In the book of Luke, Luke records Jesus saying, “Everyone who comes to Me and hears My words and acts on them, I will show you whom he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid a foundation on the rock; and when a flood occurred, the torrent burst against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built. But the one who has heard and has not acted accordingly, is like a man who built a house on the ground without any foundation; and the torrent burst against it and immediately it collapsed, and the ruin of that house was great.” (Luke 6:47-49)

In a recent OpEd in the WSJ by Dr. Albert Mohler about homosexual marriage, Mohler starts by saying, “The Christian church has faced no shortage of challenges in its 2,000-year history. But now it’s facing a challenge that is shaking its foundations: homosexuality.”

So, I wonder, what is Mohler’s foundation? It doesn’t appear to be Jesus.

I know Mohler is a follower of Jesus… I am merely using him as an example of two things. 1) We ought to be careful of the words we use when we try to spark emotional reactions from people and 2) We ought to be able to discern hype when we read it. In fact, I seriously doubt Mohler actually believes that homosexuality is shaking the foundations of Christianity.

Since tomorrow is the popular Christian celebrated holiday called Christmas I decided that it would be a good time to talk about the word “Christ” and perhaps take “Christ” out of Christmas. The word “Christ” is similar to “Baptize,” in the sense that the word is found in our English translations because it is a transliteration of a Greek word. In this case, Christ is a transliteration of “Χριστος.” In my opinion this is not as damaging as transliterating a word like Baptize because there is no real debate as to what “Christ” means. But still, I have the same complaint, how does anyone know what “Christ” means?

I wonder how many untrained newcomers to follow Jesus believe that Christ was his last name. Before I was a follower, I always treated it as his last name and did not think about it. For those of you who do not know, “Christ” or “Χριστος” translates to “the Anointed One or the Messiah.” Some translations switch between Messiah and Christ as translations, most of them stick with Christ.

The Facts

1. The NASB translates Χριστος as “the Messiah” 4 times. (Matthew 1:1,16,17; 2:4)
2. The NASB translates Χριστος as “Christ” 528 times in the New Testament.
3. Χριστιανος occurs 3 times in the New Testament and the NASB translates  as “Christian” each time.
4. Χριστος occurs 529 times in the New Testament (an additional 11 times in the Septuagint — Greek translation of the Old Testament).
5. There is a discrepancy 3 times where the word Christ appears in the NASB but Χριστος is not found in the Greek manuscripts for those verses (Acts 8:37, 20:21; Romans 16:24). NOTE: In Romans 16:24 Χριστος appears in the Byzantine manuscripts, which are not generally used by the NASB.
6. There is also a Greek word Μεσσιας which is a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew word for Messiah. It occurs twice in the New Testament. (John 1:41, 4:25)

Conclusion

As I already said, this transliteration really does not lead to any major conflicts. Although some people probably do not know what “Christ” means, it is fairly easy to find out. Generally when someone is talking about Jesus Christ we know who they are referring to and what people believe he is. However, I would still like to see the word translated properly, to something like “the Messiah” or “the anointed One”. But even those translations could be confusing. Also, in the spirit of Christmas, we should take Christ out and replace it with Messiah.

So, Happy Messiahmas everyone!