[Serious] The Story

[Vicki Q]

The traditional interpretation of the servant songs is that they refer to the nation of israel.  Certainly not christ, and not christian redemption.

Thanks for your thoughts!

The suffering servant certainly does refer to Israel, but also to Jesus. To unpack what was mentioned earlier, it had always in the OT been the calling of Israel through suffering to free the world from sin/death. Israel failed in this task, and it fell to Jesus as representative for Israel to fulfil their destiny.

The various texts in the Suffering Servant (Isaiah 40-55) seem to flow from Israel to a servant-figure who stands over against Israel, and the Servant could be seen in the second-Temple period as a reference to the Messiah.

 However, if you've never been made aware of the disagreement in proto-christianity regarding this issue (which did persist in some forms for some time in the early church) you'll find no shortage of verses de-emphasizing the necessity of cultural and ritual (or moral/ceremonial..if we prefer) jewish identity in the NT in Acts, as it's product.

I think you're conflating a number of separate issues here. The necessity to obey Torah was the subject of considerable debate. The idea that Jesus was the most recent part of the Jewish story that began with the OT was not debated. Jesus only meant what he meant because of the complete OT context.

There is no longer jew or greek. There is no longer slave and free. There is no longer male or female. All of you are one in christ.  

This refers to the change in definition of God's People, rather than whether Jesus was the next part of the OT story. Xians are defined by their relationship to the Messiah of Judaism.

Wherein the jews are cut off from the tree by their unbelief, and the gentiles grafted in through faith in christ

But the plan was always that Israel would be a “light to the nations”. That the promise to Abraham was that “through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed”. And so on.

The penny dropped that rather than the People of God consisting of just one nation with the rest locked outside, it was open to all- especially Jews. Rather than fighting for a patch of land in the Mediterranean, the whole world had been won. Rather than defeating the Romans, sin and death had been defeated.

All of this was totally in line with the OT story, but very different to how people were expecting it to play out.

I don't see any way to explain the demographic explosion of christianity after the romanizers work aside from a very successful appeal to the gentiles.  

If you were going to invent a pitch to gentiles you wouldn't start with 'this is the ongoing story of the Jewish nation' and continue it with what they would have understood as a zombie story.