full that surge of love and fearful awe felt by every devout
soul at the mere mention of the Messianic coming.

The Messianic idea had its origins far back in Jewish his-
tory. At first it was bound up with the national dogma of the
Jews' privileged position as God's Chosen People; their faith
in it spanned the centuries in the promise given of old to the
Patriarch Abraham by Yahweh, and subsequently repeated by
Him on several occasions: to Jacob, in the dream at Bethel,
to Moses, on the smoking summit of Mount Sinai, and to
the Hebrew kings in all the splendour of their capital at Jeru-
salem. Even when misfortune breathed her deadly breath over
the Chosen People, nothing could make this living water of
faith run dry. Quite the contrary: the ancestral conviction was
now more powerful and more precisely defined than ever be-
fore, and it became the Jews' one source of hope and conso-
lation. The great prophets referred to it again and again. In
one magnificent chapter (the eleventh), Isaiah conjured up in
detail the time when the 'fresh root from Jesse's stem' would
be a 'signal, beckoning to the peoples all around! Ezekiel vis-
ualized the dead being restored to life, and the new Jeru-
salem arising from the ashes of the old. The Book of Daniel
treated the idea in its entirety, and described the divinely or-
dained climax, the foundation of God's kingdom upon earth
through the restoration of Israel's ancient glories and the es-
tablishment of a nation of saints.

It was after the return from the Exile that this grandiose
vision really assumed individual characteristics. Obviously the
ancient Promise would be fulfilled by God, but not by Him
directly. In order to realize it, the Most High would make use
of a sacred intermediary, an Anointed One, a Messiah, a
Christ. Thus man's timeless, fundamental inclination to em-
body the dearest of his dreams in living beings whom he could
understand and love came to coincide with the national dogma
of the Chosen People. In this way--confused, contradictory,
yet conspicuously present in every mind--the image of a su-
pernatural being who would deliver Israel from her enemies,
fulfil her destiny and realize the work of Yahweh began to
dominate Jewish life and thought more and more.

At the beginning of the first century of our Christian era,
there is no doubt whatsoever that the Messianic idea sus-

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