I. Mashiach in the Old Testament: The Anointed Office
The Hebrew word mashiach comes from the verb mashach, “to anoint,” and in its plainest sense means simply “anointed one.” It is not originally a proper name, and for most of its Old Testament life it is not even an exclusively future or end-times term.1 It describes whoever has been consecrated to office by the pouring of oil — above all reigning kings, but priests as well.2
David refuses twice to lift his hand against Saul, on the express ground that Saul is “the LORD's anointed” (1 Samuel 24:6; 1 Samuel 26:9–11). Leviticus calls the officiating high priest “the anointed priest” (Leviticus 4:3). Even the pagan king Cyrus, raised up to release Israel from exile, is startlingly called “His anointed” by the LORD (Isaiah 45:1). In each case the word does the same ordinary job: marking someone as set apart, by God, for a God-given office.
What turns mashiach from a common description into a title with a capital letter is the covenant God makes with David: an anointed son of David will sit on an everlasting throne (2 Samuel 7:12–16). Once the Davidic monarchy collapses in exile and no such king remains on any throne, “the anointed one” stops referring to whoever currently holds the office and starts pointing forward — to the one who will finally hold it. Psalm 2 is the paradigm case: the nations rage “against the LORD and against His Anointed,” a figure the psalm goes on to identify as God's own installed king and son.
“The kings of the earth take their stand … against the LORD and against His Anointed … “I have installed My King upon Zion, My holy mountain.” … “You are My Son, today I have begotten You.””
Daniel later gives the title a name and a timetable — “Messiah the Prince,” who will be “cut off” (Daniel 9:25–26) — and by the centuries just before the New Testament, “the Messiah” had become, for a Jewish reader, shorthand for a specific expected figure: God's anointed Davidic king who would finally deliver and rule His people.
This is the whole freight the word carries into the New Testament: not a vague religious title, but the promised occupant of a specific covenant office.3 Whatever “Christ” turns out to mean in Greek, it has to mean this first.
For Further Study
II. Christos in the Septuagint: A Direct Translation, Not a New Concept
Roughly two centuries before Christ, Jewish scholars in Alexandria translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek — the Septuagint (LXX), the Bible most New Testament writers and their first readers actually read and quoted. When those translators reached mashiach, they did not coin a new word or borrow a term from Greek religion. They reached for the ordinary Greek verb for anointing, chrio, and used its verbal adjective: christos — “anointed.”4
This was not a loose or occasional choice. It is the LXX's standing, consistent rendering: Saul and David are christos kyriou, “the LORD's anointed” (1 Samuel 24:6); the high priest is ho hiereus ho christos (Leviticus 4:3); and Psalm 2's “His Anointed” becomes tou christou autou.5
“… hoi archontes synechthesan epi to auto, kata tou kyriou kai kata tou christou autou — ‘… the rulers gathered together, against the Lord and against His Christ.’”
The point is a simple but important one: christos was already a fully loaded biblical-theological term — the Greek Bible's own word for “God's Anointed King” — for two centuries before a single New Testament page was written. When Matthew or Paul writes ho christos, “the Christ,” a Greek-speaking Jewish reader heard exactly what a Hebrew-speaking reader heard in ha-mashiach: not a new idea imported from paganism, but the same office, in the language most of the diaspora and much of Judea actually used.
This is why John can casually gloss one word with the other, as if translating a name rather than introducing a concept: “We have found the Messiah” (which translated means Christ)” (John 1:41). Mashiach and christos are not two theological ideas that happen to resemble each other. They are one word in two languages.
For Further Study
III. “The Christ” in the Gospels: A Title Still at Work
The Gospels almost never use Christos as a bare name. It nearly always carries the definite article — ho Christos, literally “the Christ” — the grammatical fingerprint of a title being predicated of a particular person, not a name being attached to one.6
Peter's confession is the clearest case: asked who Jesus is, he answers, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16) — a claim about office and identity, not a label.7 The Samaritan woman expects the same figure by his Hebrew name: “I know that Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ); when that One comes, He will declare all things to us” (John 4:25) — John again treating the two words as translation-equivalents for his Greek readers.
“‘Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?’ … ‘Thus it is written, that the Christ would suffer and rise again from the dead the third day.’”
The risen Jesus on the Emmaus road does not treat “the Christ” as merely His own name; He treats it as an Old Testament office with a job description — suffering, death, resurrection — which He then shows He has fulfilled (Luke 24:26–27, 44–46). The title still means something specific enough to be argued from Scripture.
Peter's Pentecost sermon makes the titular force explicit one more time, at the exact moment the church goes public: “Therefore let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ — this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). “Christ” here is not Jesus's second name; it is the office God has just publicly conferred on Him.
John's Own Purpose Statement: Christ and Son of God Together
John closes his Gospel by telling his readers exactly why he wrote it, and he states the goal in two titles held together, not one: “these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name” (John 20:30–31).8
“Many other signs therefore Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name.”
