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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 September 2024
Forty years ago, Leander Keck criticised the ‘tyranny of titles’ in the study of New Testament Christology. While Keck rightly criticised early- to mid-twentieth approaches to titles for Jesus, there is no denying the importance of titles in New Testament texts. This article summarises classic twentieth-century approaches to christological titles and discusses the most important criticisms. The root issue of such approaches is the conflation of titles and concepts. A constructive proposal is offered for reading christological titles as literary strategies of characterisation. This approach begins by carefully defining what is meant by a title and how titles might be distinguished from common nouns and names. Six principles for the productive interpretation of titles are then discussed: 1) titles must be distinguished from other christological material like motifs, typologies, and references to biblical texts; 2) titles must be distinguished from each other; 3) titles are meaningful not because they refer to particular ideas but because of their relationship with biblical texts, religious life, and culture; 4) what a title does is more important than what a title means; 5) titles are flexible, polyvalent, and ambiguous; 6) titles must be read alongside other titles and non-titular material. Finally, it is demonstrated how this literary approach to titles will be fruitful for contemporary discussions in New Testament Christology and contribute to the renewal of New Testament Christology that Keck called for several decades ago.1
1 An earlier version of this article was presented in March 2023 at the European Association of Biblical Studies Graduate Symposium in Jerusalem and benefited greatly from the insightful questions of those in attendance. I would also like to thank Matthew Novenson, Kristina Deusch, and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article.
2 Keck, L. E., ‘Toward the Renewal of New Testament Christology’, NTS 32 (1986) 362Google Scholar.
3 Keck, ‘Toward the Renewal’, 368.
4 Keck, ‘Toward the Renewal’, 368.
5 Broadhead, E. K., Naming Jesus: Titular Christology in the Gospel of Mark (JSNTSup 175, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999) 13–30Google Scholar.
6 See L. E. Keck's summary and criticism of twentieth-century approaches to Christology in general, ‘Christology of the New Testament: What, Then, Is New Testament Christology?’ in Who Do You Say That I Am? Essays on Christology (ed. M. A. Powell and D. R. Bauer, Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999) 187–93.
7 See Strauss, D. F., The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (London: Chapman, 1846 (German 1835–36)Google Scholar) §61–9.
8 New Testament scholars identified with this school include Wilhelm Bousset, Johannes Weiss, and William Wrede. See Baird, W., History of New Testament Research (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003)Google Scholar II.238–53.
9 O. Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster, rev. 1963 (German 1957)) 111–17.
10 R. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament (New York. Scribner, 1951–55 (German 1948–53)) I.164–83.
11 W. Bousset, Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus (Nashville: Abingdon, 1970 (German 1st edition 1913)) 138–47.
12 Bousset, Kyrios Christos, 31–55, 119–52.
13 Bousset, Kyrios Christos, 31–2.
14 Bousset, Kyrios Christos, 49.
15 Bousset, Kyrios Christos, 34–5.
16 Geological and palaeontological metaphors abound in this scholarship, for example, F. Hahn, The Titles of Jesus in Christology: Their History in Early Christianity (New York: World, 1969 (German 1963)) 11; R. H. Fuller, The Foundations of New Testament Christology (London: Lutterworth, 1965) 183; Keck, ‘Toward the Renewal’, 362.
17 Cullmann, Christology of the New Testament; Hahn, The Titles of Jesus; Fuller, Foundations. V. Taylor is also worth mentioning here, who examines forty-two different titles for Jesus in The Names of Jesus (London: Macmillan, 1953).
18 See Hahn, Titles of Jesus, 347–51; Fuller, Foundations, 16–17.
19 Bousset, Kyrios Christos, 128.
20 Hahn, The Titles of Jesus, 73–114.
21 See Cullmann, Christology, 9–10.
22 Cullmann, Christology, 4–5. See also Fuller, Foundations, 16.
23 Cullmann, Christology, 5. See also Fuller, Foundations, 15.
24 Hahn, The Titles of Jesus, 11.
25 Fuller, Foundations, 17.
26 I rely especially on the criticisms offered by Keck, ‘Toward the Renewal’, 368–70, and idem, ‘Christology of the New Testament’, 196–7, as well as Broadhead, Naming Jesus, 13–30. See also M. Hengel, Between Jesus and Paul (London: SCM Press, 1983) 30–47; S. E. Porter and B. R. Dyer, Origins of New Testament Christology: An Introduction to the Traditions and Titles Applied to Jesus (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2023) xvii–xxv.
