What does ‘Christ’ mean?

A word about oil

Christ is the Greek Christos, from the verb chriō, to rub with oil. It translates the Hebrew mashiach, anointed, which reached English through Greek and Latin as Messiah. The two words are one idea in two languages, and John’s Gospel translates between them for its Greek readers.

The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming, he who is called Christ. When he has come, he will declare to us all things.”

In Israel, oil on the head set a person apart for a task. Moses pours it over Aaron to make him priest (Exodus 29:7), and Leviticus calls the high priest “the anointed priest” (Leviticus 4:3). Elijah is told to anoint Elisha as a prophet (1 Kings 19:16). Above all, the anointed one was the king. Samuel pours a vial of oil on Saul’s head (1 Samuel 10:1) and later anoints David. When David finds Saul at his mercy in a cave, he will not touch him.

Yahweh forbid that I should do this thing to my lord, Yahweh’s anointed, to stretch out my hand against him, since he is Yahweh’s anointed.

The title could even go to a foreigner. Isaiah calls Cyrus, the Persian king who let the exiles of Judah go home, God’s anointed (Isaiah 45:1).

From a king to a hope

Babylon ended the line of David’s kings in 586 BC. After that the word began to point forward, to an anointed king God would one day raise from David’s family. The hopes took different shapes. The Psalms of Solomon, written after the Roman general Pompey took Jerusalem in 63 BC, pray for a son of David who will drive out the foreigners and rule in justice (Psalms of Solomon 17). The Community Rule found at Qumran waits for two anointed figures, the messiahs of Aaron and of Israel, a priest and a king (1QS 9.11). Not every Jew expected one at all. But to say “Messiah” was to say “king,” and in Roman Judaea a king was a political word.

“You are the Christ”

At Caesarea Philippi, a city named for the emperor, Jesus asks his disciples who they say he is, and Peter answers for them: “You are the Christ” (Mark 8:29). Jesus orders them to tell no one (Mark 8:30). No Gospel shows him anointed with oil as a king; the nearest thing is an unnamed woman at Bethany who breaks a jar of costly nard and pours it over his head (Mark 14:3). In Acts, Peter puts it another way: God “anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power” (Acts 10:38). And Rome crucified him under a royal charge, the King of the Jews.

From title to name

Within twenty years the title was turning into a name. In Paul’s letters, the oldest Christian writings, Jesus is “Jesus Christ,” “Christ Jesus,” or simply Christ. To Greek ears christos was no title at all, just a word for something smeared with ointment, and outsiders garbled it. Suetonius says the emperor Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome for riots stirred up by one Chrestus, a common slave name meaning useful, and many historians think he meant Christ (Life of Claudius 25.4). In Antioch the followers were first called Christians (Acts 11:26), a story told in Where were Jesus’s followers first called Christians?

Christ, then, is no surname, as What was Jesus’s real name? explains. The word still turns up everywhere: churches bless an anointing oil called chrism, and the X in Xmas is the Greek letter chi, the first letter of Christos, the same letter that heads the Chi-Rho.