Confusing something? Now THAT may well be true.
Please feel free to school us/me.
Is that what the lexicographers are doing as well?
Let me just take a lengthy quote from one of my articles:
From the
Strongest Strongs Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, heres the definition of Christos:
Christ, Anointed One, Messiah, the Greek translation of the Hebrew 4899 (cf. Greek 3323). The Messiah is the Son of David, an anointed leader expected to bring in an age of peace and liberty from all oppression. In the NT, the Messiah is Jesus, who came first to bring liberty from sin and peace with God and who will come again to bring all things under His control [6]
In the New Testament,
chrio is used five times, two of which refer to Jesus Baptism [Luke 4:18, Acts 10:38], another most likely to His Baptism [Acts 4:27][7], and once at or after His Resurrection or Ascension [Heb 1:9; cf. Ps 45:6-7, Isa 61:3, Php 2:9][8]. In the remaining instance,
chrio is used to refer to Holy Spirit-endued Christians [II Cor 1:21]. The noun form of
chrio is
chrisma, anointing,[9] which is used only three times, and each time in Johns first epistle to denote the Holy Spirit anointing of believers [once in I John 2:20, twice in 2:27].
Both
chrio and
chrisma are always used in a
sacred and symbolic sense; whereas, the Greek words
aleipho [Matt. 6:17; Mark 6:13, 16:1; Luke 7:38,46; John 11:2, 12:3; James 5:14],
epichrio [John 9:6,11],
enchrio [Rev 3:18], and
murizo [Mark 14:8], which are also translated anoint/ed/ing, are always used in a
physical sense [10] in the NT.
The word Messiah is only used twice in the New Testament although it is derived from the Aramaic rather than the Hebrew [11]. This term is used solely in the Gospel of John [1:41, 4:25] and each time it is used in conjunction with
Christos presumably for emphasis of Jesus Christs deity. It is therefore noteworthy that when the word Christ, (
Christos) is used in the NT, it is exclusively for the person of Jesus Christ and nothing or no one else (except when Jesus Himself is referring to false Christs as in Matthew 24). As both Louis Berkhof and Wayne Grudem illustrate in each of their respective Systematic Theologys, Christ is a term denoting His divinity.[12][13]
Unfortunately, many online lexicons define
Christos as
Christ = anointed which is misleading and confusing. In the NT,
Christos, though derived from
chrio which means to anoint as noted above, is defining the unique Christ, Messiah, Son of God and He is thus the Anointed One as per the two sources for definitions above. While Christians are anointed by the Holy Spirit at baptism, we are obviously not referred to as Christ (
Christos) upon baptism; and, furthermore, Jesus was described as Jesus Christ at the virgin birth which means the term was applied to Him prior to Baptism...rather than later at His Baptism by John as these online definitions would suggest...
The confusion likely stems from the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament from which early Catholic Bibles have been translated. (Interestingly, many NT quotes from the OT are taken from the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew Masoretic Text.) The term
christos is rendered as anointed in Lev 4: 4, Lev 6:22, 1 Samuel 2:10 (appropriate by the contexts) as well as a few other passages[14] and designated with a lower case rather than a capital c. In Psalm 2:2, the C in this term is capitalized (
Christos) since this is considered a Messianic passage (prophecy about the coming Messiah). This distinction in uncapitalization/capitalization is illustrated in Brentons The Septuagint with the Apocrypha: Greek and English[15]. In the NT, Im reasonably sure the convention of capitalizing Christos in each and every instance is followed in both the NA27
Novum Testamentum Graece and the UBS4
The Greek New Testament.
And does the anointing include doing supernatural things?
