Names and titles of Jesus in the New Testament

• 1. Introduction

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  The names and titles of Jesus in the New Testament are catalogued at length in Cruden's Concordance. It was first published in 1737 and has been in print ever since. Its first index, placed after the royal dedications and the author's preface, is headed "A collection of the Names and Titles given to Jesus Christ". It lists 198 entries drawn from the Bible, and each one carries a biblical reference.

  In the New Testament itself, only two of these are true names. The rest are titles, though the line between a name and a title is open to interpretation. After the crucifixion, his early followers did not simply repeat his messages. They focused on the man himself, proclaimed him, and worked to understand and explain who he was. Giving him titles became part of that work.

  Some titles came from the Jewish setting of the age. Others were chosen to underline his mission and teaching. In time, several took on deep theological weight. Where did the name Jesus come from, and how did it change as it crossed languages? Why does one Greek word for lord appear hundreds of times? And why do some familiar titles show up in only one gospel, or only once?

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• 2. A Name Travels

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  Jesus son of Joseph, Jesus of Nazareth and Jesus the Nazarene are the English forms of how people told him apart in his own lifetime. When more precision was needed, a father's name or a place was added to his given name.

  Yehoshua is the Hebrew ancestor of the name. The Bible first uses it for one of Moses' companions, who later succeeded him as leader of the Israelites. The name is usually read as two parts. Yeho refers to YHWH, the distinctive personal name of the God of Israel. The second part comes from a Hebrew root meaning to liberate or save. Proposed translations include "YHWH saves", "YHWH is salvation" and "YHWH is my help".

  The books of Ezra, Nehemiah and Chronicles contain a shortened form, Yeshua, which refers to ten individuals. In Nehemiah 8:17 it names Joshua son of Nun. The shortening may reflect a weakening of guttural sounds, including the h. Later, Aramaic and Greek-speaking Jews also adopted the name.

  By the 3rd century BCE, the Septuagint had rendered Yeshua into Koine Greek as Iesous. Greek had no sound matching the Semitic shin, so a sigma took its place. A masculine ending in s was added so the name could take case endings. The Greek writings of Philo of Alexandria and Josephus mention the name often. In Acts 7:45 and Hebrews 4:8, it still refers to Joshua son of Nun.

  Latin took the name over at least by the time of the Vetus Latina, writing it IESVS. It stayed that way for many centuries. Lowercase letters arrived around 800 AD, and the letters U and J were invented later to separate vowel sounds from consonant sounds. Before Greek lowercase letters appeared, the name was written in capitals as ΙΗϹΟΥϹ, or abbreviated as ΙΗϹ with a line over the top.

  Modern English Jesus descends from Early Middle English Iesu, attested from the 12th century. The name took part in the Great Vowel Shift in the 15th century. The Frenchman Pierre Ramus first set J apart from I in the 16th century, but J was not common in English until the 17th. That is why the first edition of the King James Version, in 1611, still printed the name with an I.

  The form Jesu outlived ordinary speech by surviving in hymns and poetry. It appears in the English wording of Johann Sebastian Bach's cantata, Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, by poet laureate Robert Bridges. It also appears in T. S. Colvin's hymn Jesu, Jesu, fill us with your love, which is based on a song from northern Ghana. In the late 19th century, some churches began updating Jesu to Jesus in their hymns. Editors then hit trouble wherever the meter allowed only two syllables for Jesu's.

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• 3. The Weight of a Name

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  In Matthew 1:21, an angel tells Joseph to call the child Jesus, because "he will save his people from their sins". In Luke 1:31, an angel gives Mary the same instruction. Christian theology reads the Matthew verse as tying salvation directly to the name. Matthew's birth account spends more attention on the child's name and what it means than on the birth itself.

  Saint Paul describes the reverence owed to the name in Philippians 2:10: "That in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth". In John 16:23, Jesus says: "If you ask the Father anything in my name he will give it you." That is why many Christian prayers end with the words "Through Our Lord Jesus Christ". Many Christians believe the name is more than a set of identifying symbols and carries intrinsic divine power. Devotions and feasts for the Holy Name of Jesus exist in both Eastern and Western Christianity. They extend to the IHS monogram, which comes from the Greek spelling ΙΗΣΟΥΣ.

