Christos

The standard lexica and theological dictionaries treat Christos as the Greek rendering of Hebrew mashiach, "anointed one," a verbal adjective from chrio, "to rub, smear, anoint." In ordinary Greek it described ointments and salves and almost never a person; its use as a personal designation is essentially a Jewish-Greek invention, created when the Greek Old Testament chose it to translate the Hebrew title (Grundmann in TDNT; Hengel; Moulton-Milligan finding no extra-Jewish personal use in the papyri). The foreignness of the term to Greek ears is indexed by the persistent confusion with the common adjective and slave-name chrestos ("useful, kind"), behind Suetonius's "impulsore Chresto" and the Chrestianoi spellings in Tacitus and Codex Sinaiticus (Wilken; Benko; J. G. Cook). BDAG distinguishes its use as a title ("the Messiah, the Anointed One") from its use as a virtual name for Jesus, and surveys the anointing of kings and priests in Israel that the word presupposes. On the Old Testament and Second Temple background, Fitzmyer and J. J. Collins document that the Hebrew title names mostly present office-holders (with Daniel 9 the one clearly future-eschatological case), messianic expectation being real but plural (Davidic king, Aaronic priest, prophetic Spirit-bearer, heavenly Son of Man) rather than a single fixed idea; Horbury argues for a richer and more continuous messianic vocabulary running Septuagint to Targums to rabbinic literature, a maximalist position Fitzmyer, Charlesworth, and W. S. Green resist. The hardest case is Paul, where the word is most name-like. Dahl's classic essay systematized the grammatical features that suggested it had become a proper name (never indefinite, never the predicate of "is," never with a possessive genitive, characteristically anarthrous), and the older Bultmann, Kramer, Hahn, and Conzelmann line drew that conclusion. The current center of gravity, led by Novenson, instead reads it as a Greek-style honorific (the lexical category of Augustus, Epiphanes, or Soter) that keeps its messianic content even where it stands beside the name, a reading reinforced by Hengel, N. T. Wright, Jipp, Bauckham, Chester, and (with care) Hurtado and Dunn. The verb chrio tells against any strong "Paul lost the etymology" claim: at 2 Corinthians 1:21-22 Paul puns on it (God who anoints "us into Christ" and anoints us), a wordplay unintelligible unless "anointed" is still heard inside the noun.

