The Ditch on the Other Side of the Road

A response to “Stop Calling Him ‘Yeshua.’ That’s Not His Name.”

I was glad to see it. When an essay from Right Response Ministries crossed my feed earlier this month, pushing back against the growing insistence that “Yeshua” is the only proper name for our Lord, my first response was gratitude. Somebody needed to say it. There is a trend moving through American evangelicalism that treats Hebrew as a master key, as though the believer who says “Yeshua” (yeh-SHOO-ah) and “Yahweh” and “Mashiach” has unlocked a room that the rest of us are still standing outside of. That trend deserves correction, and the author set out to correct it.

The trouble is that he overcorrected. He swerved away from one error so hard that he landed in the ditch on the other side of the road. Where the Yeshua movement insists that Hebrew is the sacred register and Greek a pale copy, this author insists that Greek is the sacred register and the Hebrew name a myth. He writes that Jesus’ name “isn’t now, and never was, Yeshua,” that the angel who announced His birth spoke the name in Greek, and that His “name was Greek at the start.” The structure of the error is identical in both ditches. Only the language has changed.

I want to offer a more moderate correction, one that honors what the author gets right while repairing what he gets wrong. He is right that no Christian needs to say “Yeshua” to know the Lord. He is wrong about nearly everything else, and the deepest thing he is wrong about is not linguistic at all. It is theological. God transcends language. He always has. The moment we forget that, we will keep driving into one ditch or the other forever.

The Guillermo Problem

The author’s central illustration involves the film director Guillermo del Toro. Guillermo is the Spanish form of the Germanic Wilhelm, which becomes William in English, yet nobody calls the director William, and he would not answer to it. Therefore, the argument runs, Jesus’ name is Ἰησοῦς (ee-ay-SOOS) and not Yeshua, just as Guillermo’s name is Guillermo and not William.

The illustration fails because it treats one cultural naming convention as a universal rule. It is not a rule. It is a choice, and it is a choice that monocultural people tend to make and bicultural people tend not to make.

I have a friend named Jonathan who was raised in two worlds, German and American. When his father calls him by the English pronunciation (JAH-nuh-thun), he answers. When his mother calls him by the German pronunciation (YOH-nah-tahn), he answers to that as well. He does not correct her. He does not insist that one form is his real name and the other a corruption. He inhabits both names because he inhabits both cultures, and the context determines which form surfaces. Guillermo del Toro is a man with one cultural home. My friend Jonathan has two. The question that matters is which kind of world first-century Galilee was, and the answer is not in dispute. It was a crossroads of Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, a place where a Jewish family named a son in their own tongue and the wider world received him in its own. A boy named by Aramaic-speaking parents in Nazareth, later proclaimed across a Greek-speaking empire, is in Jonathan’s situation, not Guillermo’s.

Scripture itself settles this, and it settles it with an apostle. Saul of Tarsus carried two names from birth. Saul was his Jewish name, given in honor of the great Benjamite king from whose tribe he descended. Paul belonged to his standing as a Roman citizen. This was not a renaming. When Christ renamed Simon as Peter, the text says so plainly, just as Genesis says so when God renamed Jacob as Israel. Nothing of the kind happens with Saul. Luke simply notes, at the very hinge where the Gentile mission begins, that this was “Saul, who was also called Paul” (Acts 13:9), and from that point the narrative shifts to the name suited to the Greco-Roman world he was entering. Both names were real. Both were his. The cultural context determined which one he used.

The detail that closes the case comes from Paul’s own testimony. Recounting the Damascus road before Agrippa, he says the risen Lord spoke to him “in the Hebrew tongue” (Acts 26:14), and Luke, writing in Greek, preserves the Semitic form of the address: Saoul, Saoul. Everywhere else Luke writes the Greek form, Saulos. Here, where the speech itself was Semitic, the Semitic form of the name stands in the inspired Greek text. It is worth noting that when New Testament writers use the phrase “Hebrew tongue,” scholars broadly agree they almost certainly mean Aramaic, the vernacular mother tongue of first-century Jewish life, which had so thoroughly absorbed Hebrew’s daily role that the two were used almost interchangeably as labels. Whether the risen Lord spoke in Hebrew or Aramaic on that road, the point stands with full force: He addressed a Jewish man in the Semitic mother tongue of His own people, with the name drawn from Israel’s greatest king, and the Holy Spirit saw fit to preserve the sound of it in a Greek text addressed to the whole world.

Follow the author’s own logic and you arrive somewhere he does not want to go. If the form preserved in the inspired text is the real name and everything behind it a myth, then we must stop calling the apostle Paul, because “Saul” is what the heavenly voice actually said. The absurdity is the refutation.

