Christ is the Greek word for the Hebrew mashiach. It was a job title that belonged to kings, priests and prophets, and Jesus took it somewhere nobody expected.
The Christ meaning is simple at the root. Christ is the Greek Christos, "anointed one," the word Greek speakers used for the Hebrew mashiach, which we say as Messiah.
It is a title, not a surname. Calling Jesus the Christ is a claim that He is the one God anointed to rule as King, to stand between God and people as Priest, and to speak for God as Prophet, all at once.
So every time someone says Jesus Christ, they are making a confession whether they mean to or not. They are saying Jesus is the Messiah. This study is about what that word carried before Jesus, and what He did with it.
The New Testament was written in Greek, so the Hebrew word mashiach mostly shows up already translated. Greek speaking Jews had been doing that for a long time before Jesus. In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, "the Lord's anointed" becomes christos. By the time the gospels were written, christos was simply the normal Greek way to say Messiah.
From the verb mashach, to smear or pour oil on. It names the person who has been anointed. David calls King Saul "the Lord's anointed" in 1 Samuel 24:6, and that is why he will not lift a hand against him.
From chrio, to anoint. The Septuagint uses it for mashiach, and the New Testament uses it hundreds of times for Jesus.
A straight transliteration of the Hebrew. It appears only twice in the New Testament, John 1:41 and 4:25, and both times the text explains that it means Christ.
Christ people. Only three uses: Acts 11:26, Acts 26:28 and 1 Peter 4:16. The form looks like a label other people gave the church before the church owned it.
So Christ and Messiah are the same word in two languages. That clears up the most common confusion, and it also exposes a couple of things that get repeated from pulpits without much behind them.
Christ was Jesus' last name. Or the more sophisticated version: "Jesus Christ" stresses His humanity and "Christ Jesus" stresses His divinity.
Christ is a title that often carries the article, the Christ. Paul moves between both word orders freely, and nothing in his letters supports a neat formula about two natures.
We covered how names worked in first century Judea in what Jesus' last name was. The short version is that He was Yeshua, son of Joseph, from Nazareth. For the name itself and what it means in Hebrew, see who Yeshua is.
Jesus is the name. Christ is the claim. Put them together and you have the whole confession of the early church in two words.
Anointing in Israel was a public act. Oil was poured on someone's head to mark them out for a task that came from God. It was not decoration and it was not magic. It was a commissioning, and three kinds of people received it.
Moses pours oil on Aaron's head. Leviticus 4:3 even calls the high priest "the anointed priest," using the same word, mashiach. The priest stood between the people and God.
Samuel anoints Saul, then David, and after Samuel anoints David the Spirit of the Lord comes on him from that day forward. Oil and Spirit arrive together.
Elijah is told to anoint Elisha as prophet in his place. Psalm 105:15 sets the two side by side, God's anointed ones and God's prophets.
God calls Cyrus "his anointed" for the job of sending the exiles home. The word described a role in God's plan, not a special kind of being.
God promises David a throne that lasts, and Psalm 2 pictures the nations raging against the Lord and His anointed. Over time the word became a hope for a son of David still to come.
Put those together and you can hear what a first century Jew heard in the word. Messiah meant a king first, because the promise to David dominated the hope. But the priestly and prophetic strands were in the word too, and Jesus would end up holding all three. For more on what the oil meant and how the church thinks about it now, see our study on the anointing.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
There was no single job description for the Messiah in Jesus' day. Different groups hoped for different things. That matters, because it explains why Jesus was so careful with the word.
A Jewish psalm from the century before Jesus asks God to "raise up unto them their king, the son of David" to purge Jerusalem of the nations trampling her. It closes on a righteous king over a holy people, "their king the anointed of the Lord," in G. Buchanan Gray's translation.
The Community Rule from Qumran looks ahead to a prophet and two messiahs, one from Aaron and one from Israel. A priestly anointed one and a royal one, side by side.
In John 1:21 priests ask John the Baptist whether he is Elijah or the Prophet. Deuteronomy 18 had produced its own line of hope, running alongside the royal one.
After the feeding of the five thousand, John 6:15 says the crowd was about to take Jesus by force to make Him king. He withdrew to the mountain by Himself.
The common thread in the popular version was a Davidic king who would deal with Rome. That was not a silly hope. It came straight out of the prophets and the Psalms, and it grew in people who had watched Roman soldiers in their streets for decades.
But it had a sword in its hand. The same psalm has the son of David destroying the pride of the sinner as a potter's vessel. That is the word Jesus was about to accept, and He knew exactly what people would hear if He said it out loud too early.
Mark 8 is the hinge of the whole gospel. Jesus takes the disciples north to Caesarea Philippi, asks who people say He is, and then asks them.
“He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Peter answered, ‘You are the Christ.’”
Mark 8:29Right answer. Then Jesus commands them to tell no one, and immediately starts teaching that the Son of Man must suffer, be rejected, be killed and rise after three days. He reaches for the title Son of Man there, not Christ, and we walked through why in the meaning of Son of Man. Peter takes Him aside and rebukes Him.
Jesus answers with the harshest line He ever speaks to a friend: "Get behind me, Satan! For you have in mind not the things of God, but the things of men." Satan there means what the word means, adversary. Peter was not possessed. He was voicing the opposition, the same pull Jesus faced in the wilderness, to take the throne without the cross.