A separate body of work concerns the places, mostly in Paul, where the word is stretched past both title and name: it stands as the predicate of "to live" (Philippians 1:21; Colossians 3:4), as the one who lives within and is formed within the believer or community (Galatians 2:20; Galatians 4:19), as a garment one puts on (Galatians 3:27), as the corporate body that can be partitioned (1 Corinthians 12:12; 1 Corinthians 1:13; Romans 12:5), as Abraham's single offspring (Galatians 3:16), and as a cosmic summing-up or "all in all" (Colossians 3:11; Ephesians 1:10; Ephesians 4:13). The phrase "in Christ" and its kin occur some 164 times in the Pauline corpus and form the most contested grammatical-theological question in Pauline studies. Adolf Deissmann opened the modern discussion by reading it as a literal location, the believer enveloped in a pneumatic Christ like the air one breathes; Albert Schweitzer relocated the language in Jewish apocalyptic as corporate solidarity with the messianic body in the new age, and E. P. Sanders carried this forward as participationist eschatology, with justification a secondary feature whose mechanism Sanders admitted he could not fully specify. A distinct apocalyptic-invasive line (Ernst Kasemann, J. Louis Martyn, Martinus de Boer) reads passages like Galatians 2:20 as the in-breaking of the risen Christ rather than interior mysticism, and Douglas Campbell sharpens it into a participatory, pneumatological, martyrological, and eschatological account. James Dunn, N. T. Wright, Richard Hays, Michael Gorman, Constantine Campbell (who replaces "mysticism" with the fourfold union, participation, identification, incorporation), Morna Hooker (the "interchange" pattern keyed to 2 Corinthians 5:21), Grant Macaskill (a covenantal union that preserves the Creator-creature distinction), and Susan Eastman (the self constituted relationally) have shifted the center of gravity toward a relational, narrative incorporation that keeps the distinction between the head and his members; Wright in particular grounds it in Christos as a still-royal title, the Messiah being by definition a figure who sums up his people. Murray Harris's study of the prepositions concludes that "in Christ" carries no single sense but shifts among union, agency, sphere, and cause with the context, and BDAG files the use as a marker of close personal association. Reformed and Lutheran exegetes (Douglas Moo, Thomas Schreiner, Mark Seifrid) grant the participationist insight while keeping forensic justification primary, so that union serves rather than displaces the verdict of acquittal; at the verse level the same divide recurs, e.g. at Philippians 1:21, where Fee, Silva, and Bockmuehl read "to live is Christ" as vocational-proclamatory shorthand for a Christ-centered ministry while O'Brien, Reumann, Fowl, Gorman, and Constantine Campbell read it as participatory compression, with most holding both together. The corporate readings of 1 Corinthians 12:12, 1 Corinthians 1:13, and Romans 12:5 run from C. K. Barrett's cautious "shorthand for the body of Christ," through Thiselton's, Dunn's, Wright's, Garland's, and Mitchell's mediating identification that keeps head and members distinct, to the strong "real corporate body" of John A. T. Robinson, C. F. D. Moule, and Kasemann and the patristic totus Christus of Augustine. The same corporate force is read in the Ephesians material: Christ as the one in whom Jew and Gentile become a single new humanity (Ephesians 2:13-22) and as the corporate stature the whole church grows into (Ephesians 4:13), with Andrew Lincoln, Ernest Best, and Markus Barth taking these ecclesially rather than individually. Ephesians 1:10 turns on a rare verb whose sense is itself debated, read as gathering all things up into a summary (Lincoln) or as bringing them under one head (Hoehner), but either way placing Christ at the cosmic center. A further cluster (1 Corinthians 10:4; Hebrews 11:26; 1 Peter 1:11) raises whether Christos there affirms a real existence before the incarnation, read by Hurtado, Gathercole, Thiessen, and (here) Dunn as genuine pre-existence and by Conzelmann, Fitzmyer, and Attridge as typological foreshadowing. A related question is how far Paul lets the exalted Christ and the Spirit overlap: 2 Corinthians 3:17 and Galatians 2:20 read against Romans 8:9-11 suggest a functional, not ontological, identification (Dunn; Fee resisting any collapse), which is why several read "Christ in me" as "the Spirit of Christ in me." Susan Eastman reframes the formula in relational terms, arguing the believer's very self is constituted by union with the Anointed One rather than merely influenced by it, while Grant Macaskill treats the union as covenantal, modeled on a temple in which God and his people are joined without their distinction being erased.

A separate strand of the evidence works the other way: several New Testament books outside Paul keep Christos far more openly titular. Acts narrates the apostolic preaching as a running argument that Jesus is the Anointed One, and its prayer in Acts 4:24-28 quotes Psalm 2's "against the Lord and against his Anointed" and immediately glosses it as fulfilled in Jesus, whom God anointed; Darrell Bock's commentary reads this as Luke's programmatic Davidic-messianic argument carried through Acts. The declaration at Acts 26:23 that the Anointed One was destined to suffer opens a further and much-argued question, whether a suffering messiah was already anticipated within Jewish expectation (Hengel and N. T. Wright detect pre-Christian trajectories) or is a distinctively Christian reading worked out after the cross from Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, and Daniel 9 (Fitzmyer, Keener, Hooker). Revelation uses the word only seven times, but mostly at climactic enthronement moments that draw directly on Psalm 2's "his Anointed" (Revelation 11:15; 12:10; 20:4, 6); G. K. Beale and Richard Bauckham read Revelation's Christology throughout as shaped by Psalm 2 and Psalm 110. First John turns the plain confession "Jesus is the Anointed One" into the very line that marks who belongs to the community, with Raymond Brown and Judith Lieu identifying the opponents it excludes as those who split the human Jesus from the heavenly Christ. Set beside this evidence, the debate over Paul's usage looks less like a general fading of the title across the New Testament and more like a Pauline-specific development against an otherwise consistently titular background.