Michael Wise's 1999 book is subtitled "Investigating the Savior before Christ." As the subtitle suggests, it seeks to identify the first Jewish "messiah", upon whom Jesus and more than a dozen other individuals based their own ministries. Previous attempts to identify this "original cause" are represented in the works of Knohl and Ellegard to name a few.

Chapter 1 of Wise's book is entitled "Of Messiahs and Myth Dreams" and it covers the history of messiahs and crisis cults. This chapter is well written, interesting, and provocative. Unfortunately Wise is merely descriptive. Had he used the case material he presents as a road map to construct a theory of messianic aspirations, this would have been a seminal text. Instead it is merely a great read.

Beginning in Chapter 2, Wise develops his theory. The original Messiah was the Essene "Teacher of Righteousness". He was 60 years old and his name was Judah. He lived during the late 1st Century BCE, at which time the Jewish nation was at war with itself - Alexander Jannaeus and the Sadducees vs. the Pharisees. Following Alexander's death, the nation was ruled by his widow (Alexandra) and her eldest son, Hyrcanus II.  Wise believes that Judah was the author of the Thanksgiving Hymns, written in 76 BCE.  He opposed the new rule by the Pharisees, calling them "seekers of accommodation". Eventually he was tried (deserted by his colleagues) and exiled to the wilderness of Damascus. He took with him some 150 followers, and they lived by brigandry (a very interesting section in Wise's book). Eventually the cult withered to a mere handful and the Teacher died in 72 BCE. His followers searched the OT to make sense of his life/death, eventually producing the Manual of Discipline (aka Community Rule) and the Damascus Document. When war broke out with Rome in 65 BCE and Israel lost its independence, Judah's prophecies turned out to be correct and his cult flourished. Wise extrapolates from copies of scripts to numbers of believers (pp 242-243) and shows that the cult grew from 250 to 4000+ believers from 65 BCE to 35 BCE (remember that Josephus' estimate of the number of Essenes in the early 1st Century CE was 4000).

For Wise, the story of Judah (taken from his interpretation of the DSS) created the archetype of the messiah which Jesus (and others) would follow. Wise chronicles this transition in Chapter 10, wherein he describes Jesus as a "scripture prophet"

The book is well written and there are extensive notes. Annoyingly, there is no reference list. Wise certainly knows his material, but he requires "leaps of faith" to follow him in his interpretations. The main benefit of his book is that he documents the fact that messianic ideas were already alive and well when Jesus appeared. But this is hardly new information, and more than one character has been identified as the "prime mover". Wise merely offers a new candidate.