Top 10 Titles of Jesus in the Gospels

Names and titles are important in the Bible. They are one of the key features to observe about a passage, because an author uses names and titles of characters to convey meaning. Titles can even provide clues about the author’s main point of an epistle!

Like many of our readers, I have found my co-blogger Peter Krol’s research on the NT use of the OT valuable, and I thought a similar project involving the titles used for Jesus in the Gospels could be useful.

The Criteria

In order to make the project tractable, I needed to define my terms. What do I mean by a title of Jesus? To start with, I considered roles, job names, or honorifics. I also required that the reference in the text be explicit, not merely implied.

Finally, I decided to view the titles of Jesus through each Gospel author’s perspective. In other words, if the author saw something as a role, job, or honorific of Jesus, then I would include this in my count. (Many thanks to Peter for his help in nailing this down.)

What are the implications? I included all references made by Jesus to himself as the “Son of Man,” because the Gospel authors seem to want their readers to attach this title to Jesus. (Not everyone who heard Jesus refer to himself in this way knew what was going on!) Additionally, I did not include the metaphorical references by Jesus to himself as “the vine,” “the light of the world,” etc., in John, because while understanding these self-references is important, these are not roles, jobs, or honorifics.

Additionally, I have collapsed some of the titles for the sake of counting commonality. Though you may think of “good teacher” as a separate title from “teacher,” I have just listed the title as “teacher” for Mark 10:17 and Luke 18:18 to match the many other uses of that title.

Other people may conceive of the Titles of Jesus differently than me, and that’s okay! I had to draw the lines somewhere, and this is where I landed. You can see an exhaustive list of the titles of Jesus in this spreadsheet.

If you catch any mistakes I’ve made (and I’m sure there are plenty), please point them out. I’d love for this work to be as accurate as possible.

Top 10 Titles

With all this as preamble, here are the top ten titles of Jesus as they appear in the Gospels. Do any of these surprise you?

1. Lord (97 times)
2. Son of Man (80 times)
3. teacher (39 times)
4. Christ (35 times) — includes “Christ of God” and “Christ the Lord”
5. Son (30 times)
6. Son of God (30 times) — includes “Son of the Blessed,” “Son of the living God,” “Son of the Most High,” and “Son of the Most High God”
7. king of the Jews/Israel (22 times)
8. Rabbi (13 times)
9. Son of David (12 times)
10. Jesus of Nazareth (10 times)

In future articles, I will look at each Gospel writer’s use of titles for Jesus as well as some of the most common titles themselves.

Titles themselves are just words; they never tell a whole story without a proper look at the context. However, the way an author consistently refers to a character can reveal a lot about how the author wants the reader to view that character.