We’ve already worked out when the New Testament documents were written, and traced what Paul says, what Acts adds to it, and what the Gospels give us that Paul never mentions. A question waits underneath all of that work, one we haven’t asked directly yet. When these writers say “Jesus Christ,” or “Jesus of Nazareth,” or “the Nazarenes,” what do those words actually mean? Who named what, after what, and when? These questions are not trivial. Whole theologies are folded into these names, and reading them as though they were transparent labels misses almost everything that matters.

Christ Is Not a Last Name

The most common misreading in popular Christianity treats “Christ” as though it were Jesus’s surname, the family name he was born with, the second half of a proper name like John Smith. It isn’t. “Christ” is a title, and understanding what the title carries means going back behind the Greek to the Hebrew it translates.

The Greek word is Christos, from the verb chriō, to anoint with oil. It renders the Hebrew mashiach, which carries the same meaning: the anointed one. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures in wide use throughout the first century, renders all thirty-nine instances of mashiach in the Hebrew Bible as Christos. Greek and Hebrew aren’t offering two different concepts here. They’re the same concept in two languages, and the English words “Christ” and “Messiah” are simply transliterations of the Greek and Hebrew respectively, which is why they sound different even though they mean the same thing.

Anointing in the Hebrew scriptures was a ritual act with a fixed set of uses. Oil was poured on a person’s head to consecrate them for a role, to mark them as set apart for a divine purpose. Three categories of people were anointed in the Hebrew Bible: kings, priests, and occasionally prophets. The language of the anointed one attached most naturally, and most often, to kings. When Hannah prays in 1 Samuel 2:10 that God will give strength to his king and exalt the horn of his anointed, mashiach, she is using the term for the Davidic royal line. When Psalm 2:2 describes the kings of the earth setting themselves against the Lord and his anointed, the term again is mashiach. The anointed one is, in the first instance, a king, and the king of Israel was anointed rather than crowned.

Here’s the complication. By the Second Temple period, running roughly from the return from Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE through the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, the term had picked up a weight of expectation that reached far past its original job of naming a reigning king. There was no single, unified messianic expectation in first-century Judaism, and to state this directly: there is no agreed-upon job description for the Messiah existed that all Jews of the period accepted.[1] Different groups expected different things. The Psalms of Solomon, a Jewish text from the first century BCE, envision a Davidic king who will purge Jerusalem of Gentile rulers and establish an earthly kingdom of justice. The Dead Sea Scrolls speak of two messiahs, one royal and one priestly. Some apocalyptic texts envision a heavenly figure, the Son of Man, something other than a Davidic political king. The Roman-period Jewish writer Josephus doesn’t even treat messianic expectation as a central category in his descriptions of Judaism.

What this means is that when Paul writes Iēsous Christos, Jesus the Anointed, he isn’t simply applying a fixed, universally understood label. He is making a claim that Jesus fulfills a hope that was itself contested and imagined differently across the Judaism of his time. To a Jewish audience the claim would have registered immediately as a statement about Jesus’s relationship to the Davidic royal tradition and the divine purposes for Israel. To a Gentile audience it would have landed differently, closer to a title of authority and divine appointment than to the fulfillment of a specific Jewish hope. When “Christ” later became just part of Jesus’s name in Gentile Christianity, stripped of its tie to mashiach and the Davidic hope, something real was lost, the title thinning into a name, the claim collapsing into a label, until what had once been theology settled into simple nomenclature.

Paul’s use of Christos rewards careful attention, because it isn’t always functioning as a name in his letters. In Galatians 3:16, he presses the singular form of the word “seed” in the Abrahamic promise specifically to argue that the promise was made to Christ, the singular heir. In Romans 9:5, he calls Christ the one who is over all, God blessed forever, a statement of cosmic authority that the word “Christ” is carrying as a title, not a name tag. When Paul says en Christō, in Christ, dozens of times across his letters, he is using the word to mark out a sphere of existence, a location inside the new reality that Christ’s death and resurrection have opened up. The most concentrated single statement of what “Christ” means for Paul may be 1 Corinthians 1:24, where he describes the crucified Christ, to those who are called, as “the power of God and the wisdom of God.” That formulation does something radical. The anointed one, the king from David’s line, the figure expected to restore Israel’s sovereignty, turns out in Paul’s reading to be not a political liberator but the very power by which God acts in the world and the very intelligence by which God orders it. The title has been pried open and something cosmic dropped inside it. The anointed one becomes, for Paul, a figure whose identity reaches out to absorb everyone incorporated into him. That is a long way from a king being anointed with oil in Jerusalem, though it is still the direct theological growth of the same root term.

Nazareth, Nazarene, and the Branch

“Jesus of Nazareth” is the geographic identifier that becomes fixed in the Gospel tradition. In Mark’s Gospel he is called Jesus of Nazareth at his first appearance in the synagogue at Capernaum (Mark 1:24), and the title follows him through the narrative. In John’s Gospel, the inscription on the cross reads “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews” (John 19:19). In Acts 2:22, Peter’s Pentecost speech identifies him as “Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power.”

The name Nazareth never appears in the Hebrew Bible. No text before the New Testament documents mentions it, and Josephus, who describes Galilee in real detail, never refers to it either, which has led some readers to question whether the town existed at all in the first century, though archaeological work in the twentieth century confirmed a settlement at the site during the relevant period.[2] The town was small and apparently obscure. When Nathanael hears in John 1:46 that Jesus comes from Nazareth, he responds, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” The question reflects a real regional contempt, and it’s likely that in the earliest period the identifier “the Nazarene” or “the Nazarean” functioned partly as a term of social dismissal, a marker of provincial insignificance.

The origin of the name Nazareth remains obscure, and it is better to admit that than to pretend the evidence is clearer than it is. Two possibilities have drawn most of the attention. The first traces the name to the Hebrew nazar, to watch or guard, suggesting the town occupied a position above the valley as a lookout point. The second, and more theologically loaded, traces the name to netzer, the Hebrew word for branch or shoot. Isaiah 11:1 uses netzer in one of the key messianic passages of the Hebrew Bible: “There shall come forth a Rod from the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots.” The branch that grows from the apparently dead stump of the Davidic line is the figure of the coming anointed king.

Matthew 2:23 tries to make this connection outright. Having narrated the Holy Family’s return from Egypt and their settlement in Nazareth, Matthew writes, “So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.” The trouble generations of readers have flagged is that no specific prophetic text says this anywhere. No verse in Isaiah or Jeremiah or anywhere else predicts the Messiah will be called a Nazarene. Matthew writes “the prophets” in the plural rather than “the prophet,” which suggests he is invoking a cluster of prophetic images rather than citing a single text. The one that fits most naturally is Isaiah 11:1, where netzer, branch, names the messianic figure from Jesse’s line. If “Nazarene” is read as “one who is a netzer,” a branch, the connection works as wordplay in Hebrew, though it disappears completely in Greek, which is itself a telling detail about how Matthew’s Gospel thinks and who it was written for.

Jerome, the fourth-century biblical translator who knew Hebrew well, made this connection outright in his commentaries, reading Nazareth in reference to the Hebrew netzer, branch, and citing Isaiah 11:1 by name.[3] The Catholic Encyclopedia followed his reading.[4] Whether the town was actually named for its position on a hillside, or whether the connection to Isaiah’s branch produced the name in the first place, or whether Matthew is reading messianic significance into a geographic coincidence, the texts themselves never settle the question. What the wordplay establishes, regardless of etymology, is that the earliest readers of Matthew’s Gospel were being invited to hear “Jesus the Nazarean” as “Jesus the Branch,” the shoot from Jesse’s stump that Isaiah had promised.

The Nazarenes: Who They Were

The word “Nazarenes” as a collective term for followers of Jesus turns up in Acts 24:5, where a lawyer named Tertullus accuses Paul before the Roman governor Felix of being “a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes.” The term comes from outside, a label the accusers pin on the movement rather than one it claims for itself. Paul, in his response, neither accepts nor rejects it. He calls the movement “the Way” and claims to worship the God of the ancestors (Acts 24:14). As established earlier, Paul himself never uses “Nazarenes” as a name for his communities in any of the seven authentic letters.

What the historical record gives us beyond this single Acts reference comes almost entirely from writers who regarded the Nazarenes as a problem. The fullest account comes from Epiphanius, a bishop born in Palestine who wrote his Panarion, a compendium of heresies, between 374 and 377 CE.[5] Panarion 29 treats the Nazarenes as a distinct Jewish-Christian sect. By Epiphanius’s account, they were originally Jewish believers in Jesus who fled Jerusalem before the Roman siege of 70 CE, taking refuge in Pella in the Transjordan, and spreading from there to Beroea near Coele-Syria, to the Decapolis, and to Bashan. They confessed Jesus as the Christ and Son of God, and they accepted the virgin birth, a belief that set them apart from the Ebionites, another Jewish-Christian group that rejected it. Continued observance of the Law of Moses is what Epiphanius actually held against them, since he argued that Torah observance after the coming of Christ could not coexist with Christian faith.

