What would Yeshua do?

What’s the difference between the above question and this one -- What would Jesus do? The obvious answer is that the difference is one word. Does that word really make a difference? It did for me. When I was preparing to become a minister I had an experience that changed my life. I had just purchased a new Bible and prayed this prayer:

“God please show me what I need to know.”

Immediately this is what popped into my mind:

“Unless you know how words work you can’t understand the words of your Bible.”

Was that God’s answer to my prayer or just a weird thought that came out of nowhere? That was my immediate thought. I had no idea about what to do with it, so I forgot it until a few years later when I read a book called Understanding the Difficult Words of Jesus. That was another life changing experience.

By that time I was pastor of a church. I preached and taught the words of Jesus. I preached a message of eternal salvation for all who simply believed. But after reading the book above, I realized that my meanings for the words of Jesus and many other words in my Bible were very different -- that bothered me a lot!

I knew people trusted and depended on me to tell them about God and His will is. But even more than that, when members of the church had life experiences that were very painful or challenges that made life seem hopeless, they came to me to for answers that would help get them through those experiences. That was when I remembered the prayer I prayed above. That was 30 years ago.

I spent a month in a university library doing research to understand how words work. That was followed by several years of courses at another university in Greek, Hebrew, linguistics, culture and history. I also pursued two courses of study at another college -- biblical linguistics and theology. I created this guideline to help people understand my answer and use it in their Bible studies. The first step is understanding what a word is.:

Words or phrases are units of communication that combine written symbols or spoken sounds with attached bundles of associations. Those associations are a product of the Sources culture, historical time period, geographical location and personal experiences.

The symbols of the word “Jesus” are J-e-s-u-s. They are letters of the English alphabet. The Jesus in the New Testament spent his life in Galilee and Judea. There are a number of references to him visiting the Temple in Jerusalem, which was destroyed in 70 CE by Roman armies. This tells us that Jesus’ visits had to be before that date.

The New Testament also states that Jesus was a young child while King Herod was still alive. Herod died in 4 BCE. So we know, based on those accounts from the New Testament, that Jesus lived and taught in Judea and Galilee between 4 BCE and 70 CE. Later we concluded from our research that the birth of Jesus would have been around 6 BCE and his crucifixion by the Roman soldiers took place about 27 CE. This gives us key pieces of information about Jesus we need to fill in blanks required by my guideline:

Symbols	Source	Culture	Time Period	Locations	Experiences
English	Jesus	Galilean	6 BCE-27 CE	Galilee-Judea	-

The guideline reveals an immediate problem. The first old English literary works do not appear until over 600 years later.¹ The English language did not exist at the time Jesus, therefore his name could not have been Jesus.

Now let’s consider the name Yeshua. It is the transliteration of this Hebrew word ישוע.

Symbols	Source	Culture	Time Period	Locations	Experiences
Hebrew	Yeshua	Galilean	6 BCE-27 CE	Galilee-Judea	-

The name יֵשׁוּעַ "Yeshua" is a late form of the Biblical Hebrew name יְהוֹשֻׁעַ Yehoshua (Joshua) and transliterated in the English Old Testament as Jeshua.  Tal Ilan's lexicon of Second Temple period names on inscriptions in Palestine (2002) includes for "Joshua" 85 examples of the Hebrew Yeshua, 15 of Yehoshua, and 48 examples of Iesous in Greek inscriptions," with only one Greek variant as Iesoua. The Greek word Ἰησοῦς  (Iesous) is the word translated Jesus is the New Testament.²

In the documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus, archeologist Amos Kloner stated that the name Yeshua was then a popular form of the name Yehoshua and was "one of the common names in the time of the Second Temple." In discussing whether it was remarkable to find a tomb with the name of Jesus (the particular ossuary in question bears the inscription "Yehuda bar Yeshua"), he pointed out that the name had been found 71 times in burial caves from that time period.³ During his time period in the places in which Yeshua lived and taught, if someone heard the name “Yeshua” they would have asked, “Which Yeshua?”

This gives you an idea of the process it takes to accurately view the life of Yeshua, understand his words and predict what he would do today. Our American “bundles of associations” attached to the English words in our Bible are very different. Our goal is to help you discover his meanings to the words that were the most important to him first. Simply changing your bundles of associations to be more like his will transform your life!

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Sources:

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeshua

³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeshua