"You search the scriptures, because in them you think you have life everlasting:And it is they that bear witness of Me, yet you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life" (St. John 5:39).

Jesus, claiming to be the Messiah sent by God, quoted Isaiah 61, while in the Synagogue at Nazareth, saying,

"The Lord-hath anointed Me to preach the gospel . . . to heal the contrite of heart."  "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

Jesus talked to the Samaritan woman at the well, who said -

"I know that the Messiah is coming, and when He comes He will tell all things."  Jesus replied, "I who speak with thee am He" (St. John 4:26).

While on the road to Emmaus with His disciples, who failed to recognize Jesus as the Risen Messiah, St. Luke says -

"Beginning then with Moses and with all the prophets, He interpreted to them in all the scriptures, the things referring to Him," as the Messiah. (24:27.)

Professor Joseph Klausner, of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in repudiating some rabbis who held that it was the followers of Jesus, and not Jesus Himself, Who declared, after His crucifixion, that Jesus is the Messiah, said -

"A theory has been put forward that Jesus never regarded Himself as the Messiah and only after His death was He acclaimed as Messiah by His disciples. But had this been true it would never have occurred io His disciples (simpleminded Jews) that one who had suffered crucifixion ('a curse of God is he that is hanged') could be the Messiah; and the messianic idea meant nothing whatever to Gentile converts. Ex nihilio nihil fit: when we see that Jesus messianic claims became fundamental principles of Christianity soon after His crucifixion this is standing proof that even in His lifetime Jesus regarded Himself as the Messiah" ("Jesus of Nazareth," N. Y., 1929, p. 255).

These four quotations, sustained by the declaration of a Jewish professor, the first Jewish writer of a book in Hebrew on the life of Jesus, ought to make you realize how distorted is the interpretation of Moses and the prophets by the Reform Rabbis, who deny that the Messiah is a person; and the Orthodox Rabbis, who reject Jesus as the Messiah foretold in Holy Scripture. Jesus reprimands them today, as He did the Jews in Jerusalem -

"If you believed Moses you would believe Me also, for he wrote of Me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words" (St. John 5:46-47).

If the Messiah expected to come be not a person, then how do you account for the Jews rallying to the call of about twenty false Messiahs, who have appeared in Jewry since the completion of the Messianic mission of Jesus? Jesus foretold that the Jews who rejected Him would follow a pretender when he made his appearance, viz. -

"I have come in the name of My Father, and you do not receive Me. If another come in his 'own name, him you will receive' " (St. John 5:43-44).

   The "first false Messiah of prominence in Jewish history (after the coming of Jesus) was Bar Cochba" ("Vallentine's Jewish Encyclopedia," p. 242), who "claimed to be divinely to be divenely appointed redeemer of Israel." He was supported by the whole of Jewry. Foremost among those supporters was "Akiba Ben Joseph, the great Palestinian Tanna (authority on the oral law), founder of the rabbinical system; organizer of the material in the Mishnah (the digest of Jewish ritual jurisprudence, which forms the text upon which the Talmud comments); who is responsible for the canon of the Old Testament" "He accepted Bar Cochba as the Messiah." ("Encyclopedia of Jewish Knowledge," p. 21).

   Instead of following the true Messiah, the most prominent persons in Jewry followed this pretender, Bar Cochba (whose name means "Son of the Star," real name Simeon, afterwards called Bar Kozeba, which means "Son of Lies"), with the result that battles ensued, lasting for nearly four years (131-135 A.D.), in which 580,000 Jews are said to have been killed, and hundreds of thousands of other misled unfortunates perished through sickness, starvation, etc. Besides, Jerusalem was razed to the ground, as Daniel predicted would happen in the very text wherein the Jews were told of the coming of the true Messiah, who would be slain. (Dan. 9:26).
   False calculators, as well as false Messiahs, presented themselves by the dozens since the Jews were dispersed by Titus. They afflicted the Jews, as William Miller, the father of the Adventist Church, afflicted those dupes who sold their property, and hysterically prayed on mountain tops, while awaiting his falsely calculated second coming of the Messiah. At least there was some truth in the prediction of William Miller, in that there is to be a second coming of the Lord. But there never will be a first coming of the Messiah, as the first coming of Him took place in Bethlehem in the year One of the present calendar.
   Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver told of these false Messiahs, in "The Messianic Speculation in Israel," a thesis written for his doctorate in the Union Hebrew College. He tells of -

"All the ingenuity Of a rabbinic method in hermeneutics and homiletics was therefore brought into play and Words, phrases and letters, vowels, accents and tropes, and all the mystic science of letter and numeral were marshalled into service" to prove that the Messiah would come on this, that, and the other date."

Such calculations offended Maimonides, who said in his Comment on the Sanhedrin -

"It is a fundamental dogma to believe in the coming of the Messiah; even if he is delayed long, wait for him. But no one should attempt to fix the time, nor find Biblical texts to deduce the time of his coming."

It is a pitiable thing for thousands of persons to be praying in the synagogues of the Orthodox Jews, and at the Wailing Wall, for the coming of the Messiah, who has already come. It is an offense to them, and to Christians as well, to be told, by persons who claim to be Jews, that the Messiah is not a person. Also to declare, as does the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, now in the making, that the hope for a Messiah, on the part of our fathers in Israel of old, arose with the loss of the kingship of the Jewish nation, when the promise, and the hope, of the Messiah dates back to the fall of our first parents.
   The hearts of all true Christians are sympathetically with the Jews of today in their affliction, who are crying out, as did Ephriain ben Jacob of Bon, the thirteenth century Talmudist and liturgical poet,

"And I, how long shall I hope for Redemption at the hands of the son of David and the prophet Elijah?"