  The second name belongs to Matthew alone. Matthew 1:23 reads "they shall call his name Emmanuel", quoting Isaiah 7:14. The name means "God is with us" and joins two Hebrew words, El for God and Immanu for with us. It appears nowhere else in the New Testament.

  Some interpreters see this verse as the key to an Emmanuel theme in Matthew, developed at important points through the gospel. The Gospel's final promise, in Matthew 28:20, echoes it: "I am with you always, even unto the end of the world". Ulrich Luz argues that this motif brackets the whole Gospel between 1:23 and 28:20.

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• 4. Anointed and Lord

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  The word Christ began as a job description. It comes from the Greek Christos, by way of the Latin Christus, and means anointed one. Christos is a loan translation of the Hebrew mashiah and the Aramaic mshiha, the roots of the English word messiah. Today Christ sounds like a surname, but it was originally a title, and in the phrase "Christ Jesus" it still works as one. The Septuagint, translated over a century before Jesus, already used Christos for mashiach.

  In Matthew 16:16, Peter declares "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God", a line Christians have treasured since the first century. In John 11:27, Martha tells Jesus "you are the Christ" just before the raising of Lazarus. In Paul's letters the word needs no defense. Paul uses it with no confusion about who is meant, and speaks of followers as "in Christ" in First Corinthians 4:15 and Romans 12:5.

  The New Testament records no formal anointing of Jesus with oil. Christological thought instead reads his baptism in water by John the Baptist, in Matthew 3:16, as a metaphorical anointing in light of Isaiah 61:1. His followers soon became known as Christians, from the same title. They also made a symbol from the first two Greek letters of Christos, chi and rho, superimposed to form chi rho.

  Kyrios, the Greek word for lord, appears 775 times in the New Testament in reference to Jesus. It can mean God, lord or master. In everyday Aramaic, Mari was a very respectful address, well above Teacher and similar to Rabbi. Mari captured the bond between Jesus and his disciples during his life, while Kyrios grew to express his lordship over the world.

  Paul held that confessing aloud that Jesus is Lord signifies salvation, in Romans 10:9-13. The Acts of the Apostles uses Kyrios frequently, showing how natural it felt. The title remained the dominant picture of Jesus among Christians for a number of centuries. Early Christians put it at the center of their thinking, and the question of the deity of Christ is tied to it. They reasoned that if Christ is one with God, he must have been united with God from the very beginning. The Greek still sounds in liturgy in the Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, where Jesus is called Lord in one line and Christ in the next.

  Luke prefers a different word. Epistates, meaning Master, appears six times and only in Luke's gospel. Robert O'Toole argues it relates to Jesus' power over the material world rather than to his teaching. Some commentators see Peter move in Luke 5 from calling Jesus Master in verse 5 to calling him Lord in verse 8.

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• 5. Word and Sons

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  John 1:1-18 gives Jesus the title Logos, which English translations usually render as the Word. It appears in this sense only at the start of John's Gospel, then in two other passages: 1 John 1:1 and Revelation 19:13. The opening statements build step by step. That the Word existed "at the beginning" makes Jesus eternal like God. That the Word was "with God" keeps him distinct from God. That the Word "was God" states his unity with the Father.

  In 1 John 1:1, the Word of life arrives from the beginning, and 1 John 5:6 builds on this with the water and blood of the incarnation. As early as the 2nd century, the title fed a debate between the Alexandrian and Antiochian schools over how the human and divine elements interact in Christ. After the First Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the Logos and the second person of the Trinity were often used interchangeably.

  Rulers have long claimed a family bond with the divine, from the Western Zhou dynasty in China, around 1000 B.C., to Alexander the Great in Greece. In the time of Jesus, the Roman emperor Augustus played on the likeness between Divi filius and Dei filius, meaning Son of the Divine One and Son of God. He used the ambiguous inscription "DF" to stress the divine side of his image. J. D. Crossan argues that early Christians adopted the title.

  Mark's Gospel opens by calling Jesus the Son of God. A voice from Heaven twice calls him "my beloved Son". In Matthew 14:33, the disciples exclaim "You really are the Son of God!" after Jesus walks on water. In Matthew 27:54, a Roman commander says "He was surely the Son of God!" after the earthquake that follows the Crucifixion. When Peter says in Matthew 16:15-16 that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, Jesus calls him blessed and describes the confession as a divine revelation.

