jesus is not a false god
Jesus Christ is not a false god - rebuke those who teach this! They are led by the spirit of the enemy. Truly The Churches Jesus is a caricatured representation of the historical Yeshua, but he is not a false god or anti-Christ. It would be like you telling people about me, but totally misrepresenting me. Does this make me false? No, it would make your witness false. Truly the Church is guilty of misrepresenting Messiah to the world, but this does not change the fact that the name Jesus – while a less than perfect transliteration – is not pagan. Jesus does not mean horse or Zeus; only those who are completely ignorant of the process of transliteration would suggest such a thing.
Some try to insist that names are never transliterated, but that they carry over into different languages unchanged. That is just a bunch of malarkey. Let us use my name for example: “James” is carried over into Spanish as: Diego, Jacobo, Jaime, Santiago. In the transliteration of the name Yeshua, the Greek is very correct in transliterating it as Ιησούς / Iesous. The fact is, there is no way to properly transliterate the name Yeshua into Greek, due to constraints of letter sound equivalents. The name “Jesus” is a pretty close transliteration from the Greek transliteration; if it was to be directly transliterated from Hebrew into English it would be Joshua. The name Yahweh is translated by use of the title Kurios because there is absolutely no way to even come close to a transliteration of the name; Greek has no letter for the Y sound, H sound, V sound or W sound. While there is the “Eta and Upsilon”, they do not make the same sounds as the Hebrew “heh and yod”. It is impossible to write the name Yahweh in Greek.
We can try to argue over the addition of the letter “J”, but all this is foolish debating. Our salvation is not bound up in the name of Messiah; it is bound up in the person of Messiah. I will stand with anyone who is for correcting errors about his person, but I will also stand against anyone who wants to make our salvation an issue of his name – whether spelling, transliteration or pronunciation.
I have been in the Messianic movement for 15 years and while I love to use the Hebrew name Yeshua when talking about Messiah, I will say now without any reservations – Jesus Christ is my King and Savior!
James D. Crawford Sr.
The Torah Thumper
Some try to insist that names are never transliterated, but that they carry over into different languages unchanged. That is just a bunch of malarkey. Let us use my name for example: “James” is carried over into Spanish as: Diego, Jacobo, Jaime, Santiago. In the transliteration of the name Yeshua, the Greek is very correct in transliterating it as Ιησούς / Iesous. The fact is, there is no way to properly transliterate the name Yeshua into Greek, due to constraints of letter sound equivalents. The name “Jesus” is a pretty close transliteration from the Greek transliteration; if it was to be directly transliterated from Hebrew into English it would be Joshua. The name Yahweh is translated by use of the title Kurios because there is absolutely no way to even come close to a transliteration of the name; Greek has no letter for the Y sound, H sound, V sound or W sound. While there is the “Eta and Upsilon”, they do not make the same sounds as the Hebrew “heh and yod”. It is impossible to write the name Yahweh in Greek.
We can try to argue over the addition of the letter “J”, but all this is foolish debating. Our salvation is not bound up in the name of Messiah; it is bound up in the person of Messiah. I will stand with anyone who is for correcting errors about his person, but I will also stand against anyone who wants to make our salvation an issue of his name – whether spelling, transliteration or pronunciation.
I have been in the Messianic movement for 15 years and while I love to use the Hebrew name Yeshua when talking about Messiah, I will say now without any reservations – Jesus Christ is my King and Savior!
James D. Crawford Sr.
The Torah Thumper
