And in Jesus Christ

The Text

Two words, but the entire Christian confession turns on them. Jesus is a personal name — the name of a particular first-century Galilean Jew. Christ is a messianic title — the Hebrew Mashiach, the Anointed One promised throughout Israel’s scriptures. To put the two together is to make the central Christian claim in the smallest possible space: this man is the Messiah. Every other clause of the second article unpacks what that means.

Translation Notes

Iēsous / Iesum / Jesus. The Greek Iēsous is a transliteration of the Hebrew name Yēšûaʿ (Joshua), a shortened form of Yəhôšûaʿ — “the LORD saves.” Matthew makes the etymology explicit at the annunciation to Joseph: “you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). The name is not a unique theological coinage; it was a common Jewish name in the first century, the same name as Joshua son of Nun who led Israel into the promised land. The Greek and Latin forms have obscured for English readers what would have been obvious to a first-century hearer: Jesus of Nazareth and Joshua of Numbers and Deuteronomy bear the same name. The salvation Joshua typified, Jesus accomplishes.

Christos / Christ. A title, not a name. Christos is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Mashiach — the Anointed One. In the Hebrew Bible, anointing marked the consecration of kings (1 Sam. 16:13), priests (Exod. 28:41), and occasionally prophets (1 Kings 19:16). To call Jesus Christos is to confess that he fulfills all three offices — prophet, priest, and king — and that he is the Anointed One Israel had been awaiting.

This is worth saying directly: “Christ” was not Jesus’ last name. Patronymics and family names of the modern type were not in use in first-century Palestine, and Christos was added as a title — “Jesus the Christ,” “Jesus the Messiah.” Over time it merged into the proper name, and the title became invisible to common readers. The creed’s “Jesus Christ” should be heard with the title still operative: the personal name and the messianic claim.

The two words together amount to a sentence: Jesus is the Messiah. The creed’s opening of the second article is not a name; it is a confession.

Historical Context

The combination Iēsous Christos is the earliest Christian confession. It appears in the New Testament more than two hundred times. Paul writes the formula in his earliest letters (1 Thess. 1:1, c. 50 AD) without explanation — it is already settled by the time he is corresponding with Greek congregations. Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi — “You are the Christ” (Mark 8:29) — is, in the Gospels’ own framing, the hinge on which everything turns.

The polemical edge of the confession in the first century was sharp on two sides at once. Against fellow Jews who did not identify Jesus as the awaited Messiah, the Christian movement insisted that the carpenter from Nazareth who had been executed by the Romans was the One the prophets had foretold. Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho (c. 160) is the most extensive surviving early Christian argument on this front. Against the Greco-Roman world, which used christos in non-messianic senses (e.g., for ordinary anointing), the early Christians insisted that the title carried its full Hebrew freight: this was the Anointed, the King in the line of David, the eschatological deliverer.

The baptismal interrogations of the early church (Hippolytus’s Apostolic Tradition) preserved this confession at the entry point of Christian life: Do you believe in Christ Jesus, the Son of God? The candidate’s “I believe,” answered with a second immersion, made entry into the church explicitly an identification of Jesus as the Christ.

The second article begins, therefore, with the heart of the gospel. Everything else — the conception, the birth, the suffering, the death, the descent, the resurrection, the ascension, the session, the return — is commentary on what it means that this Jesus is the Christ.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho; Irenaeus, Against Heresies III–IV

The patristic reading insists on the continuity of the Christ confession with the Hebrew scriptures. Jesus is the Christ because he fulfills what the prophets foretold — not in the bare sense of a prediction-fulfillment match, but in the larger sense that the whole shape of Israel’s history — covenant, kingship, priesthood, prophetic mission, exile, return — comes to its purpose in him. Justin’s Dialogue lays this out at length, working through one Old Testament text after another.

Strengths

• Holds the two testaments together as one story; refuses Marcion’s split
• Anchors christology in Israel’s history rather than in Greek metaphysics

Weaknesses

• The argument-from-prophecy method, taken too rigidly, can produce strained readings of Hebrew texts the original authors did not have Jesus in mind for
• Patristic anti-Jewish polemic, present in some of these texts, has caused real historical harm and needs to be named when it is present

Scholastic

Tradition: Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 37 (on the names of Christ); III, q. 22 (on the priesthood of Christ); III, qq. 31–34 (on the conception and birth)

Aquinas treats the names of Jesus and Christ at length. Jesus discloses his work — to save his people from their sins. Christ discloses his consecration — anointed by the Holy Spirit for the threefold office. The two names function together: Jesus names what he does; Christ names how he is empowered to do it.

