Are "Jesus" and "Christ" the Same Thing?

I used to think these two terms were synonymously interchangeable. Then I discovered I was uninformed. So what did/does "Christ" mean, then?

Feb 07, 2025

Disclaimer: While this article veers toward the theological/technical end of the spectrum, fear not. I’ve made it easy to read and follow (or at least, I think I did).

I’m gonna make a suggestion for those of us who desire to be better Christians—or to put that differently, to be better at Christianity.

Ready?

Love Christ but Follow Jesus.

What do I mean by that?

Insofar as you set your intentions and affections toward the expression of love, direct that love toward Christ. And then,
Insofar as you set your intentions to live in a particular way, to order you life, and to pattern your behaviors, be a follower of the way of Jesus.

Now, some of you may find this odd because perhaps you (as I once did) believe that “Jesus” and “Christ” are essentially the same thing.

They kinda are,

and they kinda aren’t.

And the “aren’t” part is, I think, important.

Before I get in to that let me address another matter.

Why am I even making this suggestion? What’s the point or purpose?

And that takes me back to something I’ve been exploring quite a bit here on Perspective Shift these past couple months which, broadly speaking, is about what it means to be a Christian in the noun/identity sense versus being Christian in the verb/behavior sense, and then even more precisely what does one mean when they say, “I love Jesus?”

Here’s some of the ground I’ve covered so far:

Exploring the very concept of what it means to love people and things as diverse as tacos, Taylor Swift, or our children.
The concept of loving the “idea” of someone. When you don’t know a person but you feel a kind of love for them, it’s likely that you love a certain idea or projection of that person.
Then I wrote one of my more widely read articles in awhile in which I tried to unpack the differences between being a disciple and being a worshiper.
Next, in one of my favorite things I’ve published in a while but that didn’t seem as popular (as happens), I analyzed the connection between actions and identity. In other words, do you have to be Christian in order to be a Christian?
Finally, I responded to some pushback I received from article #3 (the one contrasting discipleship and worship). Whether or not I succeeded in clarifying my position is yet to be determined.

Today I want to pick up a thread I left dangling at the end of article number 4 where I wrote:

I think this it how it’s possible for people to call themselves “Christian” and not actually be all that Christian. Because their hearts and their intent is more on worshiping, adoring, and (dare I say) even loving Jesus… and not so much focused on actually following, emulating, or living like him.
This is why I tend to aim my love at Christ,
and aim my life at Jesus.

Or, as I’m saying in this article: Love Christ but Follow Jesus.

In the following paragraphs I’ll delve into why and how I make a distinction between Christ and Jesus.

And I’m thinking/writing about all of this because two things matter deeply to me:

Being Christian (aka, acting and living according to the Way of Jesus)
Being a Christian (identifying with the larger movement of those who also aim to be like Jesus)

I want to be better at both. But in order to get better at something you have to actually know what you’re aiming at, otherwise you miss the mark.

(Fun fact: the Greek word most often translated as “sin” is hamartia, which literally came from archery and means, “to miss the mark.” If you’ve never watched my TED talk on this, here ya go.)

Okay then,

why separate “Jesus” and “Christ?”

Buckle up.

It’s about to get interesting.

The Difference Between Jesus and Christ

So you’ve got Jesus (the man born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, crucified by Rome), and then, you’ve got Christ (a term with serious theological and political significance).

Two different but also connected names/terms.

While it’s possible that people did use the term “Christ” with and for Jesus while he was alive (see: Peter’s confession), such a label became ubiquitous for him after his death and resurrection. Then, over time, it evolved to become virtually synonymous with the rabbi from Nazareth.

Let me see if I can map out that trajectory for us.

What did the term Christ originally mean?

The term Christ (Greek: Χριστός, Christos) was the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word Mashiach (משיח), or, Messiah, and meant "Anointed One.”

For the Jewish people (prior to Jesus), the expectation was that one day a Messiah would be sent by God as the long-awaited Savior and Redeemer foretold by prophets long ago.

What would the Messiah do? Well much like today, there was no monolithic view of messianic expectation. Different streams of Jewish thought led to different ideas of who and what the Messiah would be and do.

Broadly speaking, though, we could summarize the hope that the Messiah would:

Be a King and rule Israel (like David);
Be a Prophet (like Moses) and reveal God’s will and instruction;
Be a Priest and restore proper worship to the temple in Jerusalem;
Be an apocalyptic destroyer of evil (the “Son of Man” from Daniel 7);
Be a Savior (lit, liberate) and free Israel from Roman oppression.

Early in Jesus’ ministry there were those who became convinced that he was the Messiah they’d longed for, and that he would do the things mentioned above. Yet, if you recall your Gospel readings, Jesus managed to act both like and unlike the Messiah the people were looking for.

Which confused people at the time (for obvious reasons) and continues to confuse those of us today who are unaware of the culture and context of first century Judaism.

In other words, if you know nothing of the Jewish hopes for a Messiah at the time of Jesus (and I’d argue most Christians do not), and all you know is the post-Jesus “Christian” concept of Messiah/Christ, then you only know part of the picture.

How Jesus Become “the Christ”

After his resurrection (which functioned for his disciples like a divine stamp of approval on Jesus—clearly he was “anointed” by God), his disciples and followers had to do the difficult work of recalibrating their Messianic hopes.

Yes, on one hand they were correct, Jesus was the Messiah/Christ they had been waiting for. But also, on the other hand, it was a different kind of Christ.

