Chosen One
Chosen One
CHOSEN ONE.This, like Beloved (wh. see), seems to have been a pre-Christian designation of the Messiah, occurs in the LXX Septuagint of Isa 42:1, and is there defined as . But in the Book of Enoch the Elect one is a common title of the Messiah (cf. 40:5, 49:2, 51:3, 5, 52:6, 9, 61:5, 8, 10, 62:1). Traces of it still survive in the Gospels, but there seems to have been a tendency to avoid its use, perhaps on the ground that it might seem to favour so-called Adoptionist views of the nature of Christs relation to God. Luk 9:35 substitutes (BL [Note: L Bampton Lecture.] (I), 274mg Syr Sin a ff. 1. vg. codd. aeg. aeth.cod. arm) for Mk.s , and in Luk 23:35 we have the Messiah of God, the Elect. Elsewhere the evidence is more doubtful, occurs in Joh 1:34 in * [Note: In the Latin text (OS2 114. 7) the name is spelt Chorazin, not Chorozain, as stated in Encyc. Bibl., where also the modern name Kerzeh is once spelt with K, as if it were .] 77, 218, Syr Sin Curse, and is adopted by Burkitt, Evangelion da-Mepharreshe, ii. 309. Lastly, approved Son is given by Syr Sin in Joh 3:18 for . St. Mark and the editor of the First Gospel after him seem to have avoided the of the LXX Septuagint (Isa 42:1) in their accounts of the Baptism and Transfiguration, and to have fallen back on a Christianized version of Isa 42:1 preserved for us in Mat 12:18-21, in which had taken the place of of the LXX Septuagint .
Connected with the use of this title of the Messiah in the Gospels is the question as to the meaning of the aorist in Mar 1:11 = Mat 3:17 = Luk 3:22. Bacon (Journ. Theol. Lit. xvi. 136139) urges that this means (on whom) I fixed my choice, i.e. whom I elected, and refers in the thought of the Evangelist to the Divine election of Christ by God (cf. AJTh [Note: JTh American Journal of Theology.] ix. 451 ff.). So far as the First Gospel goes, there is much to be said for this. We might bring together the following passages Luk 3:17, Luk 17:5 , Luk 11:27 , LUK 28:18 , and possibly the of Mat 10:40; Mat 15:24, as all in the mind of the Evangelist referring to the Divine choice, endowment, and mission of the eternally existing Son (cf. Mat 11:27) into the world. To these should be added the citation in Mat 12:18 Behold my son (servant?) whom I adopted, my beloved in whom my soul was well pleased, where the aorists are most easily explained as expressing the Divine selection and appointment of the Messiah in a pre-temporal period. In the thought of the Evangelist, Jesus, born of the Virgin by the Holy Spirit, was the pre-existent Messiah (= Beloved) or Son (Mat 11:27) who had been forechosen by God (Mat 3:17, Mat 17:5), and who, when born into the world as Jesus, was God-with-us (Mat 1:23). In this respect the writer of the First Gospel shows himself to be under the influence of the same conception of the Person of Christ that dominates the Johannine theology, though this conception under the categories of the Logos and the Divine Son is worked out much more fully in the Fourth than in the First Gospel. On the other hand, terms such as choice, adoption, which at an early period seem to have been borrowed from the Jewish Messianic doctrine to express it, and which survive here and there in the Synoptic Gospels and in the Acts (cf. Act 9:22 [Fl. Gig.] and 2Pe 1:17) are absent from St. John. Such terms were probably gradually dropped out of use because they could be used to support the view of the adoption of the man Jesus to be the Son of God, which they certainly did not originally express.
W. C. Allen.