Christ among the MessiahsChrist Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism

Abstract

This book undertakes to resolve an anomaly in two intersecting fields of research. Recent scholarship on early Judaism, finding only a few diverse references to messiahs in ancient texts, has concluded that the word “messiah” did not mean anything determinate in antiquity. Meanwhile, interpreters of the apostle Paul, faced with his several hundred uses of the same word, have concluded that in Paul it does not carry its conventional sense. The present study argues that early Jewish messiah language was flexible enough to allow Paul’s idiosyncratic usage, and that any text that uses such language must be taken as evidence for its range of meaning. The discussion of Pauline christology has tended to use the “Christ” question as a cipher for more urgent interpretive disputes, while the discussion of early Jewish messianism has been hampered by an idealist account of religious language. On a social-linguistic model, however, a number of problems begin to find resolution. “Christ” in Paul functions neither as a name nor as a title but rather as an honorific. Paul’s several well known set phrases (e.g., “in Christ”) do not resolve the question how he means “Christ,” but in a number of passages, Paul clarifies his meaning in the same manner that other contemporary messiah texts do, by citing or alluding to particular scriptural source texts. Christ language in Paul turns out to be not a foil for early Jewish messianism, but an example of it.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 102 citations exist upstream.