Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Since you are about to celebrate his birth, you might want to get his name right. It is not Jesus.

Yeshua is the original Aramaic proper name for Jesus the Nazarene, who lived from about 6 B.C.E. to 27 C.E. (A.D.) The word "Jesus" is actually a mis-transliteration of a Greek mis-transliteration. The Emperor Constatine even mistook Jesus for Apollo, the son of the Greek god Zeus. In Hebrew Yeshua means Salvation while the name Jesus has no intrinsic meaning in English whatsoever.

This is the problem with ancient religions. So much is lost in the oceans of time and the constant translations into different languages.

Since Yeshua is spelled "Jeshua" and not "Jesus" in most English versions of the Old Testament (for example in Ezra 2:2 and 2 Chronicles 31:15), one easily gets the impression that the name is never mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures. Yet 'Yeshua' appears there twenty-nine times, and is the name of at least five different persons and one village in the southern part of Yehudah ("Judah").

In contrast to the early biblical period, there were relatively few different names in use among the Jewish population of the Land of Israel at the time of the Second Temple. The name Yeshua was one of the most common male names in that period, tied with Eleazer for fifth place behind Simon, Joseph, Judah, and John. Nearly one out of ten persons known from the period was named Yeshua.

Well that obviously brings up the question of which one was the famous rabbi who died on the cross? The fact that this happens is so confounding isn't it ?

Yeshua Christ!

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