Augustine described them as confessing Christ to be the Son of God while observing the Law, which Christians were taught to keep not in the flesh but in spirit. Jerome, who actually encountered Nazarenes and had access to their Gospel, the Gospel according to the Hebrews in its Hebrew or Aramaic form, described them in his own fourth century as those “who accept Messiah in such a way that they do not cease to observe the old Law.” He placed them in Beroea of Syria, near Aleppo, matching Epiphanius’s account.[6]

What the Nazarenes believed, drawn from these patristic sources with the caution their bias demands, was a form of Jewish Christianity that predated the split between Judaism and what would become Gentile Christianity. They were Jews who believed Jesus was the Messiah and saw no contradiction between that belief and continued Torah observance, and the Gospel they used was a version of Matthew in Hebrew or Aramaic rather than the Greek text in wider circulation. Alongside other Jewish sectarians, they appear to have been cursed in the synagogue as well. Epiphanius reports that Jews stood three times daily to curse the Nazoraeans by name in their synagogue prayers. They were eventually condemned as heretics by the emerging Catholic church, not for denying Christ but for the opposite reason, for continuing to live as Jews while confessing him.

The irony in this history runs deep. The term “Nazarenes” began as what looks like an outsider label for the early Jesus movement, tied to the geographic identifier “Jesus of Nazareth” and possibly to the messianic resonance of netzer, the branch. Opponents used it before Felix to describe a sect they wanted suppressed. By the fourth century it named a specific Jewish-Christian community that the orthodox church judged too bound to the Law to count as properly Christian, and too committed to Jesus to count as properly Jewish. They eventually disappeared from the historical record, squeezed out from both sides.

The community Epiphanius describes in Panarion 29 may represent the closest historical continuity with the Jerusalem community that existed before Paul wrote a single letter. They were Jews who believed in Jesus, kept the Law, and didn’t think these commitments contradicted each other. Whether they preserved an early tradition that the later Gentile church lost, or whether they were a conservative holdout the movement as a whole had moved past, the sources don’t settle cleanly, and I’d rather leave that open than force an answer the evidence can’t support. What they show is that the earliest followers of Jesus were not called Christians, did not call themselves followers of the Way, and were not easily separated, in the beginning, from the Judaism that had produced both them and the figure they followed.

What the Names Reveal

Lay these three terms side by side and they show a movement working out its identity through its own language. “Christ” translates mashiach, carrying the full weight of the Davidic royal hope and the Second Temple’s contested messianic expectations, and as the movement spread into the Greek-speaking world it became first a title, then a name, shedding its Hebrew freight along the way. “Jesus of Nazareth” is the geographic identifier that roots the figure in a specific Galilean landscape, probably obscure and socially marginal, while carrying through Matthew’s wordplay an echo of Isaiah’s messianic branch. “The Nazarenes” is a label that began outside the movement, drew its resonance from the same root as Nazareth, and eventually came to name a specific Jewish-Christian community holding together commitments the later church would call incompatible.

None of these names is simple. Each one folds in a compressed argument about who Jesus was, where he came from, what his coming meant, and who the people following him actually were. Reading them as neutral labels reads them too fast. The theology lives inside the names, and it was contested from the start.

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Footnotes:

[1] Amy-Jill Levine, “Bearing False Witness: Common Errors Made about Early Judaism,” in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, 2nd ed., ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 759–763.

[2] Ken Dark, Nazareth and Its Hinterland from the Late Persian to the Twentieth Century AD (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2020).

[3] Jerome. Epistula 46 (Ad Marcellam), §13. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 6, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893.

[4] Hugh Pope. “Nazareth.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 10. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911.

[5] Epiphanius of Salamis. The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis. Translated by Frank Williams. 2nd ed. Leiden: Brill, 2009.

[6] Jerome, Commentary on Isaiah 8:14; De Viris Illustribus 3; Against Pelagius 3.2; cf. Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion 29.7.7-8, in The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, trans. Frank Williams, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2009).