There is one more witness, and it is the very verse on which the author builds his entire case. The angel tells Joseph, “thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Notice the small word “for” sitting at the hinge of that sentence. The angel is not merely assigning a name. He is explaining it. The explanation works perfectly in the Semitic tongue. Yeshua is the shortened form of Yehoshua, the name we know in English as Joshua, and it carries the meaning “Yahweh saves.” It was a common Jewish name, borne most famously by the son of Nun who carried Israel across the Jordan into the promised land. So the angel’s sentence, spoken over a son of David, lands as the most natural Hebrew wordplay imaginable: you shall call his name Salvation, for he shall save his people from their sins. A greater Joshua was coming to lead a greater exodus. In Greek none of this works, because Ἰησοῦς (ee-ay-SOOS) has no connection to the Greek verb for saving. The wordplay only lands in the language the angel was actually speaking.

There is a further detail here that quietly dismantles the claim that His “name was Greek at the start.” Centuries before Bethlehem, when Jewish scholars translated the Hebrew Scriptures into the Greek Septuagint, they had to render the name Joshua, and the form they chose was Ἰησοῦς (ee-ay-SOOS). The very Greek form the author calls original was already in circulation as the standard transliteration of a thoroughly Hebrew name long before the annunciation. The King James translators left the seam showing at Hebrews 4:8, where the name “Jesus” appears in a verse that is plainly speaking of Joshua. Ἰησοῦς (ee-ay-SOOS) did not enter the world as a Greek name at the manger. It entered Greek as the borrowed clothing of a Hebrew name, and it had been wearing that clothing for two hundred years. Matthew, writing in Greek, faithfully rendered the name in Greek, exactly as Luke rendered Saul’s name in Greek everywhere except the one place the Hebrew speech itself was the point. The author reads Matthew 1:21 as proof that the angel spoke Greek. The verse, read closely, testifies to the opposite.

The Inspiration Overreach

Beneath the naming argument sits a larger claim, that God wrote the New Testament in Greek and that the Greek text is therefore the original divine register, with nothing authentic behind it. I believe in the inspiration of Scripture without reservation. I do not believe inspiration requires us to claim more than we know, and here the author claims more than anyone knows.

What we possess are Greek manuscripts, and from them God has faithfully preserved His word to us. What we do not possess is a window into every conversation those manuscripts record. The apostles were Hebrews, all of them, men of Galilee and Judea whose mother tongue was Aramaic and whose Scriptures sounded in Hebrew at synagogue. They lived in a multilingual land where Greek served commerce and administration and Latin belonged to the occupying power. When the Gospels record Jesus speaking to a synagogue ruler’s daughter, Mark preserves the actual Aramaic on His lips: Talitha cumi. When He cries from the cross, we hear Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani (again, Aramaic). The inspired Greek text itself keeps showing us, in flashes, the Semitic speech underneath the narration. Inspiration governs what was written. It does not retroactively change what was spoken in a carpenter’s home in Nazareth.

Even the author’s claim that Hebrew was simply a dead language outruns the evidence. The Dead Sea Scrolls, the largest manuscript discovery of the ancient Jewish world, are written mostly in Hebrew, with a substantial body of Aramaic and a small number of Greek texts. Hebrew had certainly yielded daily life to Aramaic, yet it was not a corpse. It was a living liturgical and literary tongue in the very generation we are discussing.

The clearest picture of that multilingual world hangs over the cross itself. Pilate ordered a titulus fixed above the Lord’s head, and John records that “it was written in Hebrew, and Greek, and Latin” (John 19:20). Three languages, side by side, over the dying King. Not one privileged register. Heaven did not strike two of them from the board. If we are looking for a divine commentary on sacred language at the most important moment in the history of the world, there it is. The name of the King of the Jews went out in every tongue of the people standing there, because the King belonged to all of them.

Greek as Providence, Not Pedigree

None of this diminishes Greek. The author senses something true about the Greek language, and I want to honor it, because what he senses is providence.

Centuries before the incarnation, Daniel saw a male goat flying out of the west, striking down the empire of the Medes and Persians, its great horn the first king of Greece (Daniel 8). Alexander conquered the known world and seeded it with a common tongue, and Josephus preserves the remarkable tradition that when Alexander came to Jerusalem, the priests showed him the book of Daniel, and he recognized himself in its prophecy. Whatever one makes of that account, the larger fact stands. God prepared a Greek-speaking world in advance, so that when the gospel went out from Jerusalem it could travel every road of the empire in a common language. That’s heavenly strategy, not theology.

That is what Greek is in the economy of God. It is the vehicle of evangelization, not the native tongue of heaven. The gospel was born Jewish and was carried to a Greek world, and the carrying was the point. It did not bring Greek culture with it as a requirement, any more than it had brought Jewish culture with it as a requirement, which is precisely the battle Paul fought and won at the council of Jerusalem and again in his letter to the Galatians. The gospel enters every culture and speaks every language because the God of the gospel is bigger than all of them.

