Jesus' Titles in the Gospels

Resurrecting a Titular Approach to Christology with Dr Kendall Davis

Dr Kendall Davis is Assistant Professor of New Testament Studies at Concordia University – St. Paul. In this interview, I ask Kendall about the titles of Jesus in the Gospels, such as ‘Son of God’, ‘Messiah’ and ‘Lord’. He addresses the common pitfalls we have in understanding these titles, and how we can approach their meaning in a more reliable way today.

JN: Kendall, you have spent a lot of time reflecting on the Gospels’ Christologies – the way they portray the person of Jesus. What is it that drew you especially to this area of research?

KD: I think I was especially inspired by reading Richard Bauckham’s God Crucified and Kavin Rowe’s Early Narrative Christology on the Gospel of Luke. I thought it was fascinating how they discussed Christology with a particular focus on the particular idioms and language used by the Gospels. While I have no objections to the terms and categories that arose in the first several centuries of the church’s reflection on Christology (e.g., nature, person, substance), this is plainly not the language used by much of the New Testament and especially not the Synoptic Gospels. This is, of course, not necessarily a problem theologically. But it can become a barrier to understanding texts like the Synoptic Gospels. So I thought the approach of people like Bauckham and Rowe helped me to begin to understand the Christological language of the Synoptics, so to speak. I was able to see what they were doing Christologically in their own terms and categories.

For example, in the Gospel of Luke and Acts the title “Lord” (κύριος) is famously ambiguous. Sometimes it’s used of Jesus; sometimes it’s used of God. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which. Many previous scholars have essentially assumed that the evangelist was sloppy. I’ve seen scholars build tables where they definitively determine whether each use of κύριος refers to Jesus or to God. Kavin Rowe’s book makes the argument that this ambiguity is intentional and that it is a particular literary strategy of drawing together the identity of Jesus and God through the narrative of the Gospel. Though both are distinct characters in the story, they are both the Lord of Israel. Rowe doesn’t discuss what this means ontologically, which is where a lot of the Christological debates have taken place, but that’s because his goal is to observe what questions the narrative itself is trying to answer. Now, there can be value in asking questions of texts that they weren’t necessarily trying to answer (historians in particular do this all the time), but it’s good to know that that’s what one doing, and to also know how to ask the questions that the text does want to answer.

JN: When scholars study the Gospels’ Christologies, they traditionally turned to the many ‘titles’ attached to Jesus, such as ‘Son of God’ or ‘Son of David.’ Yet in recent research, this approach has somewhat fallen out of favour. What are some common criticisms of ‘titles’ in this research?

KD: The biggest criticism of the old approach to titles that was particularly popular for much of the twentieth century was that the titles were treated as if they merely stood in for concepts, that is, it was assumed that each title referred to a ready-made Christological idea (e.g., the Davidic Messiah or the Danielic Son of Man) that was then applied to Jesus or fused with other concepts. Scholars in this vein (e.g., Ferdinand Hahn, Oscar Cullmann, Wilhelm Bousset) liked this approach because they thought it allowed them to trace the history and influence of different streams of thought (e.g., Jewish, Gnostic, apocalyptic, Greco-Roman) and disentangle these different influences on early Christian thinking and writing. Unfortunately, it’s a wrongheaded approach to language. Words certainly can be used to call to mind particular, well-defined concepts. We often call these “technical terms” (e.g., Quantum Mechanics, Supply-Side Economics). The problem is that we can’t just assume that a word is being used as a technical term. If we’re wrong, we’re liable to misunderstand what’s being said. A good example of this is the term “servant” (παῖς). This frequently gets used as a quasi-technical term in scholarship where “the Servant” refers to the suffering servant of Isaiah (e.g., Isaiah 53). However, just because that’s how we use this term, doesn’t mean that’s how New Testament authors use the term. You can see this in Acts 4:27 when Jesus is called God’s holy servant. It would be strange for this to be a reference to a text like Isaiah 53 because in Acts 4, the point is that Jesus is the subject of Psalm 2. Indeed, when the believers in Acts 4 quote the psalm, they also refer to David as God’s “servant.” Clearly God has lots of “servants.” This, of course, matches well with the usage of a term like παῖς in the Septuagint. Lots of different figures are called παῖς, not just the servant of Isaiah. So, that’s not to say that the title “servant” isn’t meaningful. It is. It’s just not meaningful in the way that the concept-focused approach assumes.

There are several other related criticisms. For example, the old approach to titles tended to assume that different Christological titles/concepts were mutually exclusive and in competition with one another. They assumed that early in Christian history different groups had their preferred title/concept. For example, Bousset talks about how the Jewish church preferred the title/concept “Messiah” while the Gentile church preferred the title/concept “Lord.” Thus, when authors like Luke use both of these titles together (e.g., Luke 2:11; Acts 2:36), they are trying to blend together what were originally separate, competing ideas in different corners of the early church. The problem with this is that we don’t have evidence that clearly suggests that different groups had their favorite titles or that these titles were seen to be mutually exclusive. In fact, our earliest sources use all kinds of titles to talk about Jesus without seeming to think that they have to pick just one. This makes sense once we realize that titles are not self-contained christologies, but simply key terms used to talk about Jesus.

