The Quran

إِذ قالَتِ المَلائِكَةُ يا مَريَمُ إِنَّ اللَّهَ يُبَشِّرُكِ بِكَلِمَةٍ مِنهُ اسمُهُ المَسيحُ عيسَى ابنُ مَريَمَ وَجيهًا فِي الدُّنيا وَالآخِرَةِ وَمِنَ المُقَرَّبينَ

Muhammad Asad

Lo! The angels said: "O Mary! Behold, God sends thee the glad tiding, through a word from Him, [of a son] who shall become known as the Christ¹ Jesus, son of Mary, of great honour in this world and in the life to come, and [shall be] of those who are drawn near unto God.

Lit., "whose name shall be 'the Anointed' (al-masih)". The designation al-masih is the Arabicized form of the Aramaic meshiha which, in turn, is derived from the Hebrew mahsiah, "the anointed" - a term frequently applied in the Bible to the Hebrew kings, whose accession to power used to be consecrated by a touch with holy oil taken from the Temple. This anointment appears to have been so important a rite among the Hebrews that the term "the anointed" became in the course of time more or less synonymous with "king". Its application to Jesus may have been due to the widespread conviction among his contemporaries (references to which are found in several places in the Synoptic Gospels) that he was descended in direct - and obviously legitimate - line from the royal House of David. (It is to be noted that this could not have related to his mother's side, because Mary belonged to the priestly class descending from Aaron, and thus to the tribe of Levi, while David descended from the tribe of Judah.) Whatever may have been the historical circumstances, it is evident that the honorific "the Anointed" was applied to Jesus in his own lifetime. In the Greek version of the Gospels - which is undoubtedly based on a now-lost Aramaic original - this designation is correctly translated as Christos (a noun derived from the Greek verb chriein, "to anoint"): and since it is in this form - "the Christ" - that the designation al-masih has achieved currency in all Western languages, I am using it throughout in my translation.