The really Messianic prophecies appeared to me to be far fewer than is commonly supposed.  I found such in the 9th and 11th of Isaiah, the 5th of Micah, the 9th of Zechariah, in the 72nd Psalm, in the 37th of Ezekiel, and, as I supposed, in the 50th and 53rd of Isaiah.  To these nothing of moment could be certainly added; for the passage in Dan. ix. is ill-translated in the English version, and I had already concluded that the Book of Daniel is a spurious fabrication.  From Micah and Ezekiel it appeared, that Messiah was to come from Bethlehem and either be David himself, or a spiritual David:  from Isaiah it is shown that he is a rod out of the stem of Jesse.—­It is true, I found no proof that Jesus did come from Bethlehem or from the stock of David; for the tales in Matthew and Luke refute one another, and have clearly been generated by a desire to verify the prophecy.  But genealogies for or against Messiahship seemed to me a mean argument; and the fact of the prophets demanding a carnal descent in Messiah struck me as a worse objection than that Jesus had not got it,—­if this could be ever proved.  The Messiah of Micah, however, was not Jesus; for he was to deliver Israel from the Assyrians, and his whole description is literally warlike.  Micah, writing when the name of Sennacherib was terrible, conceived of a powerful monarch on the throne of David who was to subdue him:  but as this prophecy was not verified, the imaginary object of it was looked for as “Messiah,” even after the disappearance of the formidable Assyrian power.  This undeniable vanity of Micah’s prophecy extends itself also to that in the 9th chapter of his contemporary Isaiah,—­if indeed that splendid passage did not really point at the child Hezekiah.  Waiving this doubt, it is at any rate clear that the marvellous child on the throne of David was to break the yoke of the oppressive Assyrian; and none of the circumstantials are at all appropriate to the historical Jesus.

In the 37th of Ezekiel the (new) David is to gather Judah and Israel “from the heathen whither they be gone” and to “make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel:”  and Jehovah adds, that they shall “dwell in the land which I gave unto Jacob my servant, wherein your fathers dwelt:  and they shall dwell therein, they and their children and their children’s children for ever:  and my servant David shall be their prince for ever.”  It is trifling to pretend that the land promised to Jacob, and in which the old Jews dwelt, was a spiritual, and not the literal Palestine; and therefore it is impossible to make out that Jesus has fulfilled any part of this representation.  The description however that follows (Ezekiel xl. &c.) of the new city and temple, with the sacrifices offered by “the priests the Levites, of the seed of Zadok,” and the gate of the sanctuary for the prince (xliv. 3), and his elaborate account of the borders of the land (xlviii. 13-23), place the earnestness of Ezekiel’s literalism in still clearer light.