Why did the Christian messiah fail to fulfill the messianic prophecies?

I grew up with the assumption that Jesus was the Messiah. We went to a performance of Handel's Messiah every Christmas. (I still play the CD at Christmas.)But the more you look at it, the clearer it is that it's reverse engineering.

No, they really weren't. As I may have mentioned earlier, a prophecy that nobody can understand is worthless.The messianic prophecies were fuel for wishful thinking. They gave the Jewish people hope in troubled times.The Second Coming of Jesus is a similar prophecy. It's much like various cults predicting the end of the world - when the predicted date passes, they just move the goalposts. If the Second Coming did happen, no doubt there would be people predicting a Third Coming, when Jesus really, really will make everything better.

What sense does that make? "Oh, he really was a real prophet after all." What's the point of confirming that somebody was a real prophet if his prophecies didn't do any good?

What I said was that a prophecy is worthless if it can only be understood correctly in hindsight. At best, the hindsight interpretation is a little extra something that can be learned from the prophecy. It is not in and of itself a fulfillment of the prophecy. Just because you hope to win the lottery tomorrow doesn't mean you will - and hope doesn't change the odds. Not at all. The basis for renewing things is Jesus' message, not His person. Unfortunately, that's all too true for some Christians because they've turned Christianity into a cult of personality where the medium is more important than the message. Jesus said that renewal of this world is our responsibility.

It isn't hard to grasp. It's hard to swallow. On the contrary, it isn't of much importance what credit the prophets receive today - or even at the time of Christ - because the time of the prophecy had already come and gone

That makes it worse, not better. One prophecy that actually fits is better than a dozen that have to be twisted to fit. So full circle again: you need the resurrection to justify your twisting of prophecy. Only to you. It's the same as the creationists sayng that without a literal 6-day creation the whole Bible is worthless. It's your poor interpretation that causes the problem. None of which requires Jesus to be the Messiah or to be resurected. The mesage has the same value with or without the delivery boy.

It's a miracle!

Matthew 25, for a start. He told us to feed the hungry, etc. That's about this world, isn't it?

You could say the same thing about Martin Luther King: If he hadn't been raised from the dead the Civil Rights movement would not have continued.And you'd be wrong about that too.

So was Jesus. He was a dime a dozen. So the only difference between one failed messiah and another is whether or not anybody though he was the messiah?

You have an irony deficiency.

What is meant is that it was not a natural phenomenon - because no such natural phenomenon exists.You really should consider the possibility that your god can do miracles.

That's what I've always thought.But don't the prophecies about the King of the Jews supposedly specify Bethlehem? Why would Jewish scholars need a star for navigation?

Huh?If they were Jewish scholars, they ought to have known the prophecies. And if the prophecies specified Bethlehem, why wouldn't they just go to Bethlehem?

If they weren't Jewish, why would they travel hundreds of miles to see the new king of the Jews? Would you travel halfway around the world to see the new king of Botswana?