JN: What do you think scholars got right about the titles of Jesus, and how do you think our engagement with his titles can be improved?

KD: I think that scholars of the old approach were absolutely right to think that titles are an important way that New Testament and other early Christian writings talk about Jesus’ identity and mission. Even so, it was probably good for scholarship to take a break from titles for a while and let the dust settle. However, we simply can’t deal with what New Testament texts want to say about Jesus without dealing with how they use these key terms. You can see this in some of the more dramatic declarations of Jesus’ identity in the New Testament. Peter proclaims that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the Living God” (Matt 16:16). The voice from heaven after Jesus’ baptism says, “You are my beloved Son” (Luke 3:22). The centurion at Jesus’ crucifixion says in Mark’s Gospel: “Truly this man was the Son of God!” (Mark 15:39). In Acts Peter ends his Pentecost speech by saying that God has made Jesus “both Lord and Messiah” (Acts 2:36). Paul will make much of the confession of Jesus as “Lord” (Rom 10:9; Phil 2:11). It didn’t have to be this way, but these documents use titles to summarize and express what they think about Jesus and his significance.

As far as improving our approach to titles, we will do well if we can do three things.

First, as I’ve talked about, we have to be more clear about what titles are and what they are not. They are not concepts. If we want to study titles, then we are studying words and how those words are used. We are not studying concepts. I sometimes see people say that they are going to examine a particular title and then they discuss texts that don’t actually use the title in question. That’s fine if one wants to examine a broader motif, pattern, or idea. But titles are words, not concepts. Another way to think about this is that titles are a literary strategy by which writings build up a particular conception of Jesus, but they are the bricks used to build the house. They are not the house itself.

Second, we will do well if we can learn to study titles alongside other strategies of characterization. For example, Luke’s Gospel does a lot during the account of Jesus’ ministry to portray Jesus as being like Elijah and Elisha. Some of this is explicit (Luke 4:25–27), but much is implicit (Luke 7:11–17; cf. 1 Kings 17:17–24). I think that the Lukan portrayal of Jesus as Messiah is deeply interconnected with these strategies of characterization. Indeed, all these strategies of characterization mutually inform one another on one level or another.

Third, I think we’ll do well if we can learn to talk about Christology in ways that don’t just have to do with divinity. It’s extremely common for discussions of Christology to be little more than a discussion about how “high” or “low” particular writings or titles are. This high/low framing is a vestige from the older, evolutionary approach to the development of Christology and really ought to be abandoned entirely. Instead, I think it’s helpful to think about Christology as any discussion of the identity and mission of Jesus. Questions about Jesus’ relationship with God are one aspect of that. But so are questions about, for example, Jesus’ relationship to Israel’s scriptures, to the temple, and so on.

JN: Of all the titles in the gospels, what is the one that we tend to have the most misconceptions about? How might we better understand that title?

KD: Probably Son of God. This title acts the most like a technical term in modern theological discourse in a way that titles like “Messiah” or “Son of Man” don’t. It’s therefore hard for many of us to hear “Son of God” outside of the context of fully-developed Trinitarian theology. On the other hand, I think some biblical scholars react too strongly to this and argue that “Son of God” is little more than a way of referring to God’s approved ruler with no implications of divinity whatsoever. However, a phrase like “Son of God” can often be a way of talking about divinity of various kinds. It just depends on the particular case. For example, my understanding is that when Roman emperors use the language of divine sonship about themselves, they typically have in mind the idea that they have been adopted by the gods, and they accordingly now have a kind of divine status. Yet in texts like Matthew and Luke’s Gospels, the notion is clearly not merely adoption but because of Mary’s virginal conception of Jesus in both these texts, the use of divine sonship language means something different than it does for Roman emperors. Jesus is not merely adopted by God. All of this is to say that we can’t know exactly what “Son of God” means for various New Testament texts until we actually see how these texts use them. They may use them in new and creative ways that are in conversation with other Jewish or Greco-Roman usage but are not necessarily in lockstep with them.

JN: My final question is whether you have a favourite title to study – and why?

KD: I’d like to do more work on Son of Man. To my mind, it’s a bit of an oddball among the titles. It’s one of the most common in the Gospels, but it’s nearly exclusively found on the lips of Jesus himself. It’s never used anywhere in the Pauline corpus, for example. Even its usage in the Gospels is odd. Jesus uses it all the time, but in contrast to other titles like Messiah or Son of God, it’s never used in some of the more dramatic declarations. For example, it’s almost never used in predication (i.e., “You are the Son of Man!”). With the possible exception of the trial narratives, it’s never something that other characters react strongly to. So in some ways it doesn’t seem to be as “loaded” of a term as some of the other titles. And yet it is also clearly important for the Gospels’ presentation of Jesus that has a rich background of usage in Israel’s scriptures. I’d like to do more work to observe how this title is used in New Testament texts.

JN: This has been really insightful. Thank you for helping us to be more reflective and thoughtful as we approach the Gospels’ titles of Jesus!

If you have enjoyed this interview and want to go deeper, you can now read Dr Davis’ article on this subject in the journal, New Testament Studies: “The Value of Christological Titles, in Conversation with Leander Keck,” NTS 70 n.3 (2024): 357-370.