Christ Among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism

Author/Contributor(s):	Novenson, Matthew V
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Date:	10/01/2015
Binding:	Paperback
Condition:	NEW

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 christos in Paul does not bear its conventional sense. Against this curious consensus, Matthew V. Novenson argues in Christ among the Messiahs that all contemporary uses of such language, Paul's included, must be taken as evidence for its range of meaning. In other words, early Jewish messiah language is the kind of thing of which Paul's Christ language is an example.