Lost In Translation

Jesus, Jesus Christ. To call him by any other name sounds utterly blasphemous to our ears. His name is Jesus always was always will be that’s what they called him in the bible right, it says to right there in mine and yours. I think we tend to forget how things used to be in the world, especially the world Jesus walked in. I know it’s a big thing today to bring the Bible into our age and to interpret it according to our modernistic culture. But I strongly believe that we can’t interpret the bible in our age with out understanding what was the original intentions and the original audience that our scriptures where presented to. I believe it is a great travesty to overlook what was happening when the books where being handed down by God. Why did Paul write what he did to those individual churches? Or for instance or who was Jeremiah crying out to? I’m not saying that we can’t apply those truths to our lives in our day but we rob ourselves of a level of revelation and richness when we forget what was.

To make my self clear I want to talk about Jesus, not Him as a person but why we call him Jesus Christ. Why is Christ his last name, I don’t remember there being a Mary and Joseph Christ in the early pages of Luke. It may shock you to know that no one ever referred to Him as Jesus when he walked the earth. In those days he was called Yehoshua (does this still sound like the white mans gospel lol). That was the name given to him at birth, the name Mary called him by, the name he was known by in the synagogue, the name called upon him by the apostles, Yehoshua from Nazareth the Messiah. All of this IS important to know.

What else is important to know is that the old Hebrews would chose the names of their children as a prophecy for their lives or as a reflection of the state of the nation for instance Ichabod means the glory has departed and David means well beloved. (Want a good study? look up old testament names and compare it to their lives) So Yehoshua is interpreted from Hebrew as “Yahweh the Savior or Yahweh our deliverer.” Sort of fitting for the name of the messiah (which literally means the anointed one and his anointing; and anointing means to be covered/soaked (by oil or the spirit of God)). So in our minds his name is Jesus Christ, while literally before God His name is “Yahweh our Savior and deliverer from Nazareth the One covered with the Spirit of God.” It’s a mouthful I know but a powerful one. Imagine when you pray, you say in the name of Jesus, but actually you are saying in the name of “Yahweh our Savior and deliverer from Nazareth the One covered with the Spirit of God.” (try and pray like this for a week)

I want to tell you about someone else who had the name Yehoshua in the Old Testament. But first I should explain how Yehoshua became Jesus. In Jesus’ time it was customary to have names their Jewish birth names and a Greek translation of their name. Long story short Greek was the trade/business language of the land, you did any business in the Roman Empire you did it in Greek. In our times you could use the Chinese immigrants in North America as an example, as they adopt western names to fit in. Now the greek translation of Yehoshua was Iesus, which carried over unchanged into Latin, then French developed out of Latin and changed the I to a soft J making Jesus (pronounced Jeyzu). Then in England French and German merged to become English and the soft J became a hard J becoming the Jesus we know today. Now if we were to make a direct translation from Hebrew to English, Yehoshua would become Joshua.

Yes Joshua the other man to share the name of Yehoshua, and are we surprised. The life of Jesus can be found all over the old testament, he’s everywhere in there. You want another study try and find Jesus in the book of Leviticus, it will blow your mind when you see him in places where they talk about sacrifices and the procedures. Did you know that for a priest to cleanse a house of leprosy? He would talk a dove sacrifice it ties it to a branch, dip it into its blood and sprinkles it on the house (tell me I you can’t see jesus in that). Ok back to Joshua. These lives are for the most part direct parallels, you could say that the life of Joshua was a prophecy of the life of Jesus. How you ask?