What was Jesus Hebrew Name? http://www.seekfirst.com/node/257
Start with Yeshua. That's his name, not 'Jesus.'
It's what his father and mother and his brothers and sisters called him
and it's how his followers knew him. Probably the name was pronounced in the
rough regional dialect of Galilee as 'Yeshu'... (Akenson, 2000, p. 57).
"In pre-exilic times, the name Yehoshua consisted of ... two roots. The
first, yeho, is the theophoric referring to God. The second, shua, means "help"
and the name meant, "Whose help is YHWH/God."
In 2nd temple times, it became a practice NOT to use full theophorics to
prevent accidentally voicing the name of God so the theophorics were truncated
and Yehoshua became Y'shua. In the Galilee, Aramaic was pronounced differently
and Galileans dropped their alefs and ayins like Cockney English drop their
H's. Jesus' Galilean friends would have called him Yeshu. Therefore, in Judea
and formally, his name was Yeshua, yehSHOO-ah, and in the Galilee his name was
pronounced Yeshu, pronounced YEHshoo. Because of strong Hellenistic influence
in Palestine at the time, some Jews with the name of Yeshua used a Greek
transliteration of the name. Yeshua ben Sirach was one of them who went by the
name IHSOUS, pronounced YAYsoos. Hence, Yeshua was rendered IHSOUS." (Jack
Kilmon, 2006)
THE REALITY
There never was a person named Jesus Christ!
His first name wasn't Jesus and his last name wasn't Christ.
Would you believe that Jesus' real name in pre-exilic Hebrew was Yehoshua
or in the Second Temple period Yeshua or Joshua? When the English rendered the
Latin IESVS from the Greeks who translated the Semitic name Yeshua they came up
with Jesus (Yehoshua became Yeshua became Iesous became Jesus), and that name
stuck. But his real name in his own language was Yeshua, which was a very good
name in the Hebrew tradition. It meant - "Yahweh (God) is savior (helper)".
Josephus mentions more than 20 Joshuas, the most famous of whom was the "Son of
Nun" (Exodus, 33:11), from the tribe of Ephraim, who was the successor to Moses
as the leader of the Israelites. We remember him best as the trumpeter who blew
down the walls of Jericho. What is not so well known is that Nun in Hebrew
means fish, the symbol of life, especially for Galileans who lived by the Sea
of Galilee. Interestingly enough, the symbol of the fish became associated with
Jesus [1], as did the fact that the start of the Age of Pisces (symbolized by
the fish) represented the start of the "end of times", since Pisces was the
last symbol of the Zodiac, and the start of the new age coincided with Jesus'
birth. Moreover, the symbol for "Nun" is equivalent in the Jewish gematria [2]
to the number 50, which represents freedom and the fullness of life, and Nun is
the fourteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the number 14 symbolizing David,
the King of Israel. Thus, in many ways the name Joshua was a very holy name and
had many connotations that later became associated with Jesus' life (e.g.,
Jesus was said to be descended from David, was said to be a "fisher of men",
preached the "end of times", etc.).
As far as his last name goes, in those days, people didn't have last
names. He would have been called Yeshua bar Yahosef bar Yaqub, Joshua, son of
Joseph, son of Jacob. Yet many people think his last name was Christ! Not true.
He was never called Jesus Christ! Jesus/Joshua was believed, by some, to be the
Messiah, which in Hebrew (moschiach) means "the anointed one" [3]. The Greek
word for the oil used to anoint someone is "khrisma", and the person so
anointed is "Khristos" in Greek, "Christus" in Latin, and "Christ" in English.
In reality, had he been considered someone deserving of anointing, he would
have been called Joshua the Anointed, or Jesus the Christ.
Many people mistakenly believe that because Jesus was the "anointed one"
he was the Messiah. Not true: being anointed was not solely reserved for the
Messiah. Other people who were anointed were Kings, High Priests, and prophets.
Indeed, in special circumstances, sick people would be anointed to help in the
healing process (James 5:14).
The person referred to as "Jesus Christ" is best understood, then, to
have been "Yeshua bar Yahosef " or "Joshua, son on Joseph, son of Jacob" or
"Joshua the Anointed One". No one ever called him Jesus Christ!
Updated 8/22/2006
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[1] The fish was also one of the symbol for Horus, a precursor to Jesus,
who was also known as a "fisher of men" (Harpur, 2004).
[2] The numerology of the Hebrew language, that involves translating
Hebrew characters into numbers, then seeking the meaning of the numbers.
[3] The Hebrew word, in turn, was derived from the Egyptian word messeh,
the "holy crocodile", which referred to the practice of the Pharaoh's
sister-brides anointing their husbands with the fat of the crocodile.
Interestingly enough, it's a woman (with the alabaster jar) who anoints Jesus
during his fatal trip to Jerusalem (Mark 14:3). Later Gospels changed this
event to hide the fact that a woman anointed Jesus, since this action implied
that a woman was a priest, which was anathema to the later Gospel writers who
had a definite masculine prejudice.
http://www.jesuspolice.com/common_error.php?id=1
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