A Table of Christological Titles in Early Christian Writings

For some reason, I’ve never seen a simple table of some christological titles as presented in the early Christian writings, even though it would be very handy to have. So I made my own.

I started out including fragmentary and quoted writings, but midway through I decided to put them in a separate table (incomplete). Both the entries and the blanks in the table are meaningful, but those blanks are much less meaningful with a short, fragmentary text. Some texts with substantial fragments, such as the Gospel of Peter, are shown.

I certainly wouldn’t mind if anybody would like to mention some of my errors of omission and other mistakes. Please do. I would be very happy to improve the table.

Further work to be done could be to add more christological titles, to design different arrangements or charts, to note any difficulties of ambiguous interpretation, to integrate data about presumed dates of authorship, to extend this table to the entire Nag Hammadi Library (not just the texts that are part of the Early Christian Writings site), and of course to add the rest of the fragmentary and quoted writings.

Still, I’d like to release this first draft now, below.

Here is the incomplete table of fragmentary and quoted writings.

A note regarding the “Son” column: the references to “Son of God” and “Son of Man” were also counted as references in this column. Also, references using alternative titles for God, such as “the Most High,” were not counted as “Son of God” references.

There’s some interesting observations you can make right away from the table of complete writings. For example, “Jesus” and “Christ” are highly correlated terms. Further, the term “Christ,” with one possible exception in the Odes of Solomon, never appears in one of these Christian texts without the name “Jesus” also present. One factor behind this may be the way that “Jesus Christ” becomes a title of itself, composed of both parts.

But there is something about the works that do not include either term. These include 3 John (short) and some second century apologists (often assumed to avoid it for reasons of audience and purpose in writing). They also include the Shepherd of Hermas, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and many texts from the Nag Hammadi Library. The Odes of Solomon, without the term Jesus and with the term Christ often taken as a reference to “the Messiah” as the concept instead of the person, may belong here too. There’s an entire mass of literature that is believed to be Christian (or Gnostic) that doesn’t talk about Jesus Christ by name, even in the texts that actually have dialogues with him exclusively by other names, and that’s interesting. (More texts, such as the Apocryphon of John, could be claimed to this group if some few, simple glosses have been made to them.)

The Gospel of Thomas and the Book of Thomas the Contender avoid the term “Christ.” This is, seemingly, a feature of “Thomasine” belief, if there were such a group. (The Gospel of Thomas also has the lowest christology of all texts if judging by the christological titles, which is undoubtedly one of the features that has attracted modern fascination.)

Some have argued that the term “Savior” belongs to the second century, not the first, and have used this in arguments for the dating of texts, such as the Gospel of Luke. The reference in Philippians 3:20 and some of the texts of less certain date (such as Eugnostos the Blessed and the Odes of Solomon) could contradict this.

I hope you find this table useful. Please do submit any corrections or comments so that I can make it more useful.