or the Righteous Sufferer. The proposal that the confession of Jesus as Messiah is primary is something of a novelty. The thesis is not my own. I learned it from my teacher Nils Alstrup Dahl, who has offered both a highly detailed and a comprehensive account of christological origins in his various essays and still-unpublished lectures on NT Christology. His subtle—and largely neglected—argument only improves with age. The confession of Jesus as Messiah, he argues, can be derived neither from Jesus’