The project is coordinated by Katharina Heyden, Professor for Ancient History of Christianity and Interreligious Encounters at the University of Bern (Switzerland), and David Nirenberg, Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (U.S.), and includes a network of collaborators across North America, Europe, and the Middle East.

The Hebrew word mashia’h, meaning “anointed”, originally referred to people whose special relationship with God was sanctioned by a ritual act involving the rubbing of oil. In the Hebrew Bible, it is applied to priests, prophets, and kings, some also called “son of God” and/or “son of man”. Christian tradition has interpreted all these as references to Jesus, called “Christ”, the Greek translation of mashia’h. The analysis of a 4th-century rabbinic story about a historical Messiah born on earth at the end of the 1st century CE allows us to see how the characteristics attributed to the Messiah in late antiquity were shared and co-produced among Jews, Christians, and Muslims.