Book of Mormon Questions #3 (anachronism)

To see the context for this and other questions in this series, please see the introduction, parts 1, 2, 3, and 4. 

What Is the Name Jesus Christ Doing in the Book of Mormon?

This post is a revision and extension of an earlier post, repurposed for this series of questions about the Book of Mormon. It is the result of some research I was doing in my editing of an article for BYU Studies. In the course of looking into the “name” Jesus Christ, I came upon an interesting blog post¹ by Dr. B. Brandon Scott, the Darbeth Distinguished Professor of New Testament Emeritus at the Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

With all the emphasis on using the full name of the Church because it includes the name of the Savior, we sometimes forget that Jesus’s name was not Jesus Christ. Jesus (Yeshua) is the only name he went by during his lifetime. He was often referred to by various titles or descriptors, the most common being probably “the Christ,” as in Matthew 16:16, where Peter, in response to Jesus’s question “Whom say ye that I am?” declared, “Thou art the Christ.”

“Christ” has a fascinating history, though, which Dr. Scott traces briefly in his blog post. “The Greek word ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ (CHRISTOS) translates the Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ, (māšīyaḥ), anglicized as Messiah, which means ‘anointed with oil.’ Hebrew kings, prophets, and priests were anointed with oil. Messiah became a word for ‘the king,’ and in later Hebrew traditions it designated the king to come who will save conquered Israel.” So, our English words Messiah and Christ are synonymous, both referring to one who has been anointed with oil.

Dr. Scott goes on to explain, “In Greek christos means ‘oil’ or ‘oiled’ or ‘covered in oil.’ Anointing in the Greek world was associated with bathing and athletics, not kings.” Which makes CHRISTOS an unusual choice as a Greek translation for the Hebrew term referring to the anointing of kings and prophets. Scott claims that without understanding Judaism, non-Jewish converts would therefore have regarded Paul’s use of the Greek term as mostly nonsensical.

The designation stuck, though, and when the term moved to Latin in the early church, “the translators decided not to translate christos, but to transliterate it as Christus, indicating they think it is a proper name or title. Translation involves finding a word in the target language with the same or similar meaning as the originating language. Transliteration involves transposing the letters of the original into the corresponding letters of the target language.” This results in a new term in the target language, one that has no real meaning other than what has been assigned it.

An example might be the German automobile name Volkswagen. We all know what a Volkswagen is, but the name means nothing to those who do not speak German. Having served a mission in Germany and having graduated with a degree in what Mark Twain called “the awful German language,” I know that Volkswagen is more than a company name. It means “people’s carriage (or coach).” And if you understand the company’s origin, you also know it was founded by the government of Germany in 1937. In other words, it was Hitler’s effort to produce a “people’s car.” But to most Americans, Volkswagen is just a name, like Porsche or Audi.

The Latin transliteration Christus was then transliterated into other languages, such as the English Christ. We now use this term as if it were a surname, and most people don’t understand either that it is a title or what that title means.

Ironically, if we look at the original name of the LDS Church when it was founded in 1830, the name of the Church did not include the name of the Savior at all. D&C 20:1 reads: The rise of the Church of Christ in these latter days . . .” And so it was known for the first four years. Then, in 1834, a conference of elders, presided over by Joseph Smith, changed the name to the Church of the Latter Day Saints, removing even Jesus’s title from the name.

This was apparently unsatisfactory, however, for Joseph and other Church leaders began using a combination of the 1830 name and the 1834 name: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” Finally, on April 26, 1838, Joseph received a revelation in which the Lord specified the name of the Church. The editors of the Joseph Smith Papers put it this way: “The [April 26, 1838] revelation sanctioned the name of the church that JS [Joseph Smith] and others had recently begun to use: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.”² The hyphen and lowercase “d” came later. For a thorough history of the development of the name of the Church, please see the Shane Goodwin article we published in BYU Studies Quarterly in 2019.³

As with pretty much everything in life, this name issue is more complicated than it appears at first glance. But what about the appearance of “Jesus Christ” in the Book of Mormon? The first instance of the Savior’s “name” comes from Nephi’s brother Jacob more than 500 years before Jesus was born. He says “that Christ—for last night the angel spake unto me that this should be his name—should come among the Jews” (2 Ne. 10:3). This is rather problematic on several levels. This statement is either anachronistic or it tells us something about the translation process (or both).

Jesus is referred to by Nephi as the Messiah (the Anointed) in the very first chapter of the book (1 Ne. 1:19) and several other times before Jacob declares that the Messiah’s name will be Christ (the Anointed). The angel does not tell Jacob that the Redeemer will be called Christ; he says that his name will be Christ. But Jesus’s name would not be Christ for many centuries after Jacob lived, and it would first have to travel through Greek translation and Latin transliteration before becoming that name. I find it odd that the angel would not tell Jacob that the Savior’s name would be Jesus Christ. No, it is just Christ, which is not a name at all. It is a title or descriptor.

But a few chapters later, in 2 Nephi 26:12, Nephi uses the name “Jesus” for the first time in the Book of Mormon, without any sort of antecedent. It just appears out of nowhere: “And as I spake concerning the convincing of the Jews, that Jesus is the very Christ, it must needs be that the Gentiles be convinced also that Jesus is the Christ, the Eternal God.”

The first instance of the name Jesus Christ appearing in Mormon’s abridgement of the large plates of Nephi comes near the beginning of Mosiah, in King Benjamin’s great address: “But wo, wo unto him who knoweth that he rebelleth against God! For salvation cometh to none such except it be through repentance and faith on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Mosiah 3:12).

The name appears a couple of times in the book of Alma, but its most significant appearance comes from the mouth of Jesus himself when he appears to the people at the temple in Bountiful: “Behold, I am Jesus Christ, the Son of God. I created the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are” (3 Ne. 9:15). Why, we might ask, does Jesus introduce himself shortly after his death with a transliteration of a Greek title that will not be recognized as a name until that title is transferred into Latin (and later into English)?

One answer is that whoever was doing the translating from the ancient Nephite language (some corrupted form of reformed Egyptian?) simply used the transliteration rather than to translate directly what we assume the Savior may have said: I am Jesus the Anointed One. Another answer is that the “translator” simply added a lot of material (Skousen’s “creative and cultural translation”) that wasn’t in the text on the plates at all. We simply can’t know. All we can conclude is that “Jesus Christ” or even just “Christ” as a name is an anachronism in either the sixth century BC or in the first century AD. Regardless, the term Jesus Christ is used sporadically throughout the Book of Mormon as a name.

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1. B. Brandon Scott, The Origin of the Word “Christ,” https://earlychristiantexts.com/the-origin-of-the-word-christ/.

2. “Journal, March–September 1838,” in Journals, Volume 1: 1832–1839, ed. Dean C. Jessee and others, Joseph Smith Papers (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2008), 230, accessed July 19, 2019, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-march-september-1838/18/#historical-intro.

3. K. Shane Goodwin, “The History of the Name of the Savior’s Church: A Collaborative and Revelatory Process,” BYU Studies Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2019): 4–41.