2. Twentieth-Century Approaches to Titles

There are a number of ways to tell the story of twentieth-century approaches to titles for Jesus. For example, Edwin Broadhead in his thorough Forschungsgeschichte focuses on titles research as it relates to historical Jesus studies.Footnote ⁵ However, like Keck, here we are interested in the study of titles as an aspect of the study of New Testament Christology, that is, the theological accounts of the mission and identity of Jesus to be found in New Testament writings.Footnote ⁶

While nineteenth-century scholars were primarily interested in titles for recovering Jesus’ self-understanding,Footnote ⁷ by the turn of the twentieth century, scholars were primarily interested in titles for revealing the development of early christological thought as typified by the ‘history of religion’ school.Footnote ⁸ One of the hallmarks of this approach was assuming that titles or the concepts standing behind them were borrowed and modified from other religious traditions, whether Judaism,Footnote ⁹ Gnosticism,Footnote ¹⁰ or Greco-Roman religion.Footnote ¹¹ Wilhelm Bousset typifies this approach when he associates different titles with different early Christian communities, for example, χριστός and ‘son of man’ with an early Palestinian community influenced by Jewish ideas and κύριος with a Hellenistic community influenced by Greek ideas.Footnote ¹² Bousset also associates different titles with different religious concepts. For example, when discussing the messianism of the early Palestinian community, he makes a division between two different kinds of messiahs: the one was ‘a powerful king from David's tribe who, as a victorious ruler, would again establish the ancient throne of David’ and the other was a ‘transcendent Messiah’, ‘a supra-terrestrial, angel-like, and pre-existent being’, and for Bousset these two conceptions corresponded to two different titles: ‘son of David’ for the former and ‘son of man’ for the latter.Footnote ¹³ According to Bousset, the primitive Palestinian community rejected the son of David idea and replaced it with the ‘Messiah-Son of Man idea’.Footnote ¹⁴ He argues we can see traces of this polemic in passages like Mark 12.35–7.Footnote ¹⁵ In this approach, the New Testament becomes a kind of fossil record of the history of different communities’ preferred titles for and conceptions of Jesus.Footnote ¹⁶

For many scholars, therefore, titles were the key to understanding the development of Christology and the diversity of christological expression in the New Testament. The mid-twentieth century saw what might be called the golden age of title-dominated approaches to New Testament Christology with the flourishing of a number of works which outlined New Testament Christology according to various christological titles. These include especially works by Oscar Cullmann, Ferdinand Hahn and Reginald Fuller.Footnote ¹⁷

Like Bousset, Hahn and Fuller assume that titles provide a window into the development of Christology as the doctrine of the early church came into greater contact with the Gentile world or experienced theological crises, such as the delay of the parousia.Footnote ¹⁸ In many ways, these scholars offer a more nuanced picture of the background of these titles than Bousset. For example, while Bousset treats the exalted use of the title κύριος as an almost entirely Hellenistic innovation,Footnote ¹⁹ Hahn offers a more complex historical and philological picture, arguing that κύριος as a concept developed separately in Palestinian and Hellenistic contexts.Footnote ²⁰

Cullmann, by contrast, offers a more theological approach when he structures his analysis not according to a historical reconstruction of the development of christological thought but according to the place that each title has in salvation history, dividing titles according to those which have to do with Jesus’ earthly work, his future work, his present work and his pre-existence.Footnote ²¹ Even still, like the history of religions school which came before him, he approaches the question of Christology in terms of borrowing and modifying distinct concepts that are encapsulated by various titles:

Of course, Cullmann also differs significantly from previous approaches to titles when he criticises them for assuming that ‘Christology had necessarily to conform to the conceptual scheme already present in Judaism and Hellenism’ and instead emphasises the importance of the self-consciousness of Jesus and the effect of the first Christians’ religious experiences as they sought to describe Jesus using the concepts available to them.Footnote ²³

Ultimately, despite all the differences between these scholars, what they all have in common is that their true object of study is not titles themselves but the christological concepts which are assumed to stand behind titles or to which titles are assumed to refer. As Hahn writes, ‘The christological ideas of the earliest church have nevertheless obtained far-reaching expression in the strata of tradition which are stamped with a definite title of majesty’.Footnote ²⁴ They study these concepts in order to address historical questions regarding the development of Christian doctrine in the first century. The New Testament and the traditions preserved within it are simply the primary dataset for answering these diachronic questions. Texts are for them a window into history.Footnote ²⁵ Thus, it is natural for them to conflate titles with concepts because christological concepts are their real object of study. And it is this methodological tendency to conflate titles and concepts that has, in my view, drawn the most significant criticism and should form the focal point of a new approach to titles.

