In a total nitpick, I’ll note that Paul mentions Luke in Philemon, and then agree that there’s zero reason to attribute Luke-Acts to this particular Luke.
I’m not an expert (at all) in Hebrew, but looking around a bit, I disagree. Wikipedia says this:
So maybe there was a difference in priests and kings being annointed, and then saying someone was “The Annointed One,” but isn’t it still true that the Jews in Jerusalem would never have referred to this country bumpkin rabble-rouser as being either a capital-M Messiah or a simply annointed messiah? My point was that the notion that the “Chrestus” could have referred to Jesus simply does not hold up to scrutiny.
~shrugs~
Some might. Cultic offshoots of Judaism prophesying/following a new king of the Jews were hardly unknown. And again, you’re thinking in the wrong terms. They weren’t looking for a messiah, capital M or not. It’s not the same sort of a concept.
They had an expectation that an heir to the throne of David would restore the kingdom of Israel. Yes, “anointed ones” were standard Jewish designations for priests and kings, but they were still expecting an upper case “Anointed One” who would be both King and high priest (ala David) and restore the Davidic kingdom. This particular “Anointed” was still a human king, and Christianity took this concept in a completely different direction, but as to the semantic facts above, Christos was the Greek word for “Anointed.”
Yeshua Moshiach and Iesous Christos both mean “Jesus the Anointed” (with whatever meaning any given group wants to pack into “Anointed”…it’s essentially the equivalent of saying “King Jesus”), and neither of them has a connection to the name, Chrestus, which comes from a different Greek root.
Ya know, the last time this came up for me was well over a decade ago, in a conversation at work. I said one thing, went to the library after work and got a book out about it, and found out I was wrong. I went in the next day and corrected myself. I apparently have once again misremembered, and went and made the same damn mistake again. Thanks for the correction.
Regarding “Chrestus”, it is true that this name was used for slaves–Cicero had a slave by this name–and obviously is derived from the Greek χρήστον - “useful”.
However, some Christian writers remark that Latin speakers often mispronounced the term as “Chrestians”; Tertullian in his Apology (addressed generally to the * Romani imperii antistites* - “Rulers of the Roman empire”–is an example:
Note also that Tertullian is picking up on the Greek χρήστον when he refers to “sweetness and benignity”, a bit of wordplay from an otherwise stern (and IMO boring) Latin writer.