  Jesus claims the relationship himself by speaking of "my Father", as in Matthew 11:27, John 5:23 and John 5:26. In Luke 2:49, the young Jesus found in the temple calls it "my Father's house". The Apostles' Creed keeps two kinds of fatherhood apart. It begins with belief in the "Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth", and then separately in "Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord".

  The title Son of man appears in all four gospels, thirty times in Matthew alone. Unlike Son of God, it has never been an article of faith in a Christian creed. Modern researchers sort its uses in the Synoptic gospels into three groups: his coming, his suffering, and his work in the present. In Mark 14:61, the high priest asks at the Sanhedrin trial whether Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Blessed. Jesus answers that he is, and that people will see the Son of man "sitting at the right hand of Power". In John 5:27, the Son of man holds the power to judge.

  In the 5th century, Saint Augustine wrote: "Since he is the only Son of God by nature, he became also the Son of Man that he might be full of grace as well." Geza Vermes has argued that the phrase comes from the Aramaic bar nash or bar nasha. In extant Aramaic sources it means man in general, or serves as an indefinite pronoun, or lets a speaker refer to himself modestly in the third person. In none of those texts, he concludes, is it a title.

  Daniel 7:13-14 describes "one like a son of man" who comes with the clouds of heaven to the Ancient of Days and receives dominion. The vision is set in the time of a "fourth kingdom on earth" in Daniel 7:23, which the most traditional view identifies with Rome. The Christian Churches, established under that Roman system, came to identify the Son of man of Daniel 7 as Jesus.

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• 6. Royal Claims

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  Matthew 1:1 uses "Son of David" to open both the genealogy and the gospel. The title points to Jesus' descent from King David and to his place in the line of Davidic kings. Its roots lie in 2 Samuel 7:11-16, where God promises David through the prophet Nathan that an offspring will build a house for God's name and that his throne will last forever.

  Paul ties the promise to Jesus in Romans 1, writing that the Son was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead. In the Book of Revelation, Jesus calls himself "the Root and the Offspring of David".

  Matthew keeps returning to the title. Blind men healed in Galilee cry "Have mercy on us, Son of David". A Canaanite woman whose daughter is exorcised calls out "Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me". The blind men near Jericho use almost the same words. When Jesus enters Jerusalem, the crowds shout "Hosanna to the Son of David" in Matthew 21:9. Anglican Bishop Charles Ellicott called it "the most popular of all the names of the expected Christ". The genealogies of Matthew and Luke also call Jesus the Son of Joseph.

  The New Testament uses "King of the Jews" at the beginning and at the end of Jesus' life, and each time it brings drama. In Matthew's Nativity account, the Magi from the east use the title, and King Herod answers by ordering the Massacre of the Innocents. In the Passion accounts of all four canonical gospels, the title leads to the charges that result in the Crucifixion.

  Only gentiles use it: the Magi, Pontius Pilate and the Roman soldiers. The Jewish leaders in the Passion accounts prefer "King of Israel", as in Matthew 27:42 and Mark 15:32. The word king carried weight with Rome. In John 19:12, Pilate tries to release Jesus, but the crowd objects: "If thou release this man, thou art not Caesar's friend". Taking the title of king implied rebellion against the Roman Empire.

  The last use comes in Luke 23:36-37. The soldiers see Jesus nailed to the cross, offer him vinegar, and mock him: "If thou art the King of the Jews, save thyself."

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• 7. Lamb, Adam and Light

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  On two successive days in John 1:29 and 1:36, John the Baptist calls Jesus the Lamb of God. His first words are "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world." The second time, two men who will become the first apostles hear him. They follow Jesus, address him as Rabbi, and later bring others to meet him.

  These cries frame another declaration by the Baptist in John 1:34, "I have borne witness that this is the Son of God". The descent of the Holy Spirit as a dove in John 1:32 supports it. The Lamb title opens the theme of a redemptive, sacrificial death followed by resurrection. The Samaritans echo it in John 4:42 when they call him the Saviour of the world.

  The Book of Revelation has over twenty references to a lion-like lamb, "slain but standing". In Revelation 5:1-7, only this lamb is found worthy to take the judgment scroll from God and break its seals. In 375, Saint Augustine explained the pairing: "Why a lamb in his passion? For he underwent death without being guilty of any inequity. Why a lion in his resurrection? For in being slain, he slew death." The Agnus Dei, "Lamb of God who take away the sins of the world have mercy on us", is still used in liturgy and as a contemplative prayer.

