Independently, therefore, of the use of the term Messiah, there was a natural and suffi cient basis in the Old Testament for the widely spread belief in regard to the coming of a fu ture Davidic king called the Messiah, which appears to have existed in the time of Jesus In this belief Jesus himself shared, and this king Messiah, or Christ, he both virtually and formally claimed that he himself was. A vir tual claim of this kind is found in Matt xvi. 13-20, and in the parallel passages, Mark 27-30, and Luke ix, 18-21, and also in the act done by Jesus, of which we have the record in Matt. xxi, 1-11, and the parallel passages. Mark xi, 1-10, and Luke xix, 29-40. A formal claim of Jesus to be the Messiah is found in John iv, 25 and 26.
The rejection of the claims of Jesus by the Jewish nation, and the continuation in that na tion of the belief in a coining Messiah, were the occasion of the appearance in Jewish his tory of several who claimed to be the Messiah after the time of Jesus. Of all these the one who was most generally received as the Messiah by the nation, and who accomplished the most for his people, was Simon bar Cochba (or bar Kozeba), who flourished 130-35 A.D., in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. For two years and a half, bar Cochba reigned as king, and, at the head of an army of 200,000 men, defied the might of Rome. But, in the end, he and his nation were both crushed beneath the power of Rome.
The Jews of the present day are not all of the same opinion in regard to the Messianic hope. The conservative, or Orthodox, Jews are still looking for the corning of the Messiah, the great king of the line of David. With the lib eral, or Reformed, Jews, so far as the term Messiah is used at all, it is made to stand for a personification of a system of ideas and doctrines, and the coming of the Messiah will be the universal acceptance and the world wide domination of Jewish ideas and the Jewish religion.
Bibliography.-- Bacher,