odied in the teachings of Jesus. Peter's epiphany at the Pentecost touches on this by quoting from the book of Joel: "God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy" (Acts 2:17). Peter goes on to explain that even death at the hands of lawless men could not contain Jesus' spirit.
Significantly, Peter identifies Jesus with the Jews' messiah: "God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified" (Acts 2:36). "Israel" is exhorted to be baptized, to receive the "promise" and "gift" of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:33,38). Significantly, this gift is not material but spiritual, its formal constituent being in the shape of teaching and prayer. Equally significant is the shift in terminology, a feature of the shift in the textual language of Scripture from Aramaic or Hebrew to Greek. The messiah, a Hebrew word that the dictionary says means "the anointed," becomes the Christ, in Greek Christós. One could say that the terminology is a distinction without a difference, since the meanings of messiah and Christ are equivalent. However, language bespeaks cultural identity, and it shapes cultural content. That idea is in the background of Schonfeld's citation of Burkitt's comment that the story of Christianity is "more confused, more secular, in a word more appropriate to the limitations of its own age, than we should gather from the epic selectiveness of the Creeds and the theological manuals" (12). Schonfeld, whose flamboyantly titled Passover Plot conceals a serious interpretation of the Crucifixion, continues:
[Burkitt's] language is necessary, and should be heeded by those theologians who feel at liberty to expound Christianity as if it owed little or nothing to its original background of thought. [A certain bishop] freely employ[s] key words like Christ and Gospel without apparent concern for t heir primary meaning and implicatios. Christ is the Greek translation o...