We believe Jesus is the Christ, anointed by God as King, Priest and Prophet, and we believe He redefined what that meant from the inside. The Messiah people hoped for would conquer the enemy. The Messiah God sent was killed by the enemy and raised by God, and that is how He won.
That is why Paul could write, "we preach Christ crucified; a stumbling block to Jews, and foolishness to Greeks." A crucified Messiah sounded like a contradiction. Crucifixion was Rome's answer to would be kings. Jesus let that answer land on Him and turned it into the victory. If you want the why behind that, see why Jesus had to die.
This cuts two ways. The popular version of Christ in our culture is a nice spiritual teacher with no throne at all. That is wrong. The other version, a Christ who wins by force and gets enlisted on one side of the world's fights, is also wrong. Both skip the cross.
The sword road did get its chance. Within a generation, Jerusalem's revolt against Rome ended in AD 70 with the city and the temple destroyed, just as Jesus, weeping over the city in Luke 19, said it would. He had already offered the other way.
What did Jesus do right after Peter called Him the Christ?
Mark 8:30 to 31. He accepted the title, silenced it for the moment, and immediately filled it with the cross. Peter's rebuke in the next verse shows how far that was from what everybody expected.
If Christ means anointed one, the obvious question is when Jesus was anointed. No oil is poured on Him to start His ministry. The Spirit comes down on Him at His baptism, and a little later in the Nazareth synagogue He reads Isaiah and applies it to Himself.
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.”
Luke 4:18Then in Acts 10, Peter preaches to a Roman centurion's household and says it in one sentence: "how God anointed him with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him." That is what the anointing looked like in practice. No coronation parade. Healing, freedom, and people released from whatever was crushing them.
In Acts 2:36 Peter says God has made Him both Lord and Christ. The Messiah is not waiting for a throne. He has it, and the Kingdom of God He rules is present and active today.
2 Corinthians 1:21 says God establishes us in Christ and has anointed us. In Greek the two words sit side by side, Christos and chrisas. And 1 John 2:20 tells ordinary believers they have an anointing from the Holy One. Everyone in the Anointed One shares the anointing.
Acts 11:26 says the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch. The name probably came from outsiders who noticed a group that would not stop talking about the Christ. It was a label before it was a badge. More on that in what a Christian is.
The gifts of the Spirit are the anointing still at work. Healing, prophecy and freedom from oppression are what Christ looks like when His body carries His oil.
When you say Jesus Christ, you are saying three things. He is the King, and His Kingdom is here. He is the Priest who stands between God and us, and the offering He made was Himself. He is the Prophet, and everything God wanted to say about Himself is said in Him.
That last one changes how we read the whole Bible. If Jesus is the anointed Prophet, He is the final word on what God is like, and every earlier picture of God gets read through Him rather than the other way around.
And because He is the Anointed One, you are not left to follow Him on willpower. The same Spirit that rested on Him rests on His people. That is not a slogan. It is what the word Christian meant in Antioch.
For related reading, see the meaning of Messiah, Peter in the Bible, what we believe, and if you are on Long Island, plan a visit and come see it lived out.
Christ is the Greek word for Messiah, the anointed one, a title once shared by kings, priests and prophets, which Jesus accepted, silenced, filled with the cross, and now shares by His Spirit with everyone who is in Him.
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Christ comes from the Greek Christos, which means anointed one. It is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew mashiach, which English gives us as Messiah. In ancient Israel, kings, priests and sometimes prophets were anointed with oil to mark them out for a task from God. When the New Testament calls Jesus the Christ, it is claiming He is the anointed King Israel hoped for, and more than that, the one who holds the roles of king, priest and prophet together.
No. People in first century Judea did not carry family surnames in our sense. Jesus was known as Yeshua, son of Joseph, or Jesus of Nazareth. Christ is a title, which is why the Gospels so often say the Christ, with the article. Saying Jesus Christ is a short way of saying Jesus is the Messiah. Over time the title became so attached to Him that it started to sound like a name, but every early believer who said it was making a claim.
Yes. They are the same word in two languages. Messiah comes from the Hebrew mashiach and Christ comes from the Greek Christos, and both mean anointed one. The Greek translation of the Old Testament used christos for mashiach long before Jesus, so when the gospel writers wrote in Greek, Christ was the natural word to use. John's Gospel even shows the translation happening: Andrew tells his brother Simon that they have found the Messiah, and John adds that this means Christ.
Because the word came loaded with expectations He did not intend to meet. For many people in His day, Messiah meant a son of David who would drive out Rome by force. John 6:15 says a crowd was ready to take Him by force and make Him king, and He withdrew. When Peter confessed Him as the Christ in Mark 8, Jesus told the disciples to keep quiet and began teaching that He must suffer, be killed and rise again. The cross had to define the title before the title was announced.
Acts 11:26 says the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch. The word means people belonging to Christ, and it appears only three times in the New Testament: there, in Acts 26:28 on the lips of King Agrippa, and in 1 Peter 4:16 about suffering for the name. It seems to have started as a label outsiders gave the church, since believers mostly called themselves disciples, brothers and sisters, or followers of the Way. Being a Christian simply means belonging to the Anointed One.