Strengths

• Precise theological vocabulary for the relation between Jesus’ personhood and his work
• The threefold-office framework (prophet, priest, king) becomes a powerful interpretive tool for the rest of christology

Weaknesses

• The treatment can drift toward technical questions (e.g., the moment at which Christ’s soul received the beatific vision) that have limited pastoral cash value
• Aquinas’s medieval framework requires translation for contemporary use

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes II.15 (“To know the purpose for which Christ was sent by the Father, and what he conferred upon us, we must look above all at three things in him: the prophetic office, kingship, and priesthood”)

Calvin systematizes the patristic and scholastic threefold-office tradition into one of the most influential frameworks in Protestant theology. Christ — the Anointed — is Anointed for these three offices, and the work of redemption is accomplished through them. Christ as Prophet teaches; Christ as Priest sacrifices and intercedes; Christ as King rules and protects. The Heidelberg Catechism (Q.31) catechizes the framework. The Westminster Shorter Catechism (Q.23–26) extends it.

Strengths

• Gives a clear structure for relating christology to the church’s preaching, sacraments, and discipline
• Provides one of the cleanest entry points into “what is Jesus doing now?”

Weaknesses

• The threefold structure, however clarifying, is a theological construction not made explicit in scripture; some have argued for a fourfold structure (adding judge) or a richer framework
• Calvin’s heavy emphasis on the offices can underweight the personal/relational dimension that other traditions emphasize

Modern — Quests for the Historical Jesus

Tradition: Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906); Ernst Käsemann (“the new quest,” 1953); N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (1996, “the third quest”)

The 19th and 20th centuries produced a sustained scholarly attempt to recover the historical Jesus apart from the dogmatic Christ of the creeds. Schweitzer’s survey of the 19th-century quest demolished it: each scholar, he showed, had produced a Jesus who looked suspiciously like himself. The “new quest” (Käsemann and others, mid-20th c.) tried again with more historical-critical discipline. The “third quest” (Wright, Sanders, Meier) returned to a more thoroughly Jewish Jesus, situating him in late Second Temple Judaism rather than in the categories of post-Enlightenment German Protestantism.

Strengths

• The third quest in particular has recovered the deeply Jewish texture of Jesus’ ministry — the kingdom of God, the messianic claim, the eschatological tension
• Honest about the difficulty of any reconstruction; honest about the limits of the sources

Weaknesses

• Schweitzer’s caution remains alive: the Jesus the historian reconstructs tends to resemble the historian
• A purely historical Jesus, abstracted from the church’s confession, cannot bear the weight the gospel places on him; the creed is not satisfied with a great teacher or a misunderstood prophet

Liberation

Tradition: Jon Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator; Leonardo Boff, Jesus Christ Liberator

Liberation christology reads Christos through its messianic-political register. The Anointed One announces, in his first sermon, “good news to the poor… release to the captives… freedom for the oppressed” (Luke 4:18). Sobrino and Boff argue that to confess Jesus as the Christ is to identify with his mission to those at the bottom; christology and ethics are inseparable.

Strengths

• Recovers the full messianic claim — Christos meant something concrete in first-century Palestine, and the creed assumes that meaning
• Refuses the depoliticized Christ of pietistic Protestantism

Weaknesses

• Can press the political reading harder than the patristic tradition would sustain, especially when it underweights the eschatological dimension
• Risks reducing the Christ to his social-political function, losing the trinitarian and ontological depth of the confession

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley’s treatment of the names Jesus and Christ is concentrated in his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament and in the language of his hymns and sermons rather than in any sustained doctrinal treatise. The pattern is clear: Wesley receives the threefold-office tradition (he was deeply read in Calvin and the Anglican divines) and warms it into a personal-relational register.

In his Notes on Matthew 1:21, Wesley writes on Jesus: “He shall save his people from their sins; from all their sins, original and actual, past, present, and to come; and from all the punishment, guilt, and power of them.” The work of salvation Wesley sees in the name itself — Jesus is named what he is to do. In the Notes on John 1:41 (“We have found the Messiah”), Wesley glosses Christ directly: “the anointed; anointed with the Holy Ghost… to the Prophetic, Priestly, and Regal office.” Wesley does not need to argue for the threefold office; he assumes it.

Where Wesley is distinctive is in the pastoral warmth he brings to the name Jesus itself. His sermons return again and again to the simple repetition of the name — not as a magical formula but as the name of the one with whom the believer has a real, ongoing, life-transforming relationship. Wesley’s high doctrine of assurance — that the Spirit witnesses to the believer’s spirit that they are a child of God — rests on this personal knowledge of Jesus.

The practical Wesleyan posture: confess “Jesus Christ” with both freight — the personal name of the one we know, and the messianic title of the one we follow.