3. Criticisms of Early- to Mid-Twentieth-Century Approaches to Titles

The classic twentieth-century approaches to titles have been criticised on a number of fronts.Footnote ²⁶ As mentioned, the most significant overarching issue is the conflation of words and concepts. This conflation has two primary effects which detract from these approaches’ contribution to New Testament Christology which will be examined here in turn: 1) title-dominated approaches fail to understand titles, and 2) these approaches fail to deal adequately with New Testament Christology overall.

Regarding the first objection, it is rightly pointed out that such approaches often, in the words of Keck, rely on ‘an inadequate view of language’ wherein the ‘difference between a word and a concept is blurred’.Footnote ²⁷ This is, of course, not an issue limited to the study of titles, as James Barr has pointed out in his pointed criticism of Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament:

Additionally, as Barr points out, the situation is further muddied when German writers use the term Begriff, which can mean either ‘word’ or ‘concept’.Footnote ²⁹

For titles research, this blurring between word and concept can be seen in the over-reliance on background material. If one is studying the use of titles in New Testament writings as words, then background material is of only limited usefulness. While a diachronic investigation of a word may helpfully trace how the meaning of a word has changed over time, it can easily lead one astray if, for example, an older meaning of a word is obsolete. However, if one is not investigating words but concepts or ideas, then it becomes more difficult to know when one's investigation of background material has degraded into parallelomania.Footnote ³⁰ The distinction between words and concepts is critical for determining the relevance of background material.

Furthermore, when titles are assumed to refer directly to concepts, scholars often assume that different titles must refer to fundamentally different Christologies, as we have seen, for example, with Bousset's assessment of ‘son of man’ and ‘son of David’, discussed above.Footnote ³¹ However, this is not necessarily true, as Martin Hengel has argued, ‘The multiplicity of christological titles does not mean a multiplicity of exclusive “Christologies” but an accumulative glorification of Jesus.’Footnote ³² Keck also concurs, ‘What is characteristic of communities is their capacity to affirm multiple and diverse Christologies simultaneously.’Footnote ³³ Whatever one makes of the diversity and development of early Christian thought, titles cannot necessarily be assumed to correspond to competing conceptions of Jesus.

Other errors of history, exegesis and linguistics have been noted as well,Footnote ³⁴ especially with respect to particular titles like son of manFootnote ³⁵ or messiah.Footnote ³⁶ The rise of narrative-critical approaches in the late twentieth century has also seen classic twentieth-century approaches to titles criticised for their insensitivity to the way that titles function in narratives.Footnote ³⁷ These are all reasons why many find that title-dominated approaches have typically not done justice to titles themselves.

