Names Changed for a Different Reason

Part 1 of 8

 

What This Series Examines

The first series in this collection, The Erasure of the Name, established that the divine name YHWH was systematically removed from the Hebrew scriptures over 6,800 times, and that this removal continued into every personal name that carried YHWH within it. Yeshua, Yochanan, Mattityahu, Eliyahu, all translated into forms that surrender the divine name they bore.

This series examines a second category of name-change. These are not names that carried YHWH within them. They are names that carried something else, something the translators apparently found equally dangerous to leave intact.

Each of these three names, in its Hebrew original, confronts the reader with a truth so direct, so structurally embedded in the story, that to leave it intact would have made certain theological positions impossible to maintain. So the names were changed.

 

The Three Names

Miriam: the mother of Yeshua, bore the name of the first prophet in the Torah, the woman who led the song of the redeemed after the great deliverance. Her name was changed to Mary. The prophetic thread was severed.

Yehudah: the one who handed Yeshua over, bore the name of the tribe through which the Messiah came. His name means YHWH is praised. The same name as the tribe. The same root as the Lion of Judah. His name was changed to Judas. The impossible theological tension was erased.

Yakov: the one known as James, the bishop of Jerusalem, the writer of the epistle that stands in direct tension with the gospel of grace, bore the name of the patriarch who grasped, who displaced, who took what was not given to him. His name was changed to James. The warning embedded in his identity was hidden.

Three names. Three deliberate erasures. One unmistakable pattern.

 

The Order of These Documents

This series moves from the most beautiful recovery to the most consequential confrontation. Miriam opens with prophetic resonance and the restoration of a thread that two thousand years of translation buried. Yehudah follows with what may be the most theologically charged single name-change in the entire New Testament. Yakov closes with the figure whose name, whose location, and whose teaching stand at the center of the confusion this body of work has spent fifty-five years addressing.

By the time this series concludes, what has been obscured will be visible in plain sight. Not through speculation. Through the text itself, the history itself, and the names themselves, restored to the language in which they were given.

 

The Gospel Revolution  •  Mike Williams Ministries

William Ethan Massengill  •  Michael Lilborn Williams  •  Daniel Thomas Rouse

Published by Audrey Williams