Hymnody

The Wesleyan hymnic treatment of Jesus Christ is so rich it sets the English-speaking standard.

“O for a thousand tongues to sing / My great Redeemer’s praise” (Charles, 1739) is the opening hymn of the 1780 Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists and is, by general consensus, the doctrinal opening of the Wesleyan hymnal. Its second stanza names the name: “Jesus! the name that charms our fears, / That bids our sorrows cease; / ‘Tis music in the sinner’s ears, / ‘Tis life, and health, and peace.” The name itself does work; the verse celebrates the work the name does.

“Jesus, lover of my soul” (Charles, 1740) is Charles’s most enduring single-name hymn. The address is direct — Jesus, lover of my soul — and the whole hymn rests on a personal-relational confession that the name makes possible.

“Jesus! the name high over all” (Charles, 1749) places the name at the doctrinal center: “The name to sinners dear, / The name to sinners given; / It scatters all their guilty fear, / It turns their hell to heaven.”

The 1780 Collection’s opening section, “Exhorting and Beseeching to Return to God,” is dense with Jesus-name hymns. Methodists historically have not had a thin christology; they have had a christology carried by hymnody more than by treatises, and the hymns do serious doctrinal work.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

Visual images of Jesus across two thousand years of Christian history display a striking pattern: in almost every culture where the gospel has been received, Jesus has been painted to look like the people who received him. There are Ethiopian Jesuses with brown skin, Korean Jesuses with east-Asian features, medieval European Jesuses with northern hair and beard. The phenomenon is theologically rich — the incarnation reaches into every culture — but it is also a temptation. As Albert Schweitzer observed in The Quest of the Historical Jesus a century ago: when scholars went looking for the historical Jesus, each one tended to find a face that looked a lot like his own.

The most reproduced portrait of Jesus in the English-speaking world is Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ (1940) — soft-featured, light-haired, blue-eyed, comprehensively unlike a first-century Galilean Jew. A conservative tends to find a conservative Jesus. A liberal finds a liberal Jesus. A radical finds a radical Jesus. To follow the Jesus of the creed, however, is not to make him more like us; it is to be slowly made more like him.

The creed’s Jesus Christ is, in this respect, a discipline. Jesus — a Jewish name, a Galilean carpenter’s son, an itinerant teacher executed by the Roman state. Christ — the Anointed One of Israel, the Son of God, the Lord of all the nations. Both names belong to him at once. To strip either one — to keep the title without the historical man, or to keep the historical man without the title — is to confess someone other than the One the creed names.

How is this knowledge gained? The creed assumes that no one comes to confess Jesus is the Christ by argument alone. Natural theology can carry the believer a certain distance — that there is a God, that what is rests on a Creator, that the universe is not self-explanatory — but the move from a general awareness of divinity to the particular confession that this Galilean carpenter is the Christ of God is, in the New Testament’s own framing, a disclosure. The Greek word is mysterion — translated into Latin as sacramentum — and it does not mean what English “mystery” has come to mean. A mysterion is not something hidden from us; it is something disclosed to us, revealed, unveiled. Jesus’ identity as the Christ is a mysterion — given by the Spirit, received in the gathered worship of the church, sealed in baptism, deepened over a lifetime of following.

For pastors: the line gives the church its first and most consequential confession. The whole of the second article — and, with it, the gospel — rests on whether the congregation can say these two words and mean them. To say them well is to refuse every Jesus made in our own image; to receive the Jesus given to us in the gospels, in the church’s reading of the scriptures, in the sacraments, in the company of the saints. To say them well is also, eventually, to find that one has been claimed by them — that the name Jesus, in the believer’s life, is no longer a name in a book but the name of the one who has called us by our own name and said: follow me.

Further Reading

• Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho — the most extensive early Christian argument for Jesus as the Messiah of Israel
• Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies III–IV — christology rooted in the unity of the two testaments
• Athanasius, On the Incarnation — christology in its classical form
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 37 (the names of Christ); III, q. 22 (the priesthood of Christ)
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.15 — the threefold office of Christ
• Heidelberg Catechism Q. 29–32
• John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament on Matthew 1:21 and John 1:41
• John Wesley, The Works of John Wesley, sermons on the names of Christ (Sermon 22, “Sermon on the Mount, Discourse II”; Sermon 21 on the Beatitudes)
• Charles Wesley, “O for a thousand tongues to sing” (1739); “Jesus, lover of my soul” (1740); “Jesus! the name high over all” (1749)
• A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780), opening section
• Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906; English 1910)
• N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Fortress, 1996)
• Jon Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator (Orbis, 1993)
• Leonardo Boff, Jesus Christ Liberator (Orbis, 1978)
• David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (California, 1998) — on Sallman’s Head of Christ and its cultural reception