The second objection to these approaches is perhaps even more damning than the first. Not only do title-dominated approaches misinterpret titles, but they also fail to give an adequate account of the theological portraits of Jesus in New Testament writings. This is because such approaches do not offer the interpretive tools to deal with texts which do not use titles. For example, Keck criticises scholars who interpret passages which do not use any titles as if there were a title that must stand behind the text, ‘So strong has been the influence of titles, however, that frequently scholars have supplied them as if the creators of the text had forgotten to include them.’Footnote ³⁸ Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is the much-debated concept of a θɛῖος ἀνήρ or ‘divine man’ in the Gospels.Footnote ³⁹ As Jack Dean Kingsbury notes in his survey of this debate in Mark, despite the total lack of the term in the Gospels and its rarity in classical sources, ‘those who use it to characterise the Christology of Mark or his tradition have tended to work with it as though it were a fixed concept with precise meaning’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Furthermore, since titles are not concepts but only one strategy of theological characterisation among many, an adequate approach to New Testament Christology must be able to deal with other strategies of characterisation used in New Testament texts. Anthony Thiselton has argued for the importance of implication as a strategy of characterisation in the Gospels. Footnote ⁴¹ For example, after Jesus calms a storm, his disciples openly wonder, ‘Who then is this that he commands both the winds and the water, and they obey him?’ (Luke 8.25).Footnote ⁴² No answer is given, but the raising of the question invites the reader to contemplate the answer. Camille Focant discusses the effect of secrecy and misunderstanding in Mark, how the reader learns to see Jesus as beyond understanding: ‘Il perçoit combien Jésus et le Règne qu'il annonce sont insaisissables…. [S]on identité échappe à toute prise.’Footnote ⁴³ Other scholars, such as Dale Allison and David Moessner, have argued that the Gospels typologically portray Jesus as a new Moses even though no ‘Moses’ title is ever used.Footnote ⁴⁴ Both Donald Juel and Richard Hays have in their own ways examined the importance of the interpretation of Israel's scriptures in New Testament portrayals of Jesus’ identity and mission.Footnote ⁴⁵ Gregory Lanier has explored the use of conceptual metaphors from Israel's scriptures as a christological strategy in Luke's Gospel.Footnote ⁴⁶ Others have focused on how literary elements, such as plot, affect Christology in the Gospels.Footnote ⁴⁷ Traditional title-dominated approaches are not able to deal with such christological strategies because they must either ignore them or unnaturally force them into a titles-based approach. Any renewed approach to titles must be able to deal with the non-titular strategies in a more nuanced way.

Of course, it is also widely recognised that titles cannot be ignored. Christology might not be merely a matter of titles, but titles are an important strategy of theological characterisation and can be found in every writing of the New Testament except for 3 John. In fact, one will notice that none of the issues thus far highlighted have been issues with the christological significance of titles themselves. Rather, critics have pointed out issues with poor approaches to titles. While it may be commonplace to emphasise that titles do not fully answer many of the questions that we want to ask of New Testament portraits of Jesus,Footnote ⁴⁸ titles undeniably play a key role in New Testament texts. Titles are some of the key terms by which our sources discuss the mission and identity of Jesus and therefore cannot be ignored, as Kavin Rowe has noted with regard to the Gospel of Luke:

But how then do we approach titles without falling into the same errors of previous interpreters?

4. A Literary Approach to Titles

What follows will outline one productive approach to titles as a strategy of theological characterisation in early Christian writings. This approach seeks to correct the characteristic errors of previous approaches while providing guidelines for the reading of titles in the New Testament. Other approaches are certainly possible, including sociological, linguistic and historical approaches.Footnote ⁵⁰ This approach, however, seeks to move past the ‘preoccupation with history’ that in Keck's assessment has often plagued the study of New Testament ChristologyFootnote ⁵¹ and is instead interested in titles from a literary-critical perspective. In other words, this approach is not interested in answering questions like, ‘What can titles tell us about the development of early Christian thought?’ or ‘What titles did Jesus himself use and what did he mean by them?’ Rather, this approach is interested in how the titles used in New Testament texts can help us understand the Christology of these texts.Footnote ⁵² This proposal centres around the following key insight: the root issue of classic twentieth-century approaches to titles is in conflating titles and concepts. This is by no means an error that only twentieth-century scholars are guilty of. Even contemporary scholars who are careful to avoid the errors of previous approaches often find themselves slipping into this same issue.Footnote ⁵³ As has been discussed, this conflation has caused scholars to misunderstand titles and to misunderstand Christology. However, this error can be corrected by attending more carefully to the formal features of our texts and how they use titles. This will require a greater appreciation for how titles function linguistically and how they are related to concepts.

Before proceeding further, we should clarify what is meant by a title. It is not enough to simply refer to the set of classic titles: Christ, Lord, son of God, saviour, son of man, and so on. While these are all key terms used to refer to Jesus in our texts, we must be able to give an account of how these terms create meaning. After all, if these terms are not concepts, then what are they? For this approach, titles are best understood as a literary feature of New Testament texts. It is, therefore, important to properly interpret a title for the same reason it is important to properly interpret other literary devices like metaphors or hyperboles.

Titles are a particular strategy of characterisation. Figures can be characterised through a variety of strategies. Their speech can be reported: ‘Jesus says, “Follow me”’ (Matt 8.22). Or their actions can be reported: ‘Jesus wept’ (John 11.35). They can be described with adjectives: ‘He is faithful and just’ (1 John 1.9). They can have all kinds of other things predicated of them, like abstract ideas: ‘Christ is the end of the law’ (Rom 10.4). They can also have nouns predicated of them: ‘He is a propitiation for our sins’ (1 John 2.2). In our texts, titles are definite nouns that are either predicated of characters or used to refer to characters.

One characteristic that distinguishes titles from common nouns is that titles are particularly marked nouns, that is, they help distinguish a character from others in some meaningful way.Footnote ⁵⁴ For example, consider the following passage where an angel of the Lord announces the birth of Jesus to a group of shepherds, ‘A saviour is born to you today in the city of David who is the messiah Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby swaddled and lying in a feed trough’ (Luke 2.11–12). The angel uses four nouns to refer to Jesus: ‘a saviour’, ‘the messiah’, ‘Lord’, and ‘a baby’. We may fairly distinguish the first three nouns as marked in this discourse, while the last noun is relatively unmarked. That the newborn child is a baby is for the reader of Luke's Gospel already known and hardly notable. This can be demonstrated by the fact that ‘baby’ could be replaced in English with ‘him’, and the meaning of the sentence would be largely unchanged.

Another characteristic that distinguishes titles from common nouns or even other marked nouns is that titles demonstrate a higher degree of conventionality, that is, their uses are generally recognisable as instances of broader patterns of referring to distinguished individuals, especially in formal contexts. This is in contrast to a marked but ad hoc way of referring to characters such as, ‘Is this not the one who would sit and beg?’ (John 9.8).Footnote ⁵⁵ This conventionality can be apparent from the term itself, for example, ‘the Lord’, or from a particular syntactical construction into which any number of terms can be placed and new titles formed, for example, ‘Alexander the Great’, ‘Ivan the Terrible’, and so on. This conventionality allows titles to call to mind for the reader associations with other texts, social conventions and so on. This conventionality helps give titles their particular force and meaning.

It may be noted that this analysis hardly offers a clear boundary between titles and common nouns. Markedness and conventionality are qualities that may be possessed by degree. There is no way to draw a clear line between titles and common nouns.Footnote ⁵⁶ This is not a mistake. Titles and common nouns are not fundamentally different kinds of things and therefore cannot always be disambiguated. Interpreters may sometimes disagree about when a noun or noun phrase is titular and when it is not. Footnote ⁵⁷ Determining whether something is a title or not is less important than interpreting the meaning of a noun or noun phrase in a given text. A disagreement about whether something is a title may turn out to be little more than a disagreement about where to draw the line between common nouns and titles. This is a disagreement not about the text but about our own categories. If instead, the disagreement is about how the noun or noun phrase departs from default usage (markedness) or interacts with prior usage of similar language (conventionality), then this is a disagreement about meaning.

Titles are also often distinguished from names. However, this is not merely an issue of distinguishing one set of words (e.g. Jesus, Andrew, Mary) from another set (e.g. Lord, saviour, messiah). Rather, titles are frequently distinguished from names in terms of how they function semantically. This is particularly salient for the term χριστός, which is often identified as sometimes acting as a title and sometimes as a name, especially in the Pauline corpus.Footnote ⁵⁸ Matthew Novenson summarises the commonly proposed linguistic distinction in the following way: ‘a title carries with it a sense or set of senses, but a name does nothing more than refer to a thing in the world. Titles have sense, but names have only reference’.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, while this black-and-white distinction might be philosophically satisfying, it does not reflect the way language is used in the real world. It is certainly true that names in most situations tend to be primarily referential and therefore carry little semantic weight. However, this depends on how the name is used. Names can be and often are semantically meaningful (e.g. Matt 1.21). The semantic difference between names and titles is, therefore, as Novenson argues, ‘relative, not absolute’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Our assumptions regarding the meaningfulness of names are products of our own culture and cannot be assumed to be shared by ancient people.Footnote ⁶¹ Thus, for our purposes, it is unhelpful to sharply distinguish names from titles as if they were fundamentally different kinds of things. Names and titles are both nouns that can be used to meaningfully refer to characters in our texts. Whatever potential semantic weight may be carried by names is indeed often latent until attention is called to it.Footnote ⁶² However, this semantic latency is not only true for names but also some titles, for example, ‘son of man’.Footnote ⁶³

5. Principles for Interpreting Christological Titles

The rest of this approach will be explicated through six basic principles for interpreting titles in New Testament texts. It is not enough merely to say that titles must not be confused with concepts or that titles are best understood as literary or rhetorical features. I am not the first to make these points. Many interpreters have claimed to be committed to these points but, in their interpretation, end up falling into the same trap as classic approaches to titles.Footnote ⁶⁴ Thus, these principles offer a constructive proposal to help interpreters avoid conflating titles and concepts and, thereby, falling into the same errors as classic approaches to titles. These principles will help interpreters appreciate how titles function as literary strategies of characterisation. I have arrived at these principles by observing how interpreters tend to interpret titles and what they tend to get wrong in doing so.

First, titles must be distinguished from other kinds of christological material like motifs, typologies or references to biblical texts. This is because titles are a literary feature. They are not simply the names of particular christological concepts. Hanna Stettler is, of course, right when she writes, ‘Es ist durchaus möglich, daß ein Autor das, was ein bestimmter Titel beinhaltet, aussagt, ohne den Titel zu verwenden.’Footnote ⁶⁵ For example, Jesus is portrayed as a prophet regardless of whether he is explicitly called a prophet as in John 4.19, or whether he simply engages in typical prophetic activity, such as foretelling destruction, as in Mark 13. Even still, portraying Jesus as a prophet is not the same thing as calling Jesus a prophet because titles cannot be equated with ideas. The presence of an idea is not the presence of a title. However, many scholars often fail to make this distinction. For example, in his discussion of the alleged title, ‘the servant’, Edwin Broadhead asserts that the only time this title is used in the Gospels is in Matthew 8.16–17, despite the fact that the key term, παῖς, shows up nowhere in these verses.Footnote ⁶⁶ Matthew does quote from Isaiah 53, one of the so-called servant songs, and presents Jesus as fulfilling what was spoken of the ‘servant’ in the Isaiah passage. This is not a use of a title, however. It is a use of a biblical text to characterise Jesus.

Second, titles must also be distinguished from each other. Despite titles all being similar strategies of characterisation, they are not all used in the same way. For example, titles often differ in how they are used syntactically.Footnote ⁶⁷ In the Gospels, with the exception of Mark, the title κύριος is frequently used vocatively (e.g. Matt 7.21; Luke 5.8; John 4.11), while the title χριστός is only ever used once in the vocative in the New Testament (Matt 26.68).Footnote ⁶⁸ Furthermore, it is frequently noted that while Jesus often refers to himself with the phrase, ‘son of man’, other characters almost never do and the term is surprisingly rare in the rest of the New Testament.Footnote ⁶⁹ Relatedly, while many titles are often used in predication of Jesus (e.g. χριστός (Matt 16.16); κύριος (Rom 10.9)), ‘son of man’ is almost never used in predication of Jesus, the only exception being John 5.27.Footnote ⁷⁰ If titles are concepts which acquire their meaning from their background, then these sorts of differences are largely immaterial. However, if titles are literary features and therefore acquire their meaning from how they are used in context, then these sorts of differences are essential for understanding their significance in New Testament writings.Footnote ⁷¹

