What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet;1
Recently I received an email sent to my church email address in which an entire argument was made as to whether we fail to receive power and/or blessing from God because we are using the wrong name for the Messiah, literally, the Anointed King. The article cited below the image above2 does an excellent job of pointing out the fallacies of the argument that we fail to receive power and/or blessing because we are using the wrong name for Jesus.
I will briefly point out that the article misses a crucial point. Philippians 2:10-11 states, “that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”3 But that is a translation. The original Greek says,
In other words, “at the name of Iesou(s)” is what it says. This brings up an interesting conondrum. Either it does not matter that the transliterated name sounds different than the putative Aramaic/Hebrew name or St. Paul was a heretic because he taught us the wrong Name to use. To believe that transliterating the name matters is to assert that St. Paul, St. Luke, and various other Apostles were leading us into falsehood. If this is true, why are you bothering to quote the New Testament?
Worse, among those who try to figure out what Jesus’ real Name is, there are variants. Was Jesus’ original name Yeshua or Yehoshua? The Hebrew lettering permits either interpretation. But, what if Mary used the Aramaic language, which was common in northern Israel (Galilee)? In that case, Yeshua would be more correct than Yehoshuah, though etimologically, the Aramaic name Yeshua comes from the Hebrew Yehoshua.
What those who slip/slide into the Yeshua argument fail to note is that there is no Biblical New Testament citation of Yeshua. That name is nothing more than an attempt to reconstruct a putative name that only exists outside of history. To base an entire doctrine on such loose foundations is inappropriate, to say the least. Worse, it implies a type of magical thinking that assumes that unless you pronounce and/or write the Name correctly you will not receive the fullness of the available blessings.
There is one final point to be made. Why do those who make the Yeshua argument conclude that this is His only correct name? Galilee was a mixed Jewish/Greek area as has been consistently verified by archeology. What if the St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary were bilingual? There is more than one indication that Our Lord Jesus was bilingual. Perhaps Iesus was indeed his given name. Perhaps he was known as both Iesus and Yeshua. Perhaps it did not matter at all.
All that we know is that when the Apostles wrote, Iesus (Jesus) was the Name that was taught to be above all names. There are various pronunciations of those spellings. What there is not is any record that it was the name Yeshua that was the Name that was passed on as being above all names.
Perhaps those who make the Yeshua (Yehoshua) argument need to stop making that argument. Yeshua/Yehoshua is simply not found in the Greek New Testament. If the Apostles were wrong about the name, our faith is for naught. If the Apostles were right, then some transliterated version of Iesus is sufficient unto itself. Then we need not worry about the variations as Jesus’ name crosses from culture to culture. God (YHWH) knows about whom we are speaking. So, relax! (and stop sending me Yeshua emails!)
- William Shakespeare, “Act 2, Scene 2,” Romeo and Juliet, Lit2Go Edition, (1597), accessed August 18, 2023, https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/201/romeo-and-juliet/4330/act-2-scene-2/. [↩]
- https://pointlessthorns.wordpress.com/2021/07/05/yeshua-or-jesus/ [↩]
- The Holy Bible, New King James Version, Copyright © 1982 Thomas Nelson. [↩]
“… it implies a type of magical thinking that assumes that unless you pronounce and/or write the Name correctly you will not receive the fullness of the available blessings.”
Having read Graham Twelftree and Amanda Witmer’s work on Jesus as exorcist, and having gone thorugh Clinton Arnold’s work proposing that the cult of Ephesian Artemis is necessary background to interpreting Ephesians, this particular point is very salient to me. Clinton Arnold pointed out that in magical spells exact wording was needed in ancient scrolls for the spell to work. Twelftree pointed out that charismatic exorcists were relatively common in the time of Jesus, so much so that he pointed out in the Gospel of John there are no exorcisms and Twelftree proposed that since John’s aim was to demonstrate the uniqueness of Christ presenting Him as a relatively rank and file itinerant exorcist/healer would not accomplish that was a fascinating proposal.
Sorry you’re getting Yeshua emails.
I haven’t commented in years but I do still read the blog and this post got my attention.
In both European Medieval literature and in modern Far Eastern manga, it is not simply necessary to pronounce and/or write a spell correctly. It can be deadly to mispronounce or miswrite a spell.
Since you mentioned that, it’s played for laughs as a plot point in Sam Raimi’s horror-comedy Army of Darkness where Ash, ever the idiot, mispronounces the secret words and, instead of getting back to his own time, awakens the army of the dead and has to fight them for the rest of the movie. 🙂 It’s funny in the movie but as you’ve pointed out, there’s some actually serious background to the basis for the joke.
For those of you who on one hand profess learning and then on the other profess the blessedness of ignorance, surely must know that a person’s name is its pronunciation. You do understand this, right?
If that were true, then the New Testament writers erred mightily when they changed Jesus’ name from its original Hebrew/Aramaic to Greek. So also did the translators of the Septuagint who changed many Old Testament Hebraic, Chaldean, Sumerian, etc., names to Greek phonetics. They did not just translate the names, they actually changed their pronunciation.
The next step would appear to be to doubt the authenticity of the claims the authors of the New Testament made to having received revelation from God. No, a person’s name is not merely its pronunciation in one particular phonetic system.