This is not a stray pairing. John reaches for the same two titles together at each major turning point of his Gospel: Nathanael's confession, “You are the Son of God; You are the King of Israel” (John 1:49); the Baptist's own testimony, “This is the Son of God” (John 1:34), following directly on Andrew's “We have found the Messiah” just a few verses earlier; and Martha's confession before Lazarus is raised, “I have believed that You are the Christ, the Son of God” (John 11:27). “Son of God” is not, for John, a separate claim added alongside “Messiah” — it is how he unpacks who this particular Messiah is. The Davidic king promised in the Old Testament turns out, in John's telling, to be God's own Son.
This is exactly the pairing Peter reaches for at Caesarea Philippi — “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16) — and it is the same pairing this whole study has been tracing from Psalm 2, where “His Anointed” and “My Son” describe one and the same figure in successive verses. Recognizing mashiach/christos as the promised Davidic king does not compete with recognizing Jesus as the Son of God; in the Old Testament's own terms, and explicitly in John's, they were always meant to be read as one confession.
For Further Study
IV. Paul’s Christos: Title Becoming Name — and a Live Scholarly Debate
In Paul's letters, the pattern shifts. “Christ” increasingly appears without the article, fused directly to the name Jesus — “Christ Jesus,” “Jesus Christ” — in a way that reads, on the surface, much closer to a second proper name than to a title being freshly asserted each time. This shift is real and worth naming honestly rather than smoothing over.
For much of the twentieth century, the dominant scholarly view (associated with Wilhelm Bousset and those who followed his line) held that by Paul's day Christos had, for all practical purposes, gone semantically empty — a name Gentile congregations used without hearing “Messiah” in it at all.
Matthew Novenson's Christ among the Messiahs is the most significant recent challenge to that consensus.9 He argues that Christos functions the way Greek honorific epithets regularly did — comparable to “Epiphanes” fused onto Antiochus, or “Africanus” onto Scipio: an honorific can be used name-like, attached and repeated without an article, while still carrying its full honorific sense for anyone who knows the history behind it. On this reading, Paul's readers still heard “Messiah Jesus,” even where the grammar looks like a bare name.
N. T. Wright argues a related but stronger case: that Paul's Christos-language is saturated throughout with Israel's story — kingship, covenant, the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham and David — and cannot be read as evacuated of messianic content without flattening whole arguments in Romans and Galatians that depend on it.10 James Dunn takes a more mediating position: some titular sense survives, but real thinning and development across Paul's usage should be acknowledged rather than denied.11 Reformed theology, represented here by Michael Horton, generally agrees that Christos retains genuine office-content (prophet, priest, king) even as it functions as part of Jesus's proper designation.12
Scholars disagree, in other words, about how much titular force survives and exactly how it survives — not about whether Christos and mashiach are the same word, and not about whether Paul's readers had access to that background. The popular modern assumption — that “Christ” is a semantically empty surname — is not a position any serious scholar on either side of this debate actually holds.
For Further Study
V. Recovering the Title
None of this changes any doctrine. It changes how a familiar word sounds. When “Christ” is heard as a surname, Paul's letters can start to sound like they are about a private religious brand — “Jesus Christ” as a fixed proper noun, the way “John Smith” is a fixed proper noun. When “Christ” is heard as it was written — Messiah, the Anointed One, God's covenant king — the same letters turn out to be soaked in kingdom, covenant, and fulfillment language from the first verse.
A Simple Reading Habit
Whenever “Christ” appears in the New Testament, it costs nothing to mentally supply the fuller phrase: not just “Jesus Christ,” but “Jesus, the Messiah — the Anointed King who fulfills what was promised to David.” “The gospel of Jesus Christ” (Mark 1:1) becomes, on this reading, unmistakably an announcement about a king and a kingdom — not only about personal rescue, though it is certainly that too.
Paul himself models this recovery of the title's content when he reasons publicly “from the Scriptures, explaining and giving evidence that the Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, and saying, ‘This Jesus whom I am proclaiming to you is the Christ’” (Acts 17:2–3). That is an argument about a title and an office — exactly the argument this study has traced from Psalm 2 through the Septuagint to the Gospels and into Paul.
“Messiah” and “Christ” were never two ideas. They are one promise, carried across two languages, still waiting to be heard with its full weight.
For Further Study
End of Study · Messiah and Christ
- 1.Brown, Francis, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs. The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996, s.v. mashiach, “anointed one.”
- 2.New American Standard Bible, 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
- 3.Fruchtenbaum, Arnold G. Messianic Christology. Tustin, CA: Ariel Ministries, 2010.
- 4.Thayer, Joseph Henry. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996, s.v. christos, “anointed.”
