Jesus the Resurrected Messiah

In N.T. Wright’s book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, he notes that the Messiah was generally supposed to do three things [1]:

1. Win the decisive victory over the pagans
2. Rebuild or cleanse the Temple
3. In some way or other to bring true, god-given justice and peace to the whole world

Why did the early Christians believe that Jesus was the Messiah when he seemed to have failed his mission?

Wright notes that the early Christians believed Jesus was the Messiah because he rose from the dead.

“To this question, of course, the early Christians reply with one voice: we believe that Jesus was and is the Messiah because he was raised bodily from the dead. Nothing else will do. And to this the historian has to say: yes, this belief would produce this result. If the early Christians believed that Israel’s god had raised Jesus from the dead, they would believe that he had been vindicated as Messiah despite his shameful death. “ [2]

But what about the Messiah’s mission of accomplishing the 3 things mentioned above? Did the early Christians abandon the Jewish model of the Messiah? Wright notes that the early Christians didn’t dump the existing Jewish model but allowed this belief to be transformed in four ways [3]

1. It lost its ethnic specificity: the Messiah did not belong only to the Jews
2. The ‘messianic battle’ changed its character: the Messiah would not fight a military campaign, but would confront evil itself
3. The rebuilt Temple would not be a bricks-and-mortar construction in Jerusalem, but the community of Jesus’ followers.
4. The justice, peace, and salvation which the Messiah would bring to the world would not be a Jewish version of the imperial dream of Rome, but would be God’s dikaiosune, God’s eirene, God’s soteria, poured out upon the world through the renewal of the whole creation.

[1] pg 557

[2] pg 563

[3] pg 562-563