For Question 3 (the 400 years in 4 Esdras?), I think that there is no answer that makes clear sense.
A preliminary problem is that we are not even certain that it actually says that the Messiah would be revealed and people would rejoice for "400" years and then the Messiah and all who have breath would "die". The Syriac version gives "30" years, the Arabic version gives "1000" years, and the Arabic and Armenian versions do not have the part about the Messiah dying. Nonetheless, it does look like the original Hebrew document had the Messiah dying after 400 years, because it is the majority reading and because a Christian translator would be unlikely to change the text to say this because the plain reading would seem to imply that Christ experienced two deaths or that everyone alive on earth would die in the End Times.
Further, there are three ways to interpret the passage as it is commonly translated (like in the NSRV and KJV), and none of them make full, clear sense.
The first interpretation is that the Messiah and his companions were "revealed" in the 6th or 5th century B.C. by Ezra or Daniel prophecying about them. If, as the Latin version has it, the original document called the Messiah "Jesus", Chapter 7:28, there would be a stronger case for this. Further evidence favoring the interpretation that the author sees the Messiah as "revealed" in the TaNaKh is that there were over four hundred years between the events of the "Old" and "New" Testaments. Additionally, Daniel 9 makes a similar sounding prediction about over 400 years before the Messiah's death:
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So whereas 4 Esdras 7 predicted that the Messiah would be revealed and after 400 years would die, Daniel 9:25 could be read (IMO incorrectly) as saying that there will be 49 years from the 6th-5th century BC order to build Jerusalem until the Messiah, and that after another 434 years the Messiah would die.
Major obstacles to equating 4 Esdras' 400 years with 400 years before Christ are that:
(1) verse 7:28 says that "my son the Messiah shall be revealed with those who are with him," but there isn't an easy way to show how the Messiah's heavenly companions (eg. Moses, Elijah, Enoch, Ezra himself, or the angels) or his earthly ones (eg. His followers) were revealed in the 6th-5th century BC. I guess you could say that in the ancient prophecies the Messiah has heavenly companions. But on one hand, people already knew who Moses and the other ancient people were, and on the other hand, the specific identities of the Messiah's disciples are not really clear from the ancient prophecies either.
And (2) verse 7:29 says "After those years my son the Messiah shall die, and all who draw human breath", but there isn't an easy interpretation for the death of all who draw human breath. The Armenian version has more simply "all who have continued in faith and in patience", and you can say that all who received the Spirit when the Messiah breathed on his apostles in John 20 died in the first or early second century AD. You could also say that Christ's followers experienced some kind of spiritual death of despair during His three days in the tomb. But these explanations seem strained and verse 29 sounds like it is talking about everyone's physical death because the passage is followed by 7 days of primeval stillness over the earth, followed by the general resurrection, which implies that the passage is talking about real physical extinction of everyone on earth followed by the real physical resurrection of masses of people.
The second interpretation of the 400 years is that "400" is only a metaphorical expression for the c.33 years of Christ's earthly life or the 3 or 3.5 years of Christ's ministry. This is because there is a spiritual reason for the number 400. In Genesis 15:13, God told Abraham that the Israelites would be in Egyptian slavery for 400 years, and in Psalm 90:15, Moses prayed, "Make us glad as many days as you have afflicted us, and as many years as we have seen evil." So one can perceive 400 years as being a timespan of a reward corresponding to the 400 years of punishment in Egyptian slavery. So Christ's ministry or lifespan could be seen as a time of rejoicing and reward for the faithful that can be metaphorically expressed as "400 years". It could be that the Syriac translator took this interpretation and that this is why he wrote "30" years (eg. for Christ's life from his 3rd year of infancy to his 33rd year) instead of "400" years. In this theory, the Messiah's companions who are revealed with him in verse 28 could be righteous people like Moses and Elijah who were revealed at the Transfiguration. This is because Chapters 6:26 and 14:9 refers to such ancient righteous people who were taken up without dying.
While the second interpretation would clear up the problem of how the Messiah's companions would be revealed (ie. at the Transfiguration), the problem remains from verse 29 about everyone dying who has human breath. In Biblical Christianity, particularly in Paul's writings, some righteous people on earth in the End Times are supposed to be brought up to meet Christ in the clouds, which appears to mean that they would avoid physical death due to the transformation of their bodies into a more spiritual form. In 1 Thessalonians 4:17, Paul writes about the Second Coming: "Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord." Whether this meeting in the clouds happened before the 7 days of the world's silence in 4 Esdras or after it, it would imply that the righteous remnant had remained alive, had survived, went into the clouds, and weren't going to die during some mass extinction. I guess you could theorize that those in the clouds had transformed so that they weren't having "human breath" and thus weren't going to experience death. But this explanation feels like a stretch. But more fundamentally, interpreting the 400 years to mean just 3 years, 30 years, etc. of Christ's life also feels like a stretch, since the other elements of the passage's prophecy like the general resurrection seem literal.