Third, titles are meaningful not because they refer to particular ideas but because of their relationship with biblical texts, religious life, cultural practices and so on. As has already been discussed, titles have a complex relationship with ideas. Some usage of titles seems to presuppose a larger idea. Consider, for example, Luke 3.15 where the crowds wonder whether John the Baptist might be the χριστός. The crowd assumes that χριστός refers to some kind of expected eschatological figure. They are not simply asking whether John has recently had oil poured onto him. Except, even here, χριστός is meaningful because of the use of the term in Israel's scriptures (e.g., 1 Sam 24.6; Ps 2.2; Isa 61.1), the historical practice of anointing and even the phenomenon of messianic movements. Many interpreters have been inclined to distil these associations into an idea to which key terms like χριστός are assumed to refer.Footnote ⁷² Scholars such as Hahn and Fuller do something similar with other titles.Footnote ⁷³ Regardless of whether or not these distillations are good descriptions of ancient people's ideas, it is to put the cart before the horse to assume that titles are meaningful because of their associations with such ideas. In any language, words are meaningful because of how they are used, not because of some idea that allegedly stands behind them. Likewise, titles are meaningful because of their rich linguistic and cultural associations. As noted by Marinus de Jonge, a title ‘does not stand for a fixed concept, but rather brings with it a wealth of connotations made more or less explicit in a given context’.Footnote ⁷⁴ The interpreter must decide which of the many possible connotations are being evoked in context.

Fourth, what a title does is often more important than what a title means. Because titles do not simply refer to concepts, the interpreter should pay attention to what a title is doing in a narrative or discourse. This is what Steven Runge has called the difference between semantic meaning and pragmatic effect.Footnote ⁷⁵ In other words, there is a difference between what a word means according to a dictionary and what speakers may be doing with a word when they use it. To call someone by a name or a title is not merely to assert something about them but also to do something, for example, to insult them, to flatter them, to honour them. This is what philosophers of language mean in calling utterances ‘speech-acts’.Footnote ⁷⁶ For example, it is surely important that in Matthew 8.29 the demons refer to Jesus as ‘son of God’.Footnote ⁷⁷ The reader learns from this verse that the demons think Jesus may have come to torment them. Why do the demons call their potential tormentor ‘son of God’? What are they doing in calling Jesus by this title? The background of titles is certainly still relevant here (e.g., Ps 2), but the background helps to inform the use and function of these titles. Nils Dahl makes a similar point when he compares Christology to a game of chess. The origin of the game and its background are largely irrelevant, ‘what really matters…are the rules of the game’.Footnote ⁷⁸

Fifth, titles are often flexible, polyvalent and ambiguous. Many titles can be used in a variety of senses. For example, κύριος can be used to refer to the God of Israel, to refer to someone who owns a slave or as a polite form of address, like the English, ‘sir’. These flexibilities can be exploited to great effect. Kavin Rowe explores this dynamic in Luke's Gospel.Footnote ⁷⁹ For example when a character addresses Jesus with the vocative κύριɛ (e.g. 5.8), this certainly makes sense as a polite form of address. But what is to be made of the fact that κύριος is used of Jesus in exalted senses (e.g. Acts 2.36)? Is it perhaps the case that the implied reader is to see that the characters who call Jesus ‘Lord’ as a polite form of address speak more truthfully than they are aware? Only an overly simplistic view of language could preclude this possibility. Joel Marcus has argued as well that the title χριστός was often perceived to be ambiguous enough that sometimes New Testament texts must specify precisely what sort of χριστός they have in mind.Footnote ⁸⁰

Sixth and finally, titles cannot be studied on their own but must be read alongside other titles and non-titular material. As Martin Hengel notes regarding the Gospel of John, ‘We should not try to isolate the titles of Jesus in John; it is their manifold interplay which makes John's Christology so fascinating and full of tension and power.’Footnote ⁸¹ In our texts, different titles often help inform the meaning of others. Of course, titles are also only one key strategy of theological characterisation, among others. The study of titles, therefore, cannot by itself offer a full picture of a New Testament text's characterisation of Jesus’ identity and mission. Other material must also be consulted. For example, in John's Gospel, while recourse to certain background material will certainly be of some utility in seeking to understand what the prologue means in calling Jesus ‘the Word’, the rest of the Gospel's presentation of Jesus will also clarify the use of this title even if the title is never used in quite the same way again.Footnote ⁸² Titles may not refer to concepts, but they do call to mind concepts and help construct concepts. Thus, if we are interested in the concepts that authors construct with titles, we must pay attention to other material which authors use to construct these concepts.