gstafleu

It struck me the other day what a handily multi-purpose appellation "Jesus Christ" is. "Jesus" means something like "god saves," which is very close to "savior." "Christ" means anointed. Anointing was a ritual performed on candidate kings to turn them in to real kings. To make the kingship "official," in modern parlance, the king had to be anointed.

Presumably the anointing of the savior indicated by "Jesus Christ" was done by god, thus turning the savior into the, or god's, official savior. The resulting appellation, Official Savior, was quite useful. If one needed a savior one could obviously do worse than calling him such, Jesus, and by affixing the label "official", Christ, one gave the whole thing a, well, official air. We can therefore translate Jesus Christ, or Christ Jesus, into modern day English as "Official Savior," and probably be not too far off the mark.

Given this generality of the name Jesus Christ we would expect to find quite a few different Jesus Christs, different official saviors. After all, why should my official savior be identical to yours?

We are not disappointed. In the New Testament, Jesus Christs range from the simply ethereal via the more complicated mundane to the outright bizarre. The most simple and straightforward official savior is probably Paul's. His savior is just that: as savior. Believe in him and you are saved. Paul's savior doesn't have too many other attributes, perhaps not even physical presence, but he has what counts: saviorness and officialness.

A more complex but at the same time more mundane Official Saviour is what we find in the gospels. Here the savior is not some ethereal being, he is a solid human who does useful things like miracles and healings. Not to mention kicking miscreants out of the temple. The first part of the name, Jesus, was a common name in those days, and this allows the gospel Jesus Christ an interesting twist. He can play coy, using a trick more effective than Superman's glasses: as long as you don't affix the label "official" to his name people will not clue in to who he is and that he actually plans to live up to his savior name. This allows him to go about in relative anonimity until the time is there for serious savioring: being crucified and relieving all of humanity of its sins.

There seems to be a contrast here between the rather mundane savioring that comprises walking about, preaching, healing and so on, and the very serious savioring involved in being crucified and redeeming the whole of humanity in one fell swoop. I rather suspect that we see here a merging of what were initially two different Official Saviors. This merging was no doubt made easier by the generality of the appellation Official Saviour.

Finally, the appellation Jesus Christ is even robust enough to be useable in the seriously psychedelic environment of Revelations, no mean feat. All in all, Jesus Christ, Official Savior, was an excellent choice of name for anyone's savior. I suspect that, had the Catholic Church not displayed an excess of zeal in making sure that the only true faith was indeed the only one, we would find even more Jesus Christs than we already see in the New Testament.

PhilosopherJay

Hi gstafleu,

I think this is a good point about the name Jesus Christ. It appears to be quite generic, like Superman or Spiderman. I am not sure about translating the term Christ as "official." It has the baggage of being associated with a variety of products like Kodak, the official film of the Winter Olympics and Fuji the official film of the Summer Olympics. Since we do not find evidence of the term being used with other positions then kingship, official may not be appropriate. For example, there was no Christ Priest or Christ Disciple.


I think Christ or anointed one would have been closer to the single specific official position of kingship. So I think "King Savior" would actually be the better translation of Jesus Christ, at least for the early text. "King Jesus" would probably be the best later interpretation. This later translation would be more correct when the King Savior evolves into some dude named Jesus from Capernaum (Mark's Gospel).

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

gstafleu

Jay,

you are right that "official" is a bit broad, but in part that is what I was after. Just as now marketeers try to give their products special status by declaring them "official," so the people flogging their savior were trying to elevate him by declaring him annointed.

I agree that this specific form of officializing was reserved for kings, and hence was extra-exalted. But translating JC with King Savior doesn't quite work either, as we are interested in the similarity between the elevation/making-official processes, not the similarities between the offices (king and savior).

We don't really have one word in contemporary English to describe this process, although actually just "annointed" might do ("Who annointed you as the office critic?" for example).

What I was after was pointing out the genericness of the term JC, and I still suspect that "official saviour" best does that, lacking a term that is in current daily use for "official-for-very-special-people-only."

So whenever you find the term JC in some 1st-3rd century document, maybe it should not be automatically taken to refer to the same JC as in for example Mark. Take the letter of James. It is hard to figure out which JC he is talking about, as JC is just mentioned a few times in an almost parenthetical way. Wouldn't James have thrown in some relevant snappy sayings from the Markan JC if that was the one he was referring to?

Gerard

MerryAtheist

I am kind of partial to "Sanctioned Savior" myself.

gstafleu

"Sanctioned" does indeed have a nice religious ring to it. Another version I've thought of is "God-appointed Savior." The whole idea with the anointing is after all to stress that God gave his stamp of approval.

MerryAtheist

God, or the Church in God's name, in which case "Sanctioned" has a more authoritarian ring to it.

Anyway, give me a thesaurus and I'll come up any number of possibilities...