85 LT.-COL. MOLONY, O.B.E., LATE B.E., ON PREmCTlONS AND 



Messiah as " righteous " (ix, 7 ; xi, 4 and 5 ; xvi, 5 ; xlii, 6), 

 two as beautiful " and " glorious " (iv, 2 ; xxviii, 5), and one 

 as a holy seed " (vi, 13). All the above were applied to 

 Messiah in rabbinic writings, and Isaiah has three others not so 

 included. No wonder that one of the rabbinic names for 

 Messiah was The Lord our Righteousness." In the book 

 called 1st Enoch, written in first century B.C., there are several 

 mentions of the righteousness of the . personal supernatural 

 Messiah. 



Sceptics are agreed with Christians that Jesus of Nazareth 

 was pre-eminently a righteous man. For Westerns — the 

 righteous man. Renan wrote : " Jesus remains to humanity 

 an inexhaustible source of moral regenerations." Mill wrote : 



Nor even now would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find 

 a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into 

 the concrete than to endeavour so to live that Christ would 

 approve our life." While Lecky wrote : The simple record of 

 three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and 

 to soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers, and 

 than all the exhortations of moralists." 



It was foretold that Messiah would be an unanswerable 

 Debater. 



Deutero-Isaiah, writing of the servant of the Lord, said that 

 God had made His mouth like a sharp sword " (xlix, 2). Of 

 course we take that figuratively, and understand that the servant 

 was made eloquent, and His speech incisive. In the same book 

 we read, in a passage Messianically interpreted in Jewish writings 

 (xi, 4), " With the breath of His lips shall He slay the wicked." 

 It is surely reasonable to read this as a prediction that Messiah 

 would overcome the wicked in argument : seeing that the prophets 

 habitually employ symbolic language. If this be the right read- 

 ing, it was certainly strikingly fulfilled. We ourselves can judge 

 of the cogency of some of the arguments by which the village 

 Carpenter silenced the cleverest men of His learned nation, so 

 that " no one was able to answer Him a word, neither durst 

 any man from that day forth ask Him any more questions." 



It was foretold that Messiah would be a patient Sufferer. 

 The 22nd Psalm and 53rd chapter of Isaiah alone contain a com- 

 plete word-picture of the details of Christ's last sufferings. There 

 are also predictions of Christ's sufferings in other parts of the 

 Old Testament, but as it is important to show that the prophetic 

 picture can be traced without picking and choosing over a 



