ea of a suffering and expiating Messiah was
repugnant to the carnally minded Jews. And the reason why it was
repugnant to them is, that they did not possess that which alone makes
that doctrine acceptable, viz., the knowledge of sin, and the
consciousness of the need of salvation,--because, not knowing the
holiness of God, and being ignorant of the import of the Law, they
imagined that through their own strength, by the works of the Law, they
could be justified before God. What they wished for was only an outward
deliverance from their misery and their oppressors, not an internal
deliverance from sin. For this reason, they looked exclusively to those
passages of the Old Testament in which the Messiah in glory is
announced; and those passages they interpreted in a carnal manner. In
addition to this, there were other reasons which could not fail to
render them averse to refer this passage to the suffering Messiah. As
they could not compare the prophecy with the fulfilment,--the deep
abasement of the Messiah which is here announced, the contempt which He
endures, His violent death, appeared to them irreconcileable with those
passages in which nothing of the kind is mentioned, but, on the
contrary, the glorified Messiah only is foretold. They had too little
knowledge of the nature [Pg 315] of prophetic vision to enable them to
perceive that the prophecies are connected with the circumstances of
the time, and, therefore, exhibit a one-sided character,--that they
consist of separate fragments which must be put together in order that
a complete representation of the subject may be obtained. They imagined
that because, in some passages, the Messiah is at once brought before
us in glory, just because He, in this way, represented Himself to the
prophets. He must also appear at once in glory. And, lastly, by their
controversy with Christians, they were led to seek for other
explanations. As long as they understood the passage as referring to a
suffering Messiah, they could not deny that there existed the closest
agreement between the prophecy and the history of Christ. Now since the
Christians, in their controversies with the Jews, always proceeded from
the passages, which by _Hulsius_ is pertinently called a _carnificina
Judaeorum_, and always returned to it,--since they saw what impression
was, in numerous cases, produced by the controversy of the Christians
founded upon this passage, nothing was more natural, than that they
shou