God Transcends Language

Here is the center of the matter, the thing both ditches forget. God was before language. He is not a Hebrew speaker who learned Greek, nor a Greek speaker condescending to Hebrew. Language is a created structure, like light and water and time, and the Creator is not contained by His creation. When He reveals Himself, He stoops. He bends down to our register the way a father lowers himself to the eye level of a child, because if He did not stoop, none of us would ever hear Him at all. I suspect His most native communication is not words as we know them. It is presence. Anyone who has spent long hours in the Inner Room of prayer knows that the deepest exchanges with God often carry no vocabulary at all.

The day of Pentecost puts this beyond argument. When the Holy Spirit fell on the gathered believers, Jerusalem was crowded with Jews and devout men out of every nation under heaven, Parthians and Medes and Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome, and beyond, gathered for the feast from every corner of a Hellenized world (Acts 2:5-11). The first public act of the Spirit of God in the church age was an act of translation. Every man heard the wonderful works of God in his own tongue. Notice the direction of the miracle. The Spirit did not teach the crowd Hebrew. He did not require the pilgrims to master the language of the upper room before they could hear the gospel. He carried the message outward, into Parthian ears in Parthian words and Egyptian ears in Egyptian words, because that has always been the direction God moves. He comes to us where we are, as we are, in the tongue our mothers sang over us.

Pentecost is sometimes called the reversal of Babel, and it is, though not in the way we might expect. God did not undo Babel by restoring a single sacred language to mankind. He undid it by filling every language with His glory. The curse had scattered the tongues; the Spirit sanctified them. From that morning forward, no language on earth could claim the gospel as its private property, and no language could be refused it. None of this was improvisation. It was the plan laid from the foundation of the world, sealed in the promise to Abraham that in his seed all the families of the earth would be blessed, and confirmed in the vision John would later receive of a multitude that no man could number, out of every nation, and kindred, and people, and tongue, standing before the throne. The gospel was always going to outrun its first language. The Spirit saw to it on day one.

This is why the prophets pile up names without anxiety. The virgin’s son shall be called Immanuel. Unto us a child is born, and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. John the Baptist looks up and calls Him the Lamb of God. The book of Revelation says He has a name written that no man knew but He Himself. Scripture is not protective of a single phonetic formula because Scripture knows the Person outruns every name we have for Him.

Consider what the contrary position actually requires. If salvation rides on the right syllables, whether Hebrew syllables or Greek ones, then the millions upon millions of believers across twenty centuries who called on Christ in Latin, in Coptic, in Slavonic, in Swahili, in Mandarin, in Spanish, were all addressing the wrong person. The grandmother in Oaxaca praying to Jesús, the Ethiopian deacon chanting in Ge’ez, the Chinese house-church believer whispering Yesu in the dark, all lost on a technicality of pronunciation. The conclusion is monstrous, and it is also refuted by the fruit of those very lives. They were not calling on another god. They were finding the one God in the dress of their own tongue, because He had already come to them in it.

The deaf church may say it best of all. In American Sign Language there is no spelling out of five letters for the Lord. The sign for Jesus is the middle finger of each hand touched to the palm of the other. His name, in that language, is His wounds. No Hebrew required, no Greek required, and I would argue that the deaf believer signing the nail prints has gotten closer to the heart of the name than either side of this quarrel, because the name above every name was never finally a sound. It is a Person, crucified and risen, and every tongue and every pair of hands that confesses Him confesses the same Lord.

This is the good news, and it has always been this. God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself (2 Corinthians 5:19). A child can understand it and receive it. No Greek or Hebrew required. We do not climb up to God through a language. He came down to us through a Person.

A Closing Word to the Other Ditch

Having spent this essay correcting the corrector, let me end with a word for the crowd he was originally aiming at, because his instinct about them was sound even where his argument was not.

To my friends drawn back toward things Jewish, toward the feasts and the fringes and the Hebrew formulas, I understand the hunger. It feels like depth. It feels like roots. I will tell you plainly where that road has historically led when it becomes a system: it leads through the Kabbalah, which for all its mystique is Jewish occultism, an attempt to unlock God through letters and numbers and secret names. The pursuit of power through the right pronunciation is not Hebrew devotion. It is the oldest magic there is, and Scripture has a word for the spell it casts. “O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?” (Galatians 3:1).

Paul asked that of believers tempted to return to the law. Most of you cannot even claim a return, because you were never under it. You were free. Christ set you free for freedom itself (Galatians 5:1). What made you go looking for shackles, or forge new ones out of a borrowed culture?

The man whose essay prompted mine was right to confront that bewitchment. I simply ask him to notice that a Greek shackle fits the same wrist. The Lord of Glory wore a name His mother spoke over Him in Nazareth, a name the empire received in Greek, a name Rome nailed above His head in three languages, and a name that no language has ever held. Call Him Jesus. Call Him Yeshua if your heart leans that way. He answers to His own, in every tongue, because He is bigger than them all.

Peace & Grace,

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