Handel’s Messiah as an attack on deists and Jews?

There’s a fascinating thesis advanced in Unsettling History of That Joyous ‘Hallelujah’ in today’s NYT. Far from being a celebration of the Christmas season, it seems that Handel’s Messiah was intended as a Lenten attack on deists, as well as the Jews who supposedly inspired them. The research seems thorough, and the conclusion inescapable:

To create the “Messiah” libretto Charles Jennens, a formidable scholar and a friend of Handel’s, compiled a series of scriptural passages adapted from the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Version of the Bible. As a traditionalist Christian, Jennens was deeply troubled by the spread of deism, the notion that God had simply created the cosmos and let it run its course without divine intervention. Christianity then as now rested on the belief that God broke into history by taking human form in Jesus. For Jennens and others, deism represented a serious menace.
Deists argued that Jesus was neither the son of God nor the Messiah. Since Christian writers had habitually considered Jews the most grievous enemies of their religion, they came to suppose that deists obtained anti-Christian ammunition from rabbinical scholars. The Anglican bishop Richard Kidder, for example, claimed in his huge 1690s treatise on Jesus as the Messiah that “the deists among us, who would run down our revealed religion, are but underworkmen to the Jews.”

I imagine that I will continue to enjoy The Messiah just for its music; the religious content has been largely irrelevant to me for nearly 50 years. But who knows? Will I find myself paying attention to certain passages, and will that affect my experience? It’s hard to tell….
—
[Via Robert Elisberg in HuffPo.]