If the Messiah’s Name Changes, Game Over.
For centuries, the name “Jesus” has been the cornerstone of the Christian faith, a name uttered with reverence, whispered in prayer, and shouted in exultation. It is, as the faithful have been told for generations, the only name given under heaven by which we must be saved. But what if that name, the very foundation of countless hymns, the object of immeasurable devotion, was nothing more than a colossal, two-millennia-old spelling error? If that were the case, it wouldn’t just be an embarrassment; it would be game over for Christianity.
Lost Souls
Think of the sheer magnitude of what is at stake. We are talking about a name so potent that its mere utterance is believed to cast out demons, heal the sick, and secure a spot in the afterlife. Millions upon millions have died with this name on their lips, confident in its saving power. Now, imagine the audacity of a modern-day scholar, or perhaps a committee of well-meaning but ultimately misguided theologians, stepping forward to announce, “Actually, folks, we’ve had it wrong all this time. The name is ‘Yeshua,’ or maybe ‘Joshua.’”
The suggestion is so laughable it’s almost tragic. Are we truly expected to believe that the one, true name for salvation was lost in translation? That the divine author of the universe, in all his omnipotence, couldn’t preserve the correct pronunciation of his own son’s name? It’s a theological slip-up of cosmic proportions. This isn’t just a minor correction; it’s a retroactive revocation of salvation for every soul who called upon the “wrong” name.
No Scriptural substance
This seemingly small change opens a Pandora’s box of devastating questions. If they were wrong about the name, what else have they been wrong about? The very narrative of the Bible begins to unravel. The name “Jesus,” as we know it, is conspicuously absent from the Old Testament. The desperate attempts to shoehorn a “Jesus” into the Hebrew scriptures have always been a stretch, but this new development makes it an outright impossibility.
To patch this gaping hole, they present a convenient etymology: the name “Joshua,” they claim, means “Yahweh is salvation.”[3][4] This is their smoking gun, the supposed link between the Old Testament deity and their New Testament savior. But this is where the fabrication becomes truly transparent. The name “Yahweh is salvation” as the name of the Messiah is nowhere to be found in the Old Testament. The name is neither found clearly nor unambiguously. Isaiah doesn’t mention it, and Daniel only refers to him as the Messiah, a name they now render as Hamashiach.
The clever process
And how, you might ask, do they plan to pull off this grand revision? How do you convince billions of people to abandon a name they’ve cherished for millennia? You don’t do it overnight. You do it with a classic bait-and-switch, using their own holy book as the instrument of deception.
Their entire strategy is to cleverly remove the name Joshua from the New Testament, and claim that translators, for the lack of the letter J, use Iesous, where Joshua was supposed to be.
Their playbook is already being written on the fringes of the faith, in articles like those insisting “Yahushua is the True Name of the Messiah”. The tactic is to find obscure verses where a translational quirk is convincing. Their star witness is Acts 7:45; they claim that the verse reads: “Which also our fathers that came after brought in with Jesus into the possession of the Gentiles, whom God drove out before the face of our fathers, unto the days of David;”.
Aha! they cry. See? The Bible itself uses “Jesus” when talking about the Old Testament figure Joshua, the one who led the Israelites into the promised land. They present this as proof that the names are one and the same. The translators, they argue, knew that Joshua’s name was really Jesus.
But they are lying; the New Testament has always had both names, Jesus and Joshua in there. In fact, Acts 7:45 has never had Jesus in there. Referencing a different Bible at: https://biblehub.com/study/acts/7-45.htm, we see that the name Joshua is correctly captured. This website uses the static htm format to record Bible verses, because they believe it is unchanging. But according to Bible Scholars, the Bible has been changed a lot of times, swapping words they don’t like with more favourable ones.
If you also read the article here, a second verse they are using is Hebrews 4:8, which states: “For if Jesus had given them rest, then would he not afterward have spoken of another day.” This scripture, most people will remember well, has never had the name Jesus. If you continue to read the article, it states that other Bibles maintain the name Joshua in there.
And while their etymology is laughable, their paranoia is revealing. They have inadvertently stumbled upon a deeper truth: their religion is a product of Greek Philosophy. The New Testament was written in Greek, not Hebrew. Jews who read the Old Testament daily don’t believe it. Key disciples bear Greek names like Peter, Andrew, and Philip. Most tellingly, Saul of Tarsus, the very architect of gentile Christianity, rebranded himself with the Roman-Greek name Paul.
Emmanuel
Why has the name Emmanuel not rung any bells in their head? Isn’t that the name that is explicitly stated as the name of the one born of a virgin? Perhaps they take instruction from a central source as to what the Messiah’s name should be, considering the fact that the Prophet Isaiah clearly states that the name should be Emmanuel. Or do they not have any respect for prophecy, or do they believe that bits and pieces of the Bible can be ignored? When I was a Christian, everybody ignored certain pieces of the Bible they didn’t like. So much for a book that doesn’t contradict.
Herein lies the ultimate irony. In their quest for a more “authentic” faith, these would-be reformers would only succeed in exposing the fabricated nature of it all. They would be admitting that the central figure of their religion has been misrepresented for two thousand years. The carefully constructed edifice of Christianity, built on the bedrock of the name of Jesus, would crumble under the weight of its own historical and theological blunders.
So, let them come and tell us that the name is not Jesus. Let them try to convince the world that the name that has inspired art, music, and countless acts of devotion was a mistake. In doing so, they will have proven the atheist’s point more eloquently than we ever could: that Christianity has always been a story, a powerful and enduring one, but a story nonetheless. And like any story, if you change the name of the main character, the whole plot falls apart. Game over.
