Beth El Conservative Messianic Ministries

 What's in a Name? [Part 3] Variations on a Theme And there is salvation in no-one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved [Acts 4v12] While I have used the spelling 'Yeshua' throughout these articles so far, it will come as no surprise that there is something of a controversy regarding the exact spelling and/or pronunciation of Jesus's Hebrew name. Needless to say, some of these discussions can become very heated indeed and are no credit to the Messiah who bears the name, whatever the form of it. Certain groups simply cannot agree on which form is 'correct' and some even declare that you must use the form they say is the right one, or you are calling upon a false god. Many, if not most, of these variants have come from the Sacred Names movement (which has origins from around the 1930s) and are perpetuated by the Hebrew Roots movement (which appears to have originated in the 1990s, though both would say they can tr...

 What's in a Name? [Part 2] Jesus, Yeshua, Joshua - how do we know? How do we know that 'Jesus' was originally 'Yeshua' and not some other name? (If you have missed Part 1, then please go to REF) In the third century BCE, the Hebrew Scriptures (what Christians call the Old Testament) were translated into a version of Greek known as Koine Greek. This translation became known as the Septuagint, or LXX for short, from the seventy Jewish elders who made if. Fortunately for us, the name Iesous (see Part 1 of this series) appears in the Greek text, transliterating both the names Yehoshua and Yeshua; this is supported by other writings, such as Josephus and Philo of Alexandria who also wrote in Greek and made the same transliteration. The same form, Iesous, is used in the New Testament to denote Joshua the son of Nun (see Acts 7v45 and Hebrews 4v8), and where the KJV uses the name 'Jesus' instead of Joshua, though the verses clearly refer to Joshua and not Jesus. T...

What's in a Name? [Part 1] What is His name and what is His son's name? [Proverbs 30v4] "She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins" [Matthew 1v21] One thing we can be certain of, when the Angel Gabriel addressed Joseph (in the verse above) and Mary (see Luke 1v31), he was not speaking English nor did he use the Anglicised name 'Jesus'. Although the New Testament might have been written in Greek, it is unlikely that the Angel used the Greek form of his name either. Mary and Joseph would most likely have spoken Aramaic as their every day language and Hebrew in the synagogue on Sabbath. Therefore, when the Angel Gabriel told them they were to have a son and they were to call him 'Jesus' he would have used the Aramaic or Hebrew form of the name: 'You shall call his name Yeshua ' (pronounced Ye-SHOO-ah, with the emphasis on the second syllable). The name Yeshua means 'salvation, deliveran...

 The Journey An Introduction It all began in January 2016. Frankly, I was bored with the usual Bible reading schemes that would take you through the entire Bible in a year. So instead of starting at Genesis and ploughing through to the end of Revelation, I decided to do something a bit different. Reading the Gospels through in chronological order (by event, not date of writing) seemed just the thing. I even bought a chronological Bible. Seeing the whole story of the life of Christ from beginning to end was quite an eye-opener!  His life fell into five distinct sections: His early life The beginning of His ministry His rising popularity The rising opposition The culmination - His last week, death and final triumph in the resurrection How had I not seen it before? What's more, I was struck by just how Jewish it all was. For too many years to remember, I had considered that Christianity was - or at least, ought to be - much more Jewish than the western churches accepted or practi...