- 5.Rahlfs, Alfred, and Robert Hanhart, eds. Septuaginta: Editio altera. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2006. Psalm 2:2 renders the Hebrew with tou christou autou, “of His anointed.”
- 6.Ryrie, Charles C. Basic Theology. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 1999, ch. 39, “The Person of Christ.”
- 7.Walvoord, John F., and Roy B. Zuck, eds. The Bible Knowledge Commentary: New Testament. Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 1983, comment on Matthew 16:16.
- 8.Köstenberger, Andreas J. John. Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004, comment on John 20:30–31.
- 9.Novenson, Matthew V. Christ among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
- 10.Wright, N. T. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 4. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013, esp. ch. 9 on Christos as messianic title in Paul.
- 11.Dunn, James D. G. The Theology of Paul the Apostle. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998, 196–213.
- 12.Horton, Michael. The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011, 471–75.
I. Mashiach in the Old Testament: The Anointed Office
The Hebrew word mashiach comes from the verb mashach, “to anoint,” and in its plainest sense means simply “anointed one.” It is not originally a proper name, and for most of its Old Testament life it is not even an exclusively future or end-times term.1 It describes whoever has been consecrated to office by the pouring of oil — above all reigning kings, but priests as well.2
David refuses twice to lift his hand against Saul, on the express ground that Saul is “the LORD's anointed” (1 Samuel 24:6; 1 Samuel 26:9–11). Leviticus calls the officiating high priest “the anointed priest” (Leviticus 4:3). Even the pagan king Cyrus, raised up to release Israel from exile, is startlingly called “His anointed” by the LORD (Isaiah 45:1). In each case the word does the same ordinary job: marking someone as set apart, by God, for a God-given office.
What turns mashiach from a common description into a title with a capital letter is the covenant God makes with David: an anointed son of David will sit on an everlasting throne (2 Samuel 7:12–16). Once the Davidic monarchy collapses in exile and no such king remains on any throne, “the anointed one” stops referring to whoever currently holds the office and starts pointing forward — to the one who will finally hold it. Psalm 2 is the paradigm case: the nations rage “against the LORD and against His Anointed,” a figure the psalm goes on to identify as God's own installed king and son.
Daniel later gives the title a name and a timetable — “Messiah the Prince,” who will be “cut off” (Daniel 9:25–26) — and by the centuries just before the New Testament, “the Messiah” had become, for a Jewish reader, shorthand for a specific expected figure: God's anointed Davidic king who would finally deliver and rule His people.
This is the whole freight the word carries into the New Testament: not a vague religious title, but the promised occupant of a specific covenant office.3 Whatever “Christ” turns out to mean in Greek, it has to mean this first.
For Further Study
II. Christos in the Septuagint: A Direct Translation, Not a New Concept
Roughly two centuries before Christ, Jewish scholars in Alexandria translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek — the Septuagint (LXX), the Bible most New Testament writers and their first readers actually read and quoted. When those translators reached mashiach, they did not coin a new word or borrow a term from Greek religion. They reached for the ordinary Greek verb for anointing, chrio, and used its verbal adjective: christos — “anointed.”4
This was not a loose or occasional choice. It is the LXX's standing, consistent rendering: Saul and David are christos kyriou, “the LORD's anointed” (1 Samuel 24:6); the high priest is ho hiereus ho christos (Leviticus 4:3); and Psalm 2's “His Anointed” becomes tou christou autou.5
The point is a simple but important one: christos was already a fully loaded biblical-theological term — the Greek Bible's own word for “God's Anointed King” — for two centuries before a single New Testament page was written. When Matthew or Paul writes ho christos, “the Christ,” a Greek-speaking Jewish reader heard exactly what a Hebrew-speaking reader heard in ha-mashiach: not a new idea imported from paganism, but the same office, in the language most of the diaspora and much of Judea actually used.
This is why John can casually gloss one word with the other, as if translating a name rather than introducing a concept: “We have found the Messiah” (which translated means Christ)” (John 1:41). Mashiach and christos are not two theological ideas that happen to resemble each other. They are one word in two languages.
For Further Study
III. “The Christ” in the Gospels: A Title Still at Work
The Gospels almost never use Christos as a bare name. It nearly always carries the definite article — ho Christos, literally “the Christ” — the grammatical fingerprint of a title being predicated of a particular person, not a name being attached to one.6
Peter's confession is the clearest case: asked who Jesus is, he answers, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16) — a claim about office and identity, not a label.7 The Samaritan woman expects the same figure by his Hebrew name: “I know that Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ); when that One comes, He will declare all things to us” (John 4:25) — John again treating the two words as translation-equivalents for his Greek readers.
The risen Jesus on the Emmaus road does not treat “the Christ” as merely His own name; He treats it as an Old Testament office with a job description — suffering, death, resurrection — which He then shows He has fulfilled (Luke 24:26–27, 44–46). The title still means something specific enough to be argued from Scripture.
