter examines the language, images, and discourses that General Ríos Montt employed to promote his war of counterinsurgency. While the military’s war of counterinsurgency forcibly pacified the largely indigenous highlands (a campaign that some sources claim produced nearly 50 percent of the civilian deaths that occurred over the course of Guatemala’s thirty‐six‐year armed struggle), Ríos Montt captivated much of Guatemala’s urban and nonindigenous population through his anticorruption campaign and his Sunday sermons — weekly broadcast messages that stressed anticommunism and government loyalty against a backdrop of evangelical language and imagery. This chapter provides an analysis of the sermons and offers an attempt to explain and contextualize Ríos Montt’s political popularity, as he sought to establish order and a fresh ideology for what he called the New Guatemala. This chapter is based almost exclusively on transcripts of Ríos Montt’s Sunday sermons and on newspaper clippings from the period.

Craig Evans argues that early Christian expressions of the deity of Jesus originated in the teaching and activity of Jesus himself, and not simply in later contact with the cult of the emperor. He contends that Jesus’ self‐identification as ‘the son of man’ of Daniel 7, where this figure approaches the divine throne and directly from God receives kingdom and authority, takes his messianism to a new level. It is this ingredient that evidently represents an innovation, which launches a messianic trajectory that will find its way to the more formalized expressions of trinitarian theology.

This chapter explores the historiographical and methodological context of the book. The various settings in which religious warfare occurred are outlined and compared. Ideas, images and rhetoric that derived from Europe's experience of crusading, both past and contemporary, are evaluated.

In 70 c.e., about forty years after Jesus' death, the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. In the Jerusalem Talmud, there is a legend about something that took place on the day of the destruction, which is presented in this chapter. Here the Messiah is called Menahem, son of Hezekiah. The figure of Menahem in this story combines various elements known to us from the traditions concerning the Essene Messiah and Jesus of Nazareth. Menahem, the son of Hezekiah, resembles the Essene Messiah not only in his name but also in his destiny. The figure of Menahem, the hero of our book, was the foundation of the Jewish messianic myth, just as he served as the inspiration for the messianism of Jesus of Nazareth.

The chapter outlines the rise of national and political psychology in late modern Kabbalah and its troubling impact on Israeli society. The late modern circles of Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto, Eliyahu Kramer (the Vilna Gaon) and Avraham Itzhak Kook are surveyed. The discussion of the political theory of modern Kabbalah addresses topics such as messianism, prophecy and power. A first-time extensive discussion in English of the thought of the twentieth century Lithuanian Kabbalist Shalom Elyashiv is provided, showing that he developed a form of inter-generational social psychology. It is demonstrated that Kook interpreted secularization as part of the development of “the national soul.” Chapter 4 concludes with placing the political psychology of modern Kabbalah in the context of the development of the political imagination.

Spinoza's theological opponents agree that the core religious teaching of the Bible is the divine law revealed by the prophets, but disagree about the law's status and content. In order to show what is superstitious in their opinions, Spinoza must confront these disputes. His first step is to establish that the divine law is universal. The claim that the law was ordained for the Jews, as the Old Testament seems to claim, thus rests on a misinterpretation. This chapter examines Spinoza's philosophical argument for this conclusion. It shows how his view threatens Calvinist providentialism, and constitutes an attack on two flourishing seventeenth‐century movements, Christian millenarianism and Jewish Messianism. The argument is therefore not merely about the proper interpretation of the Bible. It is also a theologico‐political intervention in Dutch affairs.