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...    see more >>

The Name That Carries a River

Part 2 of 8

She Was Not Named Mary

The mother of Yeshua was not named Mary. She was named Miriam.

In the Greek text of the New Testament she becomes Maria or Mariam. In Latin she becomes Maria. In English she becomes Mary, a name so thoroughly domesticated by two thousand years of devotional use that its Hebrew weight has become almost entirely invisible.

To recover what was lost, we must go back to the first Miriam in the Hebrew...    see more >>

The Thread Completed

Mary Severs It

Part 3 of 8

The Second Miriam

Consider what the Hebrew framework establishes when the mother of Yeshua bears the name Miriam.

The first Miriam watched over the deliverer in the water of the Nile, the water that should have killed him. The second Miriam carried the deliverer in her body, the one who would pass through water at his immersion and through death at his execution.

The first Miriam led the song of the redeemed after...    see more >>

The Name That Contains the Wound

Part 4 of 8

He Was Not Named Judas

The one who handed Yeshua over to those who would kill him was not named Judas.

His name was Yehudah.

That single act of translation, Yehudah into Judas, is one of the most consequential name-changes in the history of Western civilization. Because Judas is a villain. Judas is a byword for treachