John Goldingay on Isaiah 53

Isaiah 53 is probably known as the greatest Old Testament prophecy about Jesus. It is rare for Christians to not recognize the familiar words “he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities” (Isa 53.5). The passage is usually understood by Evangelicals to be an explicit predictive prophecy of what would happen to Jesus on the cross. Indeed, the New Testament writers certainly applied this passage to Jesus.

In a lecture which I listened to yesterday, John Goldingay, a professor of Old Testament at Fuller seminary in the United States has suggested that the passage is not a predictive prophecy about Jesus, but rather a job description which the prophet fulfilled and which Jesus himself fulfills, not because it was originally about Jesus, but because it was about what needed to be done for God’s people to return from exile at the end of the 6th century BC. He applies a similar logic to Isaiah 61, which Jesus quotes referring to himself in Luke 4. This is also what Matthew seems to be doing in Matt 1-4 since many of the prophecies which Matthew counts a fulfilled are very clearly not originally about Jesus.

Goldingay explains that at the end of the 6th century BC, the Babylonians were defeated at the hand of the Persian king Cyrus the Great. For the Jews who had been exiled into Babylon, this would ultimately mean that many of them could return to their land, because Persian policy was to return people to their original land and govern them as Persian provinces. The prophet perceived that Yahweh was at work behind the defeat of the Babylonians and knew that he would return his people to their land. Therefore, he proclaimed that message (a message contained in Isaiah chaps. 40-55).

However, the more the prophet tried to convince his people that they would return to Judah, the more they turned against him and reviled him and kicked him in the teeth. They did not trust in God’s sovereignty in instigating the rise of Cyrus the Persian. The more the prophet called out, the more God’s people turned against him. The prophet’s own proclamation led to his own suffering. But the prophet decided to ask God to take his life of suffering as a sacrifice for the sins of his people. This, Goldingay claims is likely to be the original meaning of Isaiah 53: through the prophet’s suffering ministry and the offering of his sufferings, God’s people did in fact go back to the land.

So Isaiah 53, in Goldingay’s view, was the description of a prophet who cried out to his people and when they did not listen gave his own life (either figuratively or literally in the case of Isaiah) to save that of his people. This is precisely the role that Jesus fulfills: he comes to God’s people and though he cries out to them for repentance, they ignore him. What does Jesus do when this happens? He offers his life as a sacrifice for their sin. In this sense, the prophecy of Isaiah 53 is the job description of a suffering prophet, which Jesus himself fulfills; it is not simply a prediction of Jesus.

Now it could be very easy to simply assume that Goldingay is evading the idea that centuries before Jesus Isaiah could have spoken of Jesus, but Goldingay is absolutely committed to the authority of scripture and is a self-confessed evangelical. He is not a critical scholar who does not believe that prophets can actually predict the future. For Goldingay, this is the way of being most faithful to the biblical text. I’m not sure what I think of this, but I can’t dismiss this on the basis that it denies the inspiration of prophecy. I thought I would share the idea – feel free to discuss and comment!

NB: Some of you may wonder why I keep writing of “the prophet”, rather than just calling him Isaiah. This is due to the fact that along with all critical scholars (and also many evangelical), Goldingay considers Isa. chaps 40-55 to be from the pen of a later prophet than Isaiah ben Amos.  Again this is not because Goldingay is simply conforming to scholarly pressure, it is because he feels this is the most faithful way of interpreting the text. I myself haven’t made up my mind on the issue.