Just a bit of trivia today from
some research I was doing this week 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.
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.”
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 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 us: 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. I’ll
have more to say about Book of Mormon implications in the future, but the fact
that Nephi’s brother Jacob declares more than 500 years before Jesus was born “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) is rather problematic on several levels. This statement is either
anachronistic or it tells us something about the translation process. That’s
all I’ll say for now, but the history of the title/name Christ raises
all sorts of significant questions.
_____________
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.
