Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§15.2 Who Did They Think Jesus Was?
the only testimony we have comes from or through those who responded positively
to Jesus' mission. But Jesus' mission as so far described was bound to provoke
those who heard his preaching and witnessed what he did to ask 'Who is
this?' Who was this Galilean Jew who proclaimed the kingship of God soon to be
fully realized, who called to committed discipleship, and who debated so effectively
with Pharisees from Jerusalem? The question is recalled sufficiently often
within the Jesus tradition for us to be confident that it was posed in one form or
another at least at various junctures during his mission. 8 More to the point, there
were several role models or categorizations which his audiences could use to
make sense of what they heard and saw, depending on how they understood the
categorizations and on how they 'heard' Jesus. Again, as we shall see, the Jesus
tradition echoes with some of these categorizations at various points; so here too
we can claim to be tracing and filling in the contours of the impact made by Jesus.
Not least it will be of importance to ask how Jesus himself reacted to these
possible role models and to any attempts to identify him with them.
15.2. Royal Messiah
We begin with the term most closely identified with Jesus at least from the time
of Paul: Messiah = Messias = Christos. It is a familiar fact to any student of NT
literature that Christos had become so attached to the name Jesus within about
twenty years of his death that it functioned more or less as a personal name: Jesus
Christ. 9 Nor can there be any doubt that behind this usage is the Christian claim
that Jesus was 'the Christ', the Messiah. That claim had already become so familiar,
so taken-for-granted among the first Christians that the titular sense was
fast disappearing; Jesus as Messiah no longer functioned as a claim to be argued
but simply as a fact to be assumed. That must mean that for the first Christians
the claim that Jesus was indeed Messiah had been established from the first; they
were distinguished precisely by the claim; they were 'Christ-ians', Messiah-ists.
But when did the claim become established? Was it made already during Jesus'
mission? And, not least, did Jesus himself make the claim, did he embrace a/the
role which would have been recognized as 'messianic'? These are the issues
which need to be resolved in what follows. 10
8. Mark 1.27/Luke 4.36; Mark 6.2-3 pars.; 6.14-16 pars.; 8.27-28 pars.; 14.61 pars.;
John 7.40-52; 9.16-17, 29-30; 10.19-21.
9. See my Theology of Paul 197-99. See also M. Hengel, 'Jesus, the Messiah of Israel',
Studies in Early Christology (Edinburgh: Clark, 1995) 1-72 (here 1-15).
10. In what follows I will be drawing on my 'Messianic Ideas and Their Influence on the
Jesus of History', in J. H. Charlesworth, ed., The Messiah: Developments in Earliest Judaism
and Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992) 365-81.
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