The Messiah in the New Testament in the Light of Rabbinical Writings by Risto Santala

This volume follows our presentation of the Messiah in the Old Testament. It shows the roots of Christian faith in the light of the oldest and least-censored normative Jewish sources. If the first book was a kind of “Nahson’s leap”, the first one to jump into the Red Sea at Moses’ command, here we already enter the Promised Land. We dive again into the Bible’s own native soil, finding the fulfillment of the Messianic prophecies described in the first volume. From the point of view of their content and mode of presentation the Gospels dovetail with the same reasoning typical of the “Midrash” or synagogue preaching literature. We do see e.g. that the Lord’s Prayer contains phrases and requests from pre-Christian times which have been preserved in the Jewish prayer literature, and the Holy Communion is to be understood as a Messianic meal which hints at an eternal perspective.