III. Isaiah 53 — The Text I Cannot Remove

In the first confession, I identified the vulnerability I could never close in the Islamic operation: the name of Jesus, left in the Quran, impossible to remove.

In the second confession, I identified the vulnerability in the secular operation: the Moral Law, written in the constitution of every human being, impossible to silence.

In this third confession, the vulnerability is a text. A specific text. Chapter 53 of the book of Isaiah. Written approximately 700 years before the events it describes, by a Jewish prophet in Jerusalem, preserved faithfully by Jewish scribes across the centuries, confirmed by the Dead Sea Scrolls to predate the Christian era by at least 150 years.

I have tried everything with this text. For several centuries after the Christian era began, Jewish interpretation consistently read it as a reference to the Messiah — the Talmud, Midrash Rabbah, and early targums all contain Messianic readings of Isaiah 53. I eventually managed to shift the dominant interpretation to a corporate reading — the "suffering servant" is Israel itself, not an individual. This interpretation, which became standard in medieval Jewish commentary largely in response to Christian use of the passage, served my purposes adequately for many centuries.

The problem is the text itself. Read without the corporate interpretation imposed on it, it describes an individual who suffers vicariously for the sins of others, who dies and is buried, who sees the light of life after his death, whose suffering produces righteousness for many. The corporate interpretation requires Israel to be simultaneously the one who suffers and the one for whose sins the suffering occurs — which produces a logical incoherence the text does not support.

Every Jewish person who reads Isaiah 53 honestly — without the corporate interpretation pre-installed, without knowing that Christians use it as a Christological text, simply as a Jewish person reading their own prophet — faces the same question. Who is this? The text does not answer. But the Gospels answer it with a precision that has produced some of the most significant conversations in the history of this operation.

I cannot remove the text. It has been there for 2,700 years. I can only try to keep Jewish people from reading it as it is written. This is harder than it sounds.

Textual note: The Great Isaiah Scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls (1QIsa-a), dated to approximately 125 BC, predates the Christian era and contains Isaiah 53 essentially identical to the Masoretic text used today. The medieval shift to a corporate interpretation of Isaiah 53 is documented by Michael Brown in Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, Volume 3 (Baker Books, 2003). Pre-Christian Messianic readings of Isaiah 53 are found in the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 98b), which identifies the suffering servant as "the Messiah — what is his name? The rabbis say, The Leper Scholar."