The third interpretation of the 400 years is that it is talking about a blessed 400 year period after Christ's Second Coming. Certainly, major elements of the prophecy about the 400 years sound as if the prophecy is talking about a blessed eschatological period like that. For example, the "signs" that seem to appear before the 400 years could refer to the "troubles" in Daniel 9 during the rebuilding of Jerusalem before the Messiah's coming, but they also sound like the messianic woes leading to the end of the age. In Christ's prediction of events leading up to the Second Coming, He also warned His followers to be on the look out for signs of troubles that would precede it. Further, whereas the prophecy in 4 Esdras 7 talks about the remnant of survivors seeing the Lord's wonders ("Everyone who has been delivered from the evils that I have foretold shall see my wonders", etc.) and a remnant rejoicing for 400 years, Mark 13:13 says "the one who endures to the end will be saved." The prediction in 4 Esdras 7 about the revealing of the Messiah with His companions could be comparable to Christ's statements about the angels arriving as part of the Second Coming (Mat 24:31; 25:31), as well as to Paul's statement about the Second Coming of Christ with his holy ones (1 Thess 3:13; 2 Thess 1:7).
In "The Concept of the Messiah in IV Ezra", Michael Stone comments about the 400 years and death of the Messiah that, "The only tradition similar to that of the death of the Messiah here is Apocalypse of Baruch 30:1... This is similar to the idea of the snatching away of the Messiah remarked upon by W. Zimmerli and J. Jeremias,
The Servant of God (London: SCM Press)." The passage in Apocalypse of Baruch 29-31 appears to refer to similar events, where the remnant survives to experience apocalyptic events, the Messiah is revealed, Leviathan becomes food for the Remnant, the earth produces bounties, then after this time is completed, the Messiah will return (implying that he temporarily disappeared), and then those who died in their hope of him resurrect. You can read it here:
www.pseudepigrapha.com/pseudepigrapha/2Baruch.htmlThe Jewish Encyclopedia cites Sanhedrin 99a (below), wherein rabbis proposed different lengths of time for the Messiah's kingdom as a preparation for the coming of God's eternal kingdom.
John Collins in his book
Not One World but Two. The Future in Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, finds 4 Esdras 7 comparable to Revelation 20, in which
An Arabic manuscript has 1000 years instead of 400 years, so presumably the Arabic translator interpreted the 400 years to say 1000, in keeping with a perception that the 400 years referred to a period of blessed Messianic rule comparable to the 1000 years in Revelation 20.
Regarding the 400 years, Martin Sheldon writes in his essay "Jesus, Fourth Ezra, and a Son of Man Tradition in the First Century AD":
The "eagle vision" would seem to refer to Christ's opposition to Rome, particularly in the era when it had 12 emperors, from about the first century BC to early second century AD. One could theorize that as part of the 400 years, the Messiah was in opposition to the Roman empire, and brought about its downfall. This sounds like something that would have happened from the time of Christ until, say, the 4th century AD, if one is to interpret the spread and success of Christianity as Christ's spiritual victory over the Roman empire. In that case, the 400 years would seem more in keeping with a time after Christ's earthly ministry and physical death.
The main problems with accepting this Third Interpretation are that:
(A) It would effectively entail Christ experiencing death a second time. This is because if Christ had his ministry, was crucified, was "revealed" in a Second Coming, and then, after 400 years of His followers rejoicing, He died again, He would be experiencing death twice. Yet Paul wrote in Romans 6:9, "We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again". It seems hard to explain this in terms of Christ's experiencing some kind of metaphorical second "death".
(B) The same problem of a mass extinction of everyone with human breath at the end of the 400 years remains. In fact, it could be even more acute, because a 400 year blessed future End Times reign of the risen Christ would seem even less likely to be susceptible to a mass physical extinction for everyone than in the period before the Second Coming.
I think that scholars typically choose this Third Interpretation for the 400 years, and since it has these contradictions with standard Christian thinking, they take it as a reason for concluding that the middle section of 4 Esdras was written by a non-Christian Jewish writer. Yet even this conclusion has problems. Scholars have different opinions on whether the middle section was written by a Christian or not, and it looks like there is a good reason for thinking that it was. Stephen Kraner in his essay "Allusions to 2Esdras in the New Testament" showed that 4 Esdras 8:62-9:6 lines up with major elements of Matthew 24, which in turn suggests that the author of the middle portion of 4 Esdras was a Christian who sometimes drew on the gospels. And if the author of the middle portion was actually a Christian (or Nazarene), then it seems that he also wouldn't have intended for the prophecy in Chapter 7 to contradict such basic ideas as the risen Christ's immortality or the transformed, immortal state of the righteous remnant during and after the Second Coming.
So in conclusion, each of the three possible interpretations of the 400 years, while having its appeal, also has major problems that prevents it from being the clearly correct interpretation of the 400 years.
- there are 70 faces to 