27 Keck, ‘Toward the Renewal’, 368–9.
28 J. Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961) 209.
29 Barr, Semantics, 210.
30 S. Sandmel, ‘Parallelomania’, JBL 81 (1962) 1–13.
31 Somewhat surprisingly, this assumption often leads interpreters to devalue titles. If different titles must refer to different and competing Christologies, then the presence of numerous titles in one writing could mean that some or all of the titles have lost the meaning they once had. This can be seen, for example, in H. Conzelmann's assessment of Luke's ‘promiscuous use of titles’, The Theology of St. Luke (London: Faber, 1960) 170–2.
32 Hengel, Between Jesus and Paul, 41.
33 Keck, ‘Toward the Renewal’, 371.
34 See, for example, P. Vielhauer's critique of Hahn's overly rigid division between Gentile Christianity and Jewish Christianity (‘Zur Frage der christologischen Hoheitstitel’, TLZ 90 (1965) 586–87).
35 See, for example, the criticism of Bousset's reading of ‘Son of Man’ in L. W. Hurtado, ‘Wilhelm Bousset's Kyrios Christos: An Appreciative and Critical Assessment’, Early Christianity 6 (2015) 17–29.
36 See M. V. Novenson, The Grammar of Messianism: An Ancient Jewish Political Idiom and Its Users (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
37 See C. K. Rowe, Early Narrative Christology: The Lord in the Gospel of Luke (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009) 17–23.
38 Keck, ‘Toward the Renewal’, 369.
39 See, for example, Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, I.130–1.
40 J. D. Kingsbury, ‘The “Divine Man” as the Key to Mark's Christology—The End of an Era?’, Int 35 (1981) 243–51.
41 A. C. Thiselton, ‘Christology in Luke, Speech-Act Theory, and the Problem of Dualism in Christology after Kant’ in Jesus of Nazareth: Lord and Christ: Essays on the Historical Jesus and New Testament Christology (ed. J. B. Green and M. Turner, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994) 453–72.
42 All translations from ancient texts are the author's own unless otherwise stated.
43 C. Focant, ‘Une christologie de type “mystique”’, NTS 55 (2009) 20.
44 D. C. Allison Jr., The New Moses: A Matthean Typology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993); D. P. Moessner, Lord of the Banquet: The Literary and Theological Significance of the Lukan Travel Narrative (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989).
45 D. Juel, Messianic Exegesis: Christological Interpretation of the Old Testament in Early Christianity (Library of Early Christology; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988); R. B. Hays, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014).
46 G. R. Lanier, Old Testament Metaphors and the Christology of Luke's Gospel (LNTS 591; London: T&T Clark, 2018).
47 For example, C. Karakolis, ‘Narrative Funktion und christologische Bedeutung der markinischen Erzählung vom Tod Johannes des Täufers (Mk 6:14–29)’, NovT 52 (2010) 134–55. See also the discussion of narrative Christology below.
48 See N. Henrichs-Tarasenkova, Luke's Christology of Divine Identity (LNTS 542; London: T&T Clark, 2016) 4–6.
49 Rowe, Early Narrative Christology, 23–4. See also M. de Jonge, ‘The Earliest Christian Use of Christos: Some Suggestions’, NTS 32 (1986) 321–43.
50 For a sociological approach, see B. J. Malina and J. H. Neyrey, Calling Jesus Names: The Social Value of Labels in Matthew (Sonoma: Polebridge, 1988) 35–42; for a linguistic approach to ‘son of man’, see M. Casey, The Solution to the ‘Son of Man’ Problem (London: T&T Clark, 2009); for a particularly historical approach to ‘son of man’, see R. Bauckham, Son of Man: Early Jewish Literature (vol. 1; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023). Keck likewise affirms the validity of such approaches (‘Toward the Renewal’, 376 n. 12).
