I once wrote a research paper on this. It's a complex issue. If you contact me I can email it to you. Here is an excerpt of the opening paragraphs:
The major difference between Judaism and Christianity is the fact that the Jews do not accept Jesus as Messiah. To say this, however, is to only give a partial explanation. It is also very important to realize that the word "messiah" has quite a different meaning in Judaism than it does in Christianity.
The designation "messiah" comes directly from the Hebrew word which means "anointed one.1 In the Ancient Near East, both persons and things were anointed with oil as part of a ritual meant to set them apart and make them holy. Thus when the Tabernacle was being dedicated, Moses anointed it and its vessels, and then "he poured of the anointing oil upon Aaron's head, and anointed him, to sanctify him" (Leviticus 8). We see the same practice as early in Scriptures as Genesis 28, when Jacob anointed the stone his head had laid upon when he had a vision of God, and then he called the place Beth El (The House of God).
Above all, however, anointing was connected with the dedication of an individual to become the king. As can be seen in numerous locations in Scriptures, the act associated with conferring kingship was not crowning, but anointing, a ritual carried out by a priest, or elders, or a prophet.2 Thus, almost invariably when Hebrew Scriptures speak of "the anointed one of Yahweh" or more simply of "the anointed one", they are referring to the man who sits on the throne in Jerusalem.
The Israelite monarchy was based very much on a Mesopotamian model. An element of this was to see the king as being mortal but standing in a special relationship with deity. The expression found in Psalm 2, "Yahweh said unto me: 'You are My son, this day I have begotten you'" is very similar to descriptions of the "adopted son" status of Mesopotamian kings like, for example, Hammurabi. Since the king was the "chosen one" of Yahweh, even more was expected of him than of others.
Having been granted this privilege by God, he was expected to reciprocate by being scrupulous in his adherence to the moral and ritual/theological demands of the covenant. Surely it would not be that the people would act justly and would be loyal to Yahweh, if God's own anointed one did not do so. In light of this, there was a sense that the entire fate of the people depended on the behavior of the descendant of David who occupied the palace -- salvation would come to Judea only if the king led the way.
The problem was that no living king ever measured up to this lofty ideal. Even God's most beloved, David, fell short of what Yahweh demanded. The people, however, refused to give up hope. One day, they said, the "true" king, the ideal king, would ascend the throne, and he would be the perfect "Anointed One of Yahweh." Though the present king might have fallen below their expectations, each newborn prince who stood in the line of succession was viewed as a potential ideal king.
Such an idyllic picture is painted by the prophet Isaiah when he anticipates the day when the monarch will be a "prince of peace," a "wonderful judge," a "warrior for God" who will establish righteousness throughout the land (Isaiah 9). Describing this future monarch, Isaiah continues:
...there shall come forth a shoot out of the stock of Jesse....
And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,
The spirit of wisdom and understanding,
The spirit of counsel and might,
The spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord....
with righteousness shall he judge the poor,
And decide with equity for the meek of the land....
with the breath of his lips [i.e. at his command] shall he slay the
wicked....(Isaiah 11)
As a result of his leadership there will be such justice and piety throughout the land, that God will bless the nation with all that was promised in Deuteronomy (28). Indeed, there will be such peacefulness that it will reach even into the realm of nature, so that "the wolf will dwell with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the kid, the calf and young lion and fatling" will sit side by side, and a little child will be able to walk unmolested among them all. On that day, when the earth will be full of "the knowledge of the Lord," no person and no animal will hurt or destroy any of God's creatures; salvation will be at hand (Isaiah 11).
The burden of this beautiful vision was placed on the shoulders of each newborn prince. But then, abruptly, even this dim hope was extinguished -- for when the Babylonians crushed Jerusalem, they also put an end to the Davidic monarchy. From the sixth century BC and on, there was not even a nation for the son of David to rule.
From a people broken and in exile, a new messianic vision emerged. A son of David will arise, the prophets predicted, and he will lead us back to our land, where we will defeat our enemies, and re-establish a Jewish state within the boundaries promised by God. The throne will be set up anew, and this messiah, this anointed one, will take his rightful place as ruler of the people that God had made a "light to the nations."
This new king will be so just and God-fearing that he will wipe out sinfulness from the land, and lead the people according to all of God's commandments. In response, the blessings of peace will descend from heaven -- a total peace -- even in the realm of nature -- and there will be an end to all pain, all suffering, all unhappiness. No person will die before his or her time,5 and, when the king himself dies at the end of his years, his son will continue the example set by his father. Such was the messianic vision which held sway in Judea at the beginning of the Roman period.
Given the sad realities of Jewish life in post 586 BC Judea, it should come as no surprise that the people longed to see the prophets' promise become fact. It was no doubt this dynamic which lay behind the messianic fervor which led to the belief that Zerubbabel was the much-awaited "shoot out of the stock of Jesse." Later, in the Hasmonean period, some chose to see Simon as God's anointed.7 However, the time in which the Jewish people were most open to messianic claims was in the traumatic century following the death of Herod.
Life under Roman rule was so painful that Judea was practically awash in messiah figures that promised to re-establish an independent Jewish state. The Roman overlords and their Herodian lackeys, of course, did not look upon this with equanimity since messianism was tantamount to political rebellion. No wonder, then, that whenever an individual gained attention as a "messiah," he was hunted down and done away with, generally by means of the typically Roman method of crucifixion. The names of some of these victims have been passed down to us -- Hezekiah, Simon, Judah ben Hezekiah, Athronges and Theudas. And then there was Jesus.
We are told that Jesus was born in the year that Herod died, a date most scholars now set as 4 BC. His death came in 30 AD, the middle of the term of Pontius Pilate. The only source that has provided close to contemporary information about his life and teachings is the New Testament, especially the gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, and the Epistles of Paul. Not one of these documents, however, was written during his lifetime. The earliest of them, Mark, is generally dated two generations (40 years) after his death, while the latest (John) did not appear until seven or eight decades after Jesus was crucified. Since these New Testament materials are the basis of all of our information about Jesus, there has been considerable interest in their historical accuracy.
Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a number of Christian scholars influenced by the Age of Enlightenment undertook a critical analysis of the New Testament. What emerged from many of these scholars was a sense that there were some serious problems in the gospel accounts. One researcher, a German Lutheran professor named David Strauss (ca. 1850), concluded that there were major inconsistencies regarding Jesus' life as presented in the New Testament.
Albert Schweitzer went into even more detail in his The Quest of the Historical Jesus, published in 1906. Early on in the book he notes that the New Testament provides us only with a "life of Jesus with yawning gaps."9 He proceeds to speak of how "the sources exhibit...a shocking contradiction. They assert that Jesus felt Himself to be the Messiah, and yet from their presentation of His life it does not appear that He ever publicly claimed to be so."
His final position, found at the end of his comprehensive study, is unambiguous in its evaluation of the gospels as history:
The Jesus of Nazareth...who preached...the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence.
More recently Christian theologian Rudolf Bultmann came to a similar conclusion:
I do indeed think that we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus.
The problem that these, and other scholars, have faced is the tremendous challenge of separating out the historical Jesus from the legendary one, especially given the polemical nature of the New Testament accounts. Since the New Testament was more a work of faith than of history, it is not surprising to find within it a number of contradictions and omissions which undermine its usefulness in reconstructing Jesus' life and teachings.
There are, for example, conflicting stories of Jesus' baptism, and an apparent disagreement on his