Peter's Pentecost sermon makes the titular force explicit one more time, at the exact moment the church goes public: “Therefore let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ — this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). “Christ” here is not Jesus's second name; it is the office God has just publicly conferred on Him.
John's Own Purpose Statement: Christ and Son of God Together
John closes his Gospel by telling his readers exactly why he wrote it, and he states the goal in two titles held together, not one: “these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name” (John 20:30–31).8
This is not a stray pairing. John reaches for the same two titles together at each major turning point of his Gospel: Nathanael's confession, “You are the Son of God; You are the King of Israel” (John 1:49); the Baptist's own testimony, “This is the Son of God” (John 1:34), following directly on Andrew's “We have found the Messiah” just a few verses earlier; and Martha's confession before Lazarus is raised, “I have believed that You are the Christ, the Son of God” (John 11:27). “Son of God” is not, for John, a separate claim added alongside “Messiah” — it is how he unpacks who this particular Messiah is. The Davidic king promised in the Old Testament turns out, in John's telling, to be God's own Son.
This is exactly the pairing Peter reaches for at Caesarea Philippi — “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16) — and it is the same pairing this whole study has been tracing from Psalm 2, where “His Anointed” and “My Son” describe one and the same figure in successive verses. Recognizing mashiach/christos as the promised Davidic king does not compete with recognizing Jesus as the Son of God; in the Old Testament's own terms, and explicitly in John's, they were always meant to be read as one confession.
For Further Study
IV. Paul’s Christos: Title Becoming Name — and a Live Scholarly Debate
In Paul's letters, the pattern shifts. “Christ” increasingly appears without the article, fused directly to the name Jesus — “Christ Jesus,” “Jesus Christ” — in a way that reads, on the surface, much closer to a second proper name than to a title being freshly asserted each time. This shift is real and worth naming honestly rather than smoothing over.
For much of the twentieth century, the dominant scholarly view (associated with Wilhelm Bousset and those who followed his line) held that by Paul's day Christos had, for all practical purposes, gone semantically empty — a name Gentile congregations used without hearing “Messiah” in it at all.
Matthew Novenson's Christ among the Messiahs is the most significant recent challenge to that consensus.9 He argues that Christos functions the way Greek honorific epithets regularly did — comparable to “Epiphanes” fused onto Antiochus, or “Africanus” onto Scipio: an honorific can be used name-like, attached and repeated without an article, while still carrying its full honorific sense for anyone who knows the history behind it. On this reading, Paul's readers still heard “Messiah Jesus,” even where the grammar looks like a bare name.
N. T. Wright argues a related but stronger case: that Paul's Christos-language is saturated throughout with Israel's story — kingship, covenant, the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham and David — and cannot be read as evacuated of messianic content without flattening whole arguments in Romans and Galatians that depend on it.10 James Dunn takes a more mediating position: some titular sense survives, but real thinning and development across Paul's usage should be acknowledged rather than denied.11 Reformed theology, represented here by Michael Horton, generally agrees that Christos retains genuine office-content (prophet, priest, king) even as it functions as part of Jesus's proper designation.12
Scholars disagree, in other words, about how much titular force survives and exactly how it survives — not about whether Christos and mashiach are the same word, and not about whether Paul's readers had access to that background. The popular modern assumption — that “Christ” is a semantically empty surname — is not a position any serious scholar on either side of this debate actually holds.
For Further Study
V. Recovering the Title
None of this changes any doctrine. It changes how a familiar word sounds. When “Christ” is heard as a surname, Paul's letters can start to sound like they are about a private religious brand — “Jesus Christ” as a fixed proper noun, the way “John Smith” is a fixed proper noun. When “Christ” is heard as it was written — Messiah, the Anointed One, God's covenant king — the same letters turn out to be soaked in kingdom, covenant, and fulfillment language from the first verse.
A Simple Reading Habit
Whenever “Christ” appears in the New Testament, it costs nothing to mentally supply the fuller phrase: not just “Jesus Christ,” but “Jesus, the Messiah — the Anointed King who fulfills what was promised to David.” “The gospel of Jesus Christ” (Mark 1:1) becomes, on this reading, unmistakably an announcement about a king and a kingdom — not only about personal rescue, though it is certainly that too.
Paul himself models this recovery of the title's content when he reasons publicly “from the Scriptures, explaining and giving evidence that the Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, and saying, ‘This Jesus whom I am proclaiming to you is the Christ’” (Acts 17:2–3). That is an argument about a title and an office — exactly the argument this study has traced from Psalm 2 through the Septuagint to the Gospels and into Paul.
“Messiah” and “Christ” were never two ideas. They are one promise, carried across two languages, still waiting to be heard with its full weight.
For Further Study
End of Study · Messiah and Christ