the Christ

Also called Messiah

Not a surname but a title: Greek Christos translates Hebrew mashiach, 'anointed one.' Used absolutely — 'the Christ' — it names the deliverer Israel awaited, and the Gospels are built around the question of whether Jesus is he.

A Title, Not a Name

'Christ' is a translation before it is anything else. The Greek Christos renders the Hebrew mashiach, 'anointed one,' and the Gospel of John twice stops to say so for readers who would not have known: Andrew tells Simon 'We have found the Messiah!' and the text adds the gloss '(which is, being interpreted, Christ)' (John 1:41), and the Samaritan woman says 'I know that Messiah comes, he who is called Christ' (John 4:25). These two verses are the only places the World English Bible keeps the Hebrew-derived word rather than translating it.

Anointing with oil marked a person as set apart for an office. Kings were anointed, and so 'Yahweh's anointed' is used repeatedly of a reigning king — David refuses to harm Saul precisely because Saul is 'Yahweh's anointed' (1 Samuel 24:6). Priests were anointed; so, occasionally, were prophets. The word therefore carries no automatic sense of a final or singular figure. When the New Testament uses it absolutely, with the article — 'the Christ' — it is drawing on a narrower and later usage, in which the title had come to name one awaited deliverer in particular.

What Was Expected

Second Temple Jewish expectation was not uniform, and this is worth stating carefully, because Christian retellings have often flattened it. The surviving sources describe a range of hopes rather than a single agreed programme: a Davidic king who would restore Israel's throne and drive out foreign rule; in some Qumran texts, two anointed figures, one priestly and one royal; in others, a heavenly or pre-existent figure; and in some strands of the literature, deliverance without any messianic person at all. Sources including the Psalms of Solomon, several Dead Sea Scrolls, and later rabbinic material each point in somewhat different directions.

The Gospels reflect this unsettledness in their own way. The crowd at John 12:34 objects that 'we have heard out of the law that the Christ remains forever' and cannot square that with talk of the Son of Man being lifted up. Saying the expectation was varied is not the same as saying it was empty: this app writes from a Protestant evangelical position, and holds that the Old Testament genuinely anticipates a coming deliverer and that Jesus is he. What the variety establishes is that no single tidy checklist was sitting there waiting to be ticked off, which is part of why the identification was contested at the time and why the apostles argued for it from the Scriptures rather than simply pointing.

The Question the Gospels Are Built Around

'The Christ' functions in the Gospels less as a description than as a question put to the reader. Jesus asks the disciples directly who they say he is, and Peter answers 'You are the Christ' (Mark 8:29) — 'the Christ, the Son of the living God' in Matthew 16:16 — and is immediately told to say nothing about it. At his trial the high priest asks 'Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?' (Mark 14:61), and the answer becomes the ground of the charge against him. John states the purpose of his whole book in these terms: 'these are written, that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God' (John 20:31). After the resurrection Peter's Pentecost sermon puts it as a divine verdict rather than a human recognition: 'God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified' (Acts 2:36).

One reason the identification was contested at the time is that the expectations sketched above ran mostly toward a victorious king, and a crucified claimant fit none of them. Paul says as much when he calls the message 'a stumbling block to Jews, and foolishness to Greeks.' Over the following decades the title attached to Jesus so firmly that it began to function as a name — 'Jesus Christ,' 'Christ Jesus' — which is how most English readers first meet the word, and why its force as a title has to be recovered deliberately.

How Others Read the Same Texts

On this article's central claim there is no Protestant distinctive to defend: Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians confess that Jesus is the Christ in exactly the terms the creeds use, and the disagreements between those traditions and evangelicals lie elsewhere — authority, sacraments, justification — not here. The two readings that genuinely differ from this article's are Jewish interpretation and critical scholarship, and both deserve to be represented as their own adherents would recognise them.

Judaism does not accept the identification, and the reasons are principled rather than perverse. The messianic hope in Jewish tradition is tied to visible, unrealised outcomes — the ingathering of the exiles, a rebuilt temple, universal peace and knowledge of God — and on that reading a claimant who died without those things having happened has not fulfilled the office, whatever else may be said about him. Particular texts are read differently as a matter of course: the servant of Isaiah 53 is widely read in Jewish interpretation as Israel itself rather than an individual. Daniel 9:25-26's 'anointed one' is referred elsewhere too, though the strands should not be run together: candidates proposed for the prince of verse 25 include Cyrus, while the anointed one 'cut off' in verse 26 is, in mainstream critical scholarship rather than specifically Jewish tradition, generally identified with the high priest Onias III, murdered in 171/170 BC. Evangelicals disagree with these readings and argue against them from the texts; they should not describe them as evasions, and should be aware that supersessionist caricature has a long and ugly history behind it.

Critical scholarship, for its part, tends to emphasise the diversity of Second Temple expectation described above, and to treat the early church's messianic reading of the Old Testament as a retrospective interpretation developed to make sense of a crucified leader. Evangelical scholarship answers that the apostolic reading is continuous with how the texts were already being read, that Jesus himself taught it (Luke 24:27, 24:44-46), and that the resurrection is the event that makes the reading possible rather than a decoration added to it.

A note on linking, since it is visible in the app: this article deliberately does not attach itself to Daniel 9:25-26. Evangelicals overwhelmingly read that passage as messianic, but they differ sharply among themselves over the seventy weeks — how the weeks are counted, whether the seventieth is continuous with the rest or still future, and what the 'cut off' of the Anointed One dates. Linking the verses here would imply the app had settled a scheme it has not. The passage is discussed above instead.

Scripture references

1 Samuel 24:6 — Saul as 'Yahweh's anointed' — the title used of a reigning king
John 1:41 — 'We have found the Messiah!' glossed as 'Christ'
John 4:25-26 — The Samaritan woman on the coming Messiah
Mark 8:29-30 — Peter's confession, followed by a command to silence
Matthew 16:16 — 'You are the Christ, the Son of the living God'
Mark 14:61-62 — The high priest's question at the trial
John 12:34 — The crowd's objection that 'the Christ remains forever'
John 20:31 — John states the purpose of his Gospel in these terms
Acts 2:36 — 'God has made him both Lord and Christ'