We Have Found the Messiah

Book excerpt: Ben F. Meyer once wrote, "Radical developments generally take place not by someone's seeing something new but by his seeing everything in a new way." This book is Michael Vicko Zolondek's attempt to bring Meyer's words to fruition. For more than two hundred years, scholars have been debating whether the historical Jesus took up the role of Davidic Messiah. In this book, Zolondek addresses this long-standing question in a fresh and unique way. He challenges a generation of scholarship by arguing that the manner in which it has gone about answering the Davidic messianic question is significantly problematic when considered in the light of Jesus' cultural context and the messianism of his day. This cultural context and messianism then forms the basis for Zolondek's fresh approach to the Davidic messianic question, which he ultimately answers in the affirmative. In this book, readers will not only be exposed to more than forty years of research on the Davidic messianic question, but they will come away with a unique understanding of what it means to be a Davidic Messiah and what it would have looked like for Jesus to have taken up that role.