I just published a major new article in a peer-reviewed journal, the Canadian-American Theological Review: “Did Any Pre-Christian Jews Expect a Dying-and-Rising Messiah?” It will be the lead article in vol. 14, their delayed 2025 issue (print copies are going out to that journal’s subscribers in a few weeks, and digital versions will be available in maybe a few months). In twenty pages it finds the answer is pretty much yes—and that the vast majority of the dozens of experts who’ve explored the question agree. The folks who erroneously believed a certain YouTube guy with a goatee and a tuque will be outraged and overwhelmed by the support I found for Element 5 of my original study On the Historicity of Jesus: a dying messiah was a live option within certain fringe groups of Jews, out of which Christianity most likely arose, not with any radical new idea, but with the slickest implementation of an already old one.

That these messianic expectations definitely or plausibly existed for at least a century prior to Christianity (alongside more usual ideas of an invincible conqueror) is unquestionably the mainstream consensus now—when measured by the proportion of actual specialists investigating the matter and publishing their results or actually reading them (and not those who didn’t). I’ll be discussing it all with Godless Engineer on his show this Friday (7 August 2026), and we’ll be taking questions from the audience, so join us and hear all about it!