PROPHECY

People see prophecy as the ability to either:

Foresee future events - which allows time to avoid them
Foretell future events - which means they are going to come to pass whether you like ti or not.

A considerable amount of the Old Testament records the prophecies of key figures such Isaiah and Elijah . These men as well as 10 others were believed to have been given a message by God and then tasked with telling the Jewish people.

However, despite the fact these men knew the future people tended not to like prophets because they very rarely brought good news. Often prophecy was a warning from God to return to the right path or face a punishment - and you can imagine how that would go down.

But "so what?" that's the Old Testament, this is New Testament studies right? Well as we've mentioned before, context is everything. Jesus would have practised Judaism, his audience was Jewish so everybody had these prophecies in the back of their mind.

Isaiah

One prophecy in particular would have been the prophecy of Isaiah in chapter 53. For context, Judaism has , for a large amount of its history, been oppressed by other forces. As a result God promised the Jews that one day somebody will come to save them from this oppression once and for all - this person will be called the mashiach, messiah or "the anointed one" . In Isaiah 53 there is a description given of this person - the title for this passage is called "the suffering servant"

This prophecy was written 700 years before Jesus, so skip forward 7 centuries and people start drawing comparisons between the two.

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