  In 1 Corinthians 15:45, Paul sets Jesus beside the first man, calling him the second and last Adam. Adam, in Paul's picture, corrupted himself by disobedience and passed a curse on to humanity. The new man born in Jesus obeys God. Romans 5:18-21 draws the contrast: "so one man's act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all."

  The 2nd century Church Father Irenaeus carried the idea forward. He wrote that what was lost in Adam, being according to the image and likeness of God, might be recovered in Christ Jesus. He also called the Virgin Mary the second Eve, who set a path of obedience for the second Adam from the Annunciation to Calvary. Ephrem the Syrian took up the theme in the 4th century, and Augustine added the idea of the felix culpa, the happy fall. In the 16th century, John Calvin counted the birth of Jesus as the second Adam among six modes of atonement.

  John alone records the title Light of the World, though the New Testament calls Jesus a light in seven instances. In John 8:12, he says: "I am the light of the world: he who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." He repeats it in John 9:5, during the healing of a man blind from birth, and John 9:39 explains that he came so the blind may see. The same Gospel records "Bread of Life" in John 6:35, shortly after he feeds the crowds with five loaves and two fish. It also records "Life of the World" in John 6:51. 1 John 1:5 applies the same contrast to God: "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." In Matthew 5:14, Jesus gives the phrase Light of the World to his disciples.

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• 8. Teacher, Prophet and Comforter

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  In John 20:16, Mary Magdalene meets Jesus shortly after the Resurrection and calls him Rabbouni. John translates it as teacher. The only other person to use that form is the blind man Bartimaeus in Mark 10:51. The related title Rabbi appears more often in John than elsewhere and never in Luke. At the Last Supper in Matthew 26, the other apostles answer the news of a betrayal with "Lord", while Judas Iscariot says "Surely it is not I, Rabbi". He uses Rabbi again at the Kiss of Judas in Matthew 26:49. Nathanael, by contrast, uses Rabbi and Son of God in the same sentence in John 1:49.

  In Matthew 23:1-8, Jesus rejects the title for his disciples, saying "But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your teacher, and all ye are brethren". He is criticizing Pharisees who sit on the seat of Moses and treat the title as a sign of authority. The Talmudic scholar Sherira Gaon, who lived from about 906 CE to about 1006 CE, wrote that the title Rabbi did not exist until at least 50 CE. On that view, the New Testament references to rabbi are anachronisms.

  Some terms common in later Christian tradition are rare in the text itself. The exact word Savior appears only once, spoken by the Samaritans in John 4:42. The title Nazarene has also been used to designate Christians in Syriac and Arabic traditions. Luke uses the title Chosen one twice. Rulers mock Jesus with it in Luke 23:35, and it appears again at the Transfiguration in Luke 9:35. James R. Edwards notes that 1 Enoch uses the phrase repeatedly, but Jewish thinking linked it with triumph and glory rather than suffering.

  Thomas Aquinas studied the names closely. He considered the phrase "I am" from John 8:58, "Before Abraham was born, I am", to be the most proper of all divine names. He believed it referred to the being of all things. In Hebrews 3:1, Jesus is called both an Apostle and a High Priest. As Apostle he represents God to humanity, and as High Priest he represents humanity to God.

  Luke presents Jesus as a prophet above all, using the word more often than Mark does. In Luke 4:24, after his hometown rejects him, Jesus says a prophet is not welcome there. Luke 7:39 records further doubt that he is a prophet. The view of him as prophet contributes to the threefold office of Prophet, Priest and King. No records exist of anyone else claiming to be a prophet during his lifetime.

  On the night before the Crucifixion, in the farewell discourse at the Last Supper, Jesus says in John 14:16 that he will ask the Father to send "another" paraclete, meaning comforter. The word appears only in Johannine literature, four times in the Gospel of John and in 1 John 2:1, where Jesus himself is the paraclete. The second paraclete links his ministry to the later life of the Church.

  Some titles belong to Revelation alone. Revelation 19:11 calls him "Faithful and True", and Revelation 22:13 calls him the "Alpha and Omega". The last chapter also gives the title that closes the New Testament's catalogue of names, the "Morning Star" in Revelation 22:16.

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