Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ Jeffery1938: »It is used only as a title of Jesus, and only in late ‎passages when Muḥammad’s knowledge of the teachings of the People of the Book is much ‎advanced. – The Muslim authorities usually take it as an Ar word from masaḥa ‘to wipe’ ‎‎(Ṭab. on iii, 20). Others said it was from masaḥa ‘to smear’ or ‘anoint’ (Rāghib, Mufradāt, 484), ‎others derived it from sāḥa ‘to travel’ (LA, iii, 431), and some, like Zam. and Bayḍ., rejected ‎these theories and admitted that it was a borrowed word. – Those Muslim philologers who noted it ‎as foreign, claimed that it was Hbr, and this has been accepted by many Western ‎scholars,¹ though such a derivation is extremely unlikely. Hirschfeld, Beiträge, 89, would ‎derive it from Aram ‎MŠYḤā, which is possible, though as it is used in early Ar particularly with ‎regard to Jesus, we are safer in holding with Fraenkel, Vocab, 24,² that it is from Syr məšīḥā especially as this is the source of the Arm mesiay ³ ; Eth [Gz] masīḥ ⁴ ; the Manichaean mšiχa ‎of the “köktürkisch" fragments⁵ ; the Pazend mashyâê; Phlv ??? (Shikand, Glossary, ‎‎258), and the Manichaean Soghdian mšyh (Henning, Manichäisches Beichtbuch, 142). – The ‎word was well known in both N and SArabia in pre-Islamic times.⁶ «
▪ EALL (Retsö, “Aramaic/Syriac Loanwords”⁷ ): loaned from Syr mšīḥā ‘‎Christ’
▪ Cf. also √MSḤ.

1. Sayous, Jesus Christ d’après Mahomet (Paris, 1880), p. 21; Pautz, Offenbarung, ‎‎193, n. 3. 2. So Lagarde, Übersicht, 94 ‎‎; Margoliouth, Chrestomathia Baidawiana, 163; Cheikho, Naṣrāniyya, 186; Mingana, Syriac ‎Influence, 85. 3. This, however, may be direct from the Grk; cf. Hübschmann, Arm. Gramm, i, ‎‎364. 4. Nöldeke, Neue Beiträge, 34. 5. Le Coq in SBAW, Berlin, 1909, p. 1204; Salemann, Manichaeische Studien, i, 97. 6. Horovitz, KU, 129, 130; ‎Ryckmans, Nom propres, i, 19; Rossini, Glossarium, 179. 7. following Jeffrey 1938.

west

▪ The English Messiah c.1300 is not from Ar masīḥ but goes back, via the older form messias, from lLat messíās and Grk messías, to the same Aram mešīḥā and Hbr māšīᵃḥ ‘the anointed’ (of the Lord) from which also the Ar word is borrowed. “This is the word rendered in Septuagint as Grk χrīstós (see Christ). In Old Testament prophetic writing, it was used of an expected deliverer of the Jewish nation. The modern English form represents an attempt to make the word look more Hbr, and dates from the Geneva Bible (1560). Transferred sense of ‘an expected liberator or savior of a captive people’ is attested from 1660 s” – EtymOnline.

deriv

► massaḥa, vb. II, to Christianize: denominative. – For other ‎meanings ↗√masaḥa.
► ^BP#1561masīḥī, adj., Christian: nsb-adj from the noun.
► ^BP#4550al-masīḥiyyaẗ, n.f., Christendom: n.abstr. in -iyyaẗ from al-masīḥ.

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