Plucking Jesus’s beard. Or not.

Isaiah 50.6.

Because Jesus was foretold in the Old Testament, a lot of Christians throughout history have dug around the OT looking for as many scriptures as possible which might be foretellings of Jesus. They claim to have found hundreds.

And okay, fair, there are hundreds. But there are also a whole lot of passages which actually aren’t about Jesus. They’re about other stuff. Other people, other events, other teachings. Even other messiahs. (“Messiah” is a title of the king of Israel, and Jesus is the current king of Israel, but of course he had predecessors.)

These passages resemble Jesus-stuff, so Christians claim ’em for Jesus. But in fact we’re taking those Old Testament passages out of context. It’s so important to Christians that we amass as big a number of OT “Messianic prophecies” as possible, that often we don’t care we’re misinterpreting and misquoting bible.

Today’s Isaiah passage is one of them. I originally wrote about it for advent, but it has to do with Jesus’s suffering and death, so it’s important to talk about it during the Lenten season too. It’s about how it was foretold that Jesus would get his beard plucked. Supposedly that happened after he was arrested; while he was tortured before he was crucified. Some Jesus movies throw in a scene where inbetween smacking him around and spitting on him, someone grabs a big tuft of Jesus’s beard and rips it out. Yee-ouch!

Years ago I tried to find that beard-ripping moment in the gospels, and found it’s not there at all. Doesn’t come from the gospels. It’s supposedly from Isaiah 50.6.

Isaiah 50.6 KJV

I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting.

Some Christian musta read Isaiah, found this verse about someone getting their face spat upon, thought, “Well Jesus had his face spat upon,” and concluded this was a prophecy about Jesus. And Isaiah apparently also foretold Jesus had his cheeks plucked. So there we are! They pulled out his beard.

Is this passage a foretelling of Jesus? Nah; it’s about Isaiah himself. But tradition says it’s about Jesus… and as we all know, traditions aren’t infallible. This one sure ain’t.