Was he…

A King like David?
Yes and no… because his kingdom was “not of this world” (as Jesus told Pilate).
A Prophet like Moses?
Yes and no… he absolutely had a prophetic element to his preaching and claimed to provide insight into God’s will (like Moses) but more often than not he used his voice to critique the religious leaders, ala, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea.
A Priest who restored worship?
Yes and no… Jesus talked about worship being done in spirit and truth, which could effectively be done anywhere (not just the Temple). He inspired people to worship God, yet decentralized how and where and who controlled it.
A liberator like Moses?
Yes and no… because obviously they were still under Roman occupation, and yet when the early followers said “Jesus is Lord,” that was synonymous with saying, “and Caesar is not.”
A Son of Man who destroyed evil?
Yes and no… Jesus identified more with the title of Son of Man than any other, and yet he seemed to use it slightly differently than the Daniel 7 expectations. And his destruction of evil seemed more abstract, metaphorical, and internal (than a literal, external fight against visible powers and principalities).
A Savior?
Yes and no… the Jews were not freed from being under Rome’s boot, but Jesus spoke of and embodied a power, presence, and way of life that overcame things like sin, shame, and death.

Interestingly, the first Christians discovered a kind of hidden gem in their Scriptures that pointed to a Messianic expectation that didn’t seem to get a lot of attention before Jesus, but after him became a central feature of the Christ.

A Suffering Servant
Inspired by Isaiah 53, rather than political dominance, the Christ would bear the sins of the people and restore righteousness through suffering.

So yes, the first Christians came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah.

But it required having their presuppositions about what that meant getting flipped upside down.

How it Started: Jesus the Christ

There’s an interesting development in the New Testament where the earliest accounts of the first Christians talk about Jesus as being “the Christ” (which makes sense based on what we’ve discussed so far). But then later on, as the church grew and developed, the term Christ functioned less as a title for what Jesus was and more as metaphor for what he represented, embodied, and points people to.

Check this out…

Notice Peter’s explanation in his first ever sermon,

"Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ." -Acts 2:36

Implication being, it’s not so much that Jesus was Christ (like we tend to think of him today), but that God made him to be the Christ after his death and resurrection.

Again from Acts, as the earliest disciples kept putting more and more theological and socio-political pieces together:

"Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Christ." -Acts 5:42

Let’s do one more,

"Yet Saul grew more and more powerful and baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Christ." -Acts 9:22

I’m hoping that verse makes more sense to you now? Saul (eventually, Paul) baffled Jews by demonstrating to them that Jesus was “the Christ.”

What was baffling to them? The fact that Jesus was “the Christ.”

Why? Because he didn’t seem to be the King, Liberator, Priest, Savior that they expected!

But Paul (and the others) were convinced otherwise. Which is why the church began by preaching that Jesus “is the Christ.”

As the author of 1 John put it,

"Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God." -1 John 5:1

How it Ended: Jesus Christ (or, just Christ)

Now let’s fast forward 30 years or so to when some of the later letters of the New Testament were written—especially by Paul.

Notice how Paul writes about “Jesus” and “Christ:”

Ephesians 1:3 — "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ."
2 Corinthians 13:5 — "Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you—unless, of course, you fail the test?"
Galatians 3:28 — "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

Paul shifted from describing Jesus as “the Christ” to smushing the two together as Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus.

Even more interesting is that more often than not Paul would write “Christ” without any mention of Jesus:

Romans 10:4 — "Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes."
2 Corinthians 5:17 — "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come."
Philippians 4:13 — "I can do all this through Christ who gives me strength."
Colossians 1:27 — "To them God has chosen to make known... this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory."

What are we to make of that?

It’s fine if the answer is, “I don’t know,” because that’s close to my own answer.

'But I do think it’s something of note (and this is key!) to observe the development:

of talking about Jesus as “the Christ,” to
calling him “Jesus Christ,” and then
eventually just saying “Christ.”

What Did the Term “Christ” Come to Mean?

I’ll wrap this up with a thought about the term/idea/concept of Christ as taught by Father Richard Rohr in his book, The Universal Christ.

According to Rohr, Christ is a way to name the divine manifestation present in all creation from the beginning. While Christ was uniquely and fully manifest in the person of Jesus, by no means should we expect that he was (or is) the only place where the Divine is present.

The Divine is (as Paul preached in Acts 17) the one in whom we live and move and have our being.

All things are in-God, if you will.

Paul Tillich described God as the ground of Being. All that was, is, or will be, emerges from God.

And Christ, to go back to Rohr, is God’s ongoing incarnational presence.

Christ is a kind of bridge between the material and spiritual worlds.

Christ is a cosmic force that transcends time and space, embodying God's presence in everything.

We might be closer to getting to the meaning of “Christ” if we think about it as a metaphor trying to put language to the ineffable, rather than as a last name or even synonym for “Jesus.”

Conclusion: Christ is different than Jesus

So while the term Christ (aka, Messiah) began as more of a political term, over time it slowly took on more spiritual and theological connotations—including to mean divine.*

Christ was not only a term to declare Jesus as the long awaited Messiah, but it also evolved to become a way of describing the very real presence of God in all things (similar to the Old Testament “Emmanuel,” God with us).

Here’s how I would briefly describe that evolution:

First there’s Jesus - a rabbi/teacher that people followed because of his teachings and his miraculous abilities; then
Jesus the Possible Messiah - people wanting to make him King (as they assumed the Messiah would be), but he refused; then
Jesus the Christ - in his overcoming of death he forced people to rethink what it meant to be their Messiah; then
Jesus Christ - a kind of meta, combo-name that held together both the historical person and the theological beliefs and understandings people held about him; then finally
Christ - a metaphor to point to the always-true reality that we exist within God, that God is with and in and for us, and that all things are one.

And that is why, in conclusion, I think it’s not only permissible to think about “Jesus” and “Christ” separately, but such a move can also be beneficial when it comes to being a Christian.