Paul, the first Christian writer and the apostle, stressed Jesus being the Christ or Messiah. The terms mean king or anointed one. The Messiah was to be the Son of David, ie modeled on the monarchy and reign of King David. It was both political and spiritual.
What of Jesus? There was no anointing or coronation. Therefore Christianity is not Christianity. It has a person it puts the label Messiah unto, but no Messiah. While an anointing would not guarantee Jesus had the right to the throne, its absence is baffling.
Jesus in the gospels prefers to let others think he is Christ and won't say it outright. It is suspected by critics that he either thought he would become Messiah maybe in the afterlife by divine selection but never claimed to be a king in this life. Some think he thought the Messiah was coming and he was the before-man, the preparation.
Jesus failed the Messiah tests.
There is no evidence that the list of ancestors making him king is valid legally. Other candidates, such as his cousins, were not eliminated.
Jesus like all Jews held the Law of Moses, the Torah came first. There we read in Deuteronomy 23 that no Moabite is to enter the people of the Lord even to the tenth generation. Yet Jesus' ancestor Ruth, the great-grandmother of King David, was a Moabite who joined Israel when she married Boaz.
God is depicted as being reluctant to give Israel a king but consented to Saul having that role. You can be sure he did not really like the idea of King David either. The status of the Messiah as a wonderful gift from Heaven rather than something tolerated came much later. The fact is that King David and his descendant Jesus had no real validity as kings or Messiahs. What Deuteronomy says overrides the later books.
No rules of succession are specified.
Religion is overreaching by calling Jesus the Messiah. That is a job for bloodline experts.
If Jesus had really claimed to be the Messiah and had any plausible claim to the throne, the Romans would have captured him as a hostage. He would have been starved and forced to retract. If he did not claim, he would still have had to renounce any future claim. The way he was simply crucified like a bandit showed he was considered no different from anybody else who was crucified. As with the Romanovs, he would have been murdered in secret.
He did not fulfil Messiah texts.
And Messiah's importance is best seen as a cultural thing among Jews for the scriptures have little interest in the idea of a special messiah coming.
Christians do not really believe Jesus is Messiah for they water it down to spiritual king. That is not a Messiah.
G A Wells was the best debunker of Jesus’ existence ever.
He wrote that the word Messiah or anointed one appeared in the Psalms. And that when the Jews read the Psalms after anointed ones had ceased to exist they came to believe that the Psalms were still relevant to them. How? They assumed that the anointed one was in Heaven waiting to come down. Many Jews still believe that today. Or another idea was that Messiah had already come long ago and would return (page 366, The Encyclopaedia of Unbelief, Vol 1, Edited by Gordon Stein, Prometheus Books, New York, 1985).
I would add that anointed one meant more than just a king but one that whose consecration was sanctified and accepted and approved by God. The king needed to go through some ceremony for this for any prince could make this claim. He would probably have to be anointed by a recognised prophet and take over the land. Jesus did not have an anointing ceremony and was not a king or Messiah.
The writers of the Psalms meant a political king by the term Messiah and for Christians to say they meant a spiritual king is bluntly dishonest. Wells feels that the Jesus stories started off with the belief in a Heavenly Messiah that were elaborated on and eventually became fairy-tales about a Messiah having come to earth. Given that nobody, not even Jesus, fitted the biblical criteria I have given for being an earthly Messiah this had to happen.
The early Church got away with a non-Messiah Messiah for it became a Gentile religion and a part of a culture that did not understand what the term meant.
The New Testament however curses anybody who says Jesus is not Messiah and calls them antichrist.
Cyrus though not anointed is called Messiah in Isaiah 45:1. He was a pagan. It does stand to reason though that if Jesus were a special messiah he would have had the clarity of his ceremony. If Cyrus was a symbolic messiah then the term does not mean much!
The Bible promises great wealth to real obedient kings of the people. Jesus lived in poverty indicating either that this was a choice or he did not enjoy God favour.