In ancient Jewish texts, which we call the Old Testament, some of the writers had strange visions of a suffering figure. They were written hundreds of years before Jesus.

Prophet Isaiah saw a suffering “Servant of the Lord”, who would die for his people.

Servant of the Lord was a title used of Moses, the foundational figure of the Jewish faith, who led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. These events were recorded in the Torah, or the first five books of the Old Testament, as Christians call them. Moses prophesied that one day God would raise a man like him from among the Israelites. The seer Isaiah lived hundreds of years after Moses, but he knew the books of Moses and connected this strange, suffering character he saw to the prophesied “one like Moses”, who was to come.

In Isaiah’s text there are striking similarities to the eyewitness testimonies of Jesus’ suffering. So much so that in the Jewish synagogue tradition, this passage is never read, for Jewish leaders of Jesus’ time did not believe he was the anointed one, of whom Moses and the prophets had spoken.

“He was despised and rejected by mankind,
    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.” (Isaiah 53:3)

“we considered him punished by God,
    stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
    each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
    the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted,
    yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
    and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
    so he did not open his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
    Yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
    for the transgression of my people he was punished.

He was assigned a grave with the wicked,
    and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence,
    nor was any deceit in his mouth.(Isaiah 53:4-9)

After he has suffered,
    he will see the light of life and be satisfied;
by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,
    and he will bear their iniquities.

(Isaiah 53:11)