doctrbill:
The importance of parsing the Old Testament definition of the term 'Christ' cannot be over-emphasized.
....
We must understand what this term meant to Jews before Saul of Tarsus and the Christian Church gave it their special spin. The Jewish understanding of the term 'Christ' had not changed from the time when they applied it to any and every king of Israel.
Part of that 'special spin', too, owes to the content already given to the word
Christos by non-Jewish speakers of Greek in the Roman Empire.
A title like 'Annointed One', though common to all Greek speakers, was loaded with specific cultural implications. Many of these were themselves derived from traditions and rituals of ancient origin.
The significance of the title
Christos would be very different for a Judean Pharisee conditioned to hear it as a translation of the Hebrew
Meshiach than for a Macedonian Mithraist with no experience of Judaism at all. Just the same, it would be a powerful symbol for both individuals--and they might well find themselves sitting side by side at a prayer meeting after Saul of Tarsus came through town. Each would sing praise to
Christos while holding very different understandings of the term.
Spin accrues from the bottom up as well as the top down. A different character and theological flavor was bound to emerge in the new religion as soon as some regions of the empire produced more converts than others, or as Gentiles began converting in larger numbers than Jews. The skew in understandings would influence the direction taken by the new religion regardless of what its evangelists said. It would even affect
what they said.
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Edited by Archer Opterix, : HTML.
Archer
All species are transitional.