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Identification of the Royal Psalms by Herman Gunkel indicates that the history and genre of the Royal Psalms must be distinguished from the Enthronement Psalms that are written to celebrate Yahweh's Kingship from those written to celebrate Davidic kingship. In reference to this, Joachim Becker argues against the presence of messianic Davidic Psalms in the Old Testament and posits that the initial hope in Davidic kingship died out during the exilic period and consequently centered Israelite faith in Yahweh alone. It may thus be concluded that Yahweh's Kingship effaces the place of the Davidic Messiah. Against this claim, The Messianic Kingship of Jesus argues that the early Christian use of Psalm quotations in particular suggest that the Royal and Enthronement Psalms were viewed as one entity which suggests that Yahweh's reign and Davidic kingship in Jewish-Christian thinking were not antagonistic but mutually complementary. Within the synoptic tradition, Matthew's emphasis on Davidic heritage supports this notion as he applies 'Son of David' to the 'Son of God' and also 'Son of Man.' Therein lies 'paradoxical tension' in the use of the old Jewish Scripture as early Christians, on the one hand, sought to preserve their Jewish legacy but, on the other, creatively employed the Old Testament to support their christological message and the divine attributes of Jesus expressed in the Gospel. The entire process of quotation by Matthew generates one of the major characteristics of Judeo-Christian religiosity; namely, the manifestation of divine redemptive activity in the history of Israel.

The Hebrew Bible preeminently hails King David in narratives of kingship. Israel's first king, Saul, is interpreted as a weak king whose failings contrast with David's success. Reading the stories at the end of Judges and early in 1 Samuel, Reconciling Violence and Kingship demonstrates the significance of Saul and the inauguration of monarchy independent of and preceding David's kingship. Attuned to issues of mimetic rivalry and sacrifice extending from Abimelech in Judges, Michelson argues that Saul's kingship is uniquely important in establishing the person of the king, inaugurated in order to minimize violence through sacrifice. Read in this way, Saul is not a failed king, but is truly Israel's predominant king. Israelite monarchy emerges with Saul alongside emerging practices of the sacrificial cult.

Recent studies of the Christology of John's Gospel have agreed in recognizing the centrality of the concept of messianism, but differ markedly in their interpretation of its character. Alongside the traditional understanding of messiahship in terms of a kingly role related to that of David, there is a newer understanding that is related to the role of Moses and has little or no Davidic background. Despite the broad scholarly consensus regarding the Johannine connection between crucifixion and messianism, little attention has been paid to the role of crucifixion in relation to the nature of messiahship and in particular to the possibility that this may shed light on whether or not John's messianism is decisively shaped by the kingly or royal background. In The Kingship-Cross Interplay in the Gospel of John Mavis Leung contends that the cross motif plays a major role in authenticating the royal character of messiahship in John over against views that deny or play down this element.

This book studies kingship with reference to the Johannine Jesus. Postcolonialism leads us to an avenue from which to read this Gospel in the more complex and wider context of the hybridized Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds of the Roman Empire in the first century CE. This provides a new perspective on the kingship of the Johannine Jesus, whose kingly identity is characterized by hybridized christological titles. For the Johannine readers in the first century, who were exploited, oppressed, yet at odds with both the colonizer and the colonized in the Roman Empire, this Gospel was deemed to reveal his identity. Using many christological titles, it presented Jesus as the universal king going beyond the Jewish Messiah(s) and the Roman emperors and also as the decolonizer who came to «his own» world to liberate his people from the darkness. In this respect, the ideology of the Johannine emphasizes that love, peace, freedom, service of the center for the margins, and forgiveness are the ruling forces in the new world where Jesus reigns as king. Raising an awareness of these ideologies, John's gospel asks readers to overcome the conflicting world shrouded in darkness, thenceforth entering the new Johannine world.