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The Rabbis Saw Him First: A Jewish Perspective on the Messiah
Paperback
JudaismBible StudiesGeneral Christianity
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Nov 3 2026
Pages: 166
Weight: 0.51
Height: 0.35 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Your friend is handed a checklist. If the Messiah had come, there would be peace. The Temple would stand. The exiles would be home. And if a man is killed, he is disqualified, by definition.
That checklist is real. Every verse in it is real. This book does not argue with any of it.
It asks a different question. Where did the checklist come from?
The pass-or-fail form of it was written down by one man, Maimonides, around the year 1180. The verses are ancient. The test is medieval. And the tradition that produced that test had already carried, centuries earlier and on the page:
- A Messiah who is killed, in Sukkah 52a, read out of Zechariah 12:10
- A Messiah who arrives two different ways, in Sanhedrin 98a
- A servant in Isaiah 53 whom a Jewish translation names as the Messiah
- A Messiah seated at God's right hand, in Midrash Tehillim
More than one thing was being held at once. What reaches a Jewish person today has room for one.
This book names its own weak arguments. There is a whole chapter of popular Christian claims that are false, published because the fastest way to lose a Jewish friend is to repeat something she can check in thirty seconds. And there is an entire part given to the strongest Orthodox answers against this book, stated at full strength, where most of them are conceded rather than beaten.
Every source can be looked up. Hebrew Bible quotations are the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation. Every rabbinic passage carries its tractate and folio so it can be read free on Sefaria tonight. Nothing here asks you to take the author's word for anything.
Shane Schagrin is a Bar Mitzvah'd Jewish man. Not a rabbi, not a pastor. He went and read his own sources, and this is what he found.
Written for the Christian who loves a Jewish friend and has watched this conversation go badly, and for the Jewish reader who got handed the book by that friend.
The rabbis definitely saw the Messiah before we did.
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