Christ language in Paul and messiah language in ancient Judaism

Recent scholarship on ancient Judaism, finding only scattered references to messiahs in Hellenistic- and Roman-period texts, has generally concluded that the word "messiah" did not mean anything determinate in antiquity. Meanwhile, interpreters of Paul, faced with his several hundred uses of the Greek word for "messiah," have concluded that chirho&igr;sigmatauosigma in Paul does not bear its conventional sense. Against this curious consensus, I argue that early Jewish messiah language was flexible enough to allow Paul's idiosyncratic usage, and that any text that uses such language must be taken as evidence for its range of meaning. In other words, Christ language in Paul is actually an invaluable example of messiah language in ancient Judaism. Chapter one, a history of the question, shows how the discussion of chirho&igr;sigmatauosigma in Paul has often been a cipher for other, more urgent interpretive disputes. Chapter two traces the rise and fall of "the messianic idea" in Jewish studies and gives an alternative, social-linguistic account of early Jewish messiah language: the convention worked because there existed both an accessible pool of linguistic resources and a community of competent language users. Chapter three responds to the objection that the normal rules for understanding chirho&igr;sigmatauosigma do not apply in Paul's case because he uses the word as a proper name. In fact, chirho&igr;sigmatauosigma in Paul functions essentially as a Greek honorific, like Epiphanes or Augustus. Chapter four, a philological study of several phrases that have been taken as evidence that Paul either did or did not use chirho&igr;sigmatauosigma in its conventional sense, concludes that that question cannot be settled at the level of formal grammar. Finally, chapter five explicates nine passages in which Paul comments on how he means the word chirho&igr;sigmatauosigma, showing that all nine do all that we normally expect any text to do to count as a messiah text. In sum, Paul's Christ language relates to early Jewish messiah language not as a contrast term but as a sample.