h: what then was Messiah to be?
and, did Jesus (though misrepresented by his disciples) truly fulfil
his own claims?

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 childr