51 Keck, ‘Toward the Renewal’, 365.
52 M. B. Dinkler provides a helpful account of what it means to engage in a literary critical approach to christological questions against classic historical approaches (Literary Theory and the New Testament (AYBRL, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) 137–62).
53 In their recent book, Porter and Dyer are at pains to distinguish their approach from classic approaches to titles, especially with respect to the confusion ‘between a term and a concept’ (Origins of New Testament Christology, xxiii). However, in seeking to study both ‘titles’ and ‘traditions’ without carefully distinguishing the difference between the two, they make a similar conflation. This can be seen, for example, in their treatment of the title/tradition, ‘messiah’, when they distinguish between figures in Israel's scriptures who are anointed yet are not fully messianic (Origins of New Testament Christology, 139). Porter and Dyer make a fair distinction, but in using ‘messiah’ to refer to both a term and a concept, it becomes unclear which they are trying to study.
54 Markedness is a concept from discourse analysis and is defined as follows by J. Read-Heimerdinger: ‘Usage by any particular author that is normal, not intended to create a special effect, is identified as their “default” or unmarked usage. Where patterns are disrupted for any reason, such as to underline something, that usage is said to be “marked”’ (Luke in His Own Words: A Study of the Language of Luke-Acts in Greek (LNTS 672, London: T&T Clark, 2022) 11). A default way of referring to a person might be with a pronoun or a common noun like, ‘a person’. ‘Default’ is not to be confused with numerical frequency. So then, the frequency with which our texts refer to Jesus with titles does not make titles unmarked. See also S. E. Runge, Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament: A Practical Introduction for Teaching and Exegesis (Lexham Bible Reference Series, Peabody: Hendrickson, 2010) 6–8.
55 Conventionality is not fixed and can be easily created. This is arguably what has happened with ‘one like a son of man’ from Dan 7.13 which is conventionalised in the Gospels, e.g., Matt 24.30, note the addition of the definite article.
56 For example, consider the text cited above, Luke 2.11–12. Both ‘saviour’ and ‘messiah’ are relatively marked. However, while ‘messiah’ clearly has the requisite conventionality to make it a title (see Luke 3:15), reasonable people may disagree about whether ‘saviour’ does as well.
57 Some interpreters may find it helpful to make even finer distinctions in particular instances, especially based on historical usage, such as the distinction between χριστός as a title or an honorific, for example, J. W. Jipp, The Messianic Theology of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020) 152. The usefulness of such distinctions will need to be demonstrated in the interpretation of texts. It may turn out that these are distinctions without a difference.
58 On this issue see M. V. Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) esp. 64–97.
59 Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 68.
60 Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 70.
61 F. Bovon, ‘Names and Numbers in Early Christianity’, NTS 47 (2001) 271.
62 For a fascinating study which pursues this possibility with the name of Jesus, see B. R. Wilson, ‘Directly Addressing “Jesus”: The Vocative Ἰησοῦ in Luke 23:42’, JBL 136 (2017) 435–49.
63 J. A. Gibbs, Matthew (3 vols., Concordia Commentary, St. Louis: Concordia, 2006) I.434–7.
64 Broadhead, unfortunately, does exactly this. While he helpfully focuses on narrative or literary methods for reading titles, he still fails to properly distinguish between titles and concepts. This can be seen, for example, in his treatment of the title ‘Nazarene’ (Naming Jesus, 31–42). He assumes that because the title has no background in the history of religions, it is therefore like an empty container that has meaning indiscriminately poured into it from the surrounding context. This is, however, not how words work. While words are often quite flexible, they are not empty containers. By treating ‘Nazarene’ as an empty container, Broadhead still approaches titles as concepts. Broadhead simply constructs his concept from the narrative data in Mark instead of background material.
65 H. Stettler, Die Christologie der Pastoralbriefe (WUNT 2/105, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998) 24.
66 Broadhead, Naming Jesus, 104. Oddly enough, the term παῖς is used to refer to Jesus in Matt 12.18. Perhaps Broadhead has referenced the wrong passage. Even still, it is not clear that the term παῖς has the kind of conventionality necessary to function as a title.
67 See the comments by N. A. Dahl, ‘Sources of Christological Language’, in Jesus the Christ: The Historical Origins of Christian Doctrine (ed. D. H. Juel, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) 116.
68 Notably here the term is used to mock Jesus during his trial.
69 The only exceptions used to refer to Jesus include Luke 24.7; John 12.34; Acts 7.56; Heb 2.6; Rev 1.13; 14.14.
70 For a comparison of ‘son of man’ with other titles in Matthew see J. D. Kingsbury, Matthew as Story (Philadelphia: Fortress, 19882) 95–102.
71 For example, it may be helpful to study a title specifically as it is used in a particular phrase, for example, J. T. Hewitt, Messiah and Scripture: Paul's ‘In Christ’ Idiom in Its Ancient Jewish Context (WUNT 2/522, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020).
72 For example, S. Mowinckel, He That Cometh (Nashville: Abingdon, 1954 (Norwegian 1951)).
73 Hahn, The Titles of Jesus; Fuller, Foundations.
74 De Jonge, ‘Christian Use of Christos’, 329.
75 Runge, Discourse Grammar, 4–6.
76 See, for example, J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962); J. R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
77 See W. Grundmann, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus (THKNT, Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1968) 263.
78 Dahl, ‘Sources of Christological Language’, 133.
79 Rowe, Early Narrative Christology.
80 J. Marcus, ‘Mark 14:61: “Are You the Messiah-Son-of-God?”’, NovT 31 (1989) 125–41.
81 M. Hengel, Studies in Early Christology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995) 370.
82 See B. G. Schuchard, The Word from the Beginning: The Person and Work of Jesus in the Gospel of John (Bellingham: Lexham, 2022).
83 For example, F. J. Matera, New Testament Christology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999).
84 M. B. Dinkler, ‘A New Formalist Approach to Narrative Christology: Returning to the Structure of the Synoptic Gospels’, HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 73 (2017) 4; examples of narrative Christology include E. S. Malbon, Mark's Jesus: Characterization as Narrative Christology (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009); Rowe, Early Narrative Christology.
85 For an appreciative assessment, see S. Hultgren, ‘Narrative Christology in the Gospels: Reflections on Some Recent Developments and Their Significance for Theology and Preaching’, Lutheran Theological Journal 47 (2013) 10–21.
86 For example, despite his effective literary analysis, this tendency can be observed in the work of J. D. Kingsbury, Conflict in Luke: Jesus, Authorities, Disciples (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991); and idem, Matthew as Story.
87 A recent study along these lines is D. Gustafsson, Aspects of Coherency in Luke's Composite Christology (WUNT 2/567, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck: 2022).
88 See Dahl, ‘Sources of Christological Language’, 132–33.
89 See Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs.
90 Much of the discussion of the lamb in Revelation focuses on the lamb as symbol, its conceptual origins and its relationship to the abstract theme of violence (see L. L. Johns, The Lamb Christology of the Apocalypse of John: An Investigation into its Origins and Rhetorical Force (WUNT 2/167, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck: 2003)).
91 See the literature review in Smith, B. D., ‘What Christ Does, God Does: Surveying Recent Scholarship on Christological Monotheism’, CurBR 17 (2019) 184–208Google Scholar. Some key works in this area include Bauckham, R., Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament's Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008)Google Scholar; Hurtado, L. W., Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003)Google Scholar.
92 See, for example, Bühner, R. A., Hohe Messianologie: Übermenschliche Aspekte eschatologischer Heilsgestalten im Frühjudentum (WUNT 2/523. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020)Google Scholar.
93 See again Henrichs-Tarasenkova, Luke's Christology, 4–6.
94 See Bühner, R. A., Messianic High Christology: New Testament Variants of Second Temple Judaism (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2021) 12Google Scholar.
95 See Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 11–13.
96 Keck, ‘Toward the Renewal’, 371.