Abstract
The apostle Paul referred to Jesus as ‘Christ’, ‘Jesus Christ’ or ‘Christ Jesus’ 269 times in the limited corpus of his seven undisputed letters, more than any other word for Jesus by far and far more than any other ancient Jewish author ever used the term. But what did Paul mean, if anything, by calling Jesus, ‘Christ’? In answering this central question, Matthew Novenson’s well-written and methodologically sound book marks a decisive turning point in the discussion, both for what it does and does not do in calling into question one of the assured results of modern historical criticism.
Despite periodic protests of scholars such as Schweitzer, W. D. Davies, Bornkamm, Hahn, A. Y. Collins and N. T. Wright, main-line scholarship since F. C. Baur in the mid-19th century has been largely characterized by the conviction that Jesus went through a makeover at the hands of the apostle Paul. In crossing the border into the wider Hellenistic-Roman world, Paul transformed Jesus, Israel’s Jewish Messiah, into the absolute Son of God and cosmic Lord of the universe, the divine savior of the world. Along the way, he had a name change to match his change in identity. ‘Jesus, the Christ’ became ‘Jesus Christ’, in which the messianic title simply became part of Jesus’ proper name, now ‘blandly empty of messianic connotations’ (pp. 2, 13, 136). As Hengel put it in 1982, for Paul, ‘Jesus was the real proper name, “Christos” the cognomen, and “Kyrios” the title’ (quoted, p. 26). Hence, in regard to Paul’s missionary endeavors, ‘the Christian message does not hinge, at least primarily, on the claim that Jesus was or is the Messiah’ (so George MacRae; quoted, p. 65). It is this presumed transformation that is the subject of Novenson’s book.
After surveying the history of the philological question of whether Christos in Paul is a name or a title, Novenson addresses the problem of what ancient Jewish messiah language meant (chapter two), what onomastic and titular categories were available to Paul (chapter three), and what Paul’s own use of Christos indicates about its meaning in his letters (chapters four and five). Novenson’s goal is to set forth how Paul’s use of ‘Christ’ fits within ancient Jewish messiah language in general (p. 1) and to show how ancient Jewish messiah language itself worked, using Paul’s own writings as a ‘case study’ or ‘test case’ of its diversity (pp. 8, 176).
The consensus view regarding Paul’s use of Christos is that 1) ‘messiah’ did not have a determinative meaning in ancient Judaism, that 2) for Paul ‘Christ’ did not mean ‘messiah’, and that 3) ‘Paul, at any rate, cannot have meant whatever it is that “messiah” did not mean’ (p. 2). Novenson’s conclusion is equally straightforward: 1) though ‘messiah’ was not a reified concept in ancient Judaism, it derived its context-specific, diverse meanings from a limited range of OT texts (most frequently, Gen 49:10; Num 24:17; 2 Sam 7:12-13; Isa 11:1-2; Amos 9:11; Dan 7:13-14), all of which had in common ‘the promise … of an indigenous ruler for the Jewish people’ (pp. 57-58), 2) when Paul says Christos he means ‘messiah’, and 3) Paul’s own uses of messianic terminology, based on the Scriptures, determine what he meant by it. ‘In short, Christ language in Paul relates to messiah language in ancient Judaism not as a contrast term but as a sample’ (p. 174).
Regarding the form ‘Jesus Christ’ or ‘Christ Jesus’ itself, the name (denotation) versus title (connotation) distinction common to contemporary scholarship is more a matter of degree than of kind (p. 72). In addition, Novenson’s detailed survey of ancient naming practices and of Paul’s own use of 55 proper names argues that, rather than being either a second proper name or a title, Christos is best taken as an honorific. Honorifics were illustrious, laudatory second terms added to the titles and personal names of public figures in connection with military exploits or accession to power, such as Antiochus IV Epiphanes and Shimon bar Kokhba (pp. 87, 91-92, 95, 97). The very fact that Paul can speak interchangeably of ‘Jesus Christ’ (57xs) or ‘Christ Jesus’ (49xs) undermines the attempt to take them as proper names, since double personal names in antiquity had a fixed order (e.g., Pontius Pilate and Caesar Augustus). For the order to be reversed, ‘Christ’ must be an appellative (pp. 101-102, 134). Given Paul’s conviction that Jesus was the messiah, and given the diversity of such Christ-phrases throughout the NT, Dahl’s programmatic four objections to taking ‘Christ’ in Paul’s writings to mean ‘messiah’ are all consequently countered as an under-reading of the evidence (pp. 103-115).
Even if the linguistic and historical evidence thus leads to the probability that Paul meant ‘messiah’ when he said ‘Christ’, the decisive evidence must still come from those passages in which Paul himself ‘indicates the notion that underlies his use of the word Christos’ (p. 137). Novenson therefore offers short, exegetical summaries of nine such passages to make his case. Conforming to what we expect of early Jewish messiah language and texts in general, Novenson highlights six passages in which Paul comments on a figure called Christos in patterns of speech drawn from the Jewish ‘scriptural source texts’ in order to clarify how he intends the polysemous word ‘messiah’ to be understood (Gal 3:16; 1 Cor 15:20-28; 2 Cor 1:21-22; Rom 9:1-5; Rom 15:3, 9 and 15:7-12). He then treats three texts that scholars have often mistakenly taken to show that Paul ignores or repudiates messiahship as a theological category (1 Cor 1:23; 2 Cor 5:16-17; Rom 1:3-4). In doing so, it becomes clear that Paul derives his understanding of Jesus as Israel’s ‘Messiah’ from scriptural texts that are overwhelming associated with the house of David (e.g., 2 Sam 7:12; Ps 110:1; Isa 11:10; 2 Sam 22 = Ps 18), rather than with the Aaronic priesthood or with Daniel’s visions (though see Dan 7:27 in 1 Cor 15:24) (p. 173).
Inasmuch as the one drawback of the book is the summary-nature of its pivotal exegetical sections, students of Paul will no doubt disagree with aspects of Novenson’s interpretations in an equally summary fashion. For example, many will not follow Wedderburn’s view of the Pauline ‘in Christ’ terminology as an ‘adverbial phrase expressing the means by which the blessing comes’, rather than being a reference to incorporation into or union with Christ (pp. 125-126), or Novenson’s additional arguments for taking the ‘faith of Christ’ to refer not to faith in Christ but to the messiah’s own faithfulness (p. 133), both of which, however, I find compelling. Nonetheless, Novenson’s work marks a watershed. In a great reversal, the burden of proof now lies on the ‘religionsgechichtliche thesis that Paul actively downplays the messiah Christology of the earliest Jesus movement and advocates instead for a Gentile-accessible Kyrios Christology’ (p. 175). In fact, in yet another reversal, it is now Paul, the ‘statistical outlier’ due to the volume and density of his Christ-language, who may provide the basis of comparison for other Jewish messianic texts (p. 176)!
Finally, Novenson’s study reminds us that, at the very heart of his missionary message, Paul, like his fellow Jews, took the Scriptures as the common point of departure for his messiah language. This was no ‘small thing … it was a thing whose importance can hardly be overstated. Indeed, the scriptures are one of a very few things that any ancient Jews shared in common with all other ancient Jews’ (p. 178). And so, Novenson’s study leaves us with the task of determining exegetically the specific contours of Paul’s Jewish messianism as he developed it through his own ‘‘creatively biblical’ linguistic act’ (p. 62, quoting Stuckenbruck) ‘from the linguistic resources available to him’ in the Scriptures (pp. 176, 178). For in Novenson’s words, ‘if one cul-de-sac is closed off … many other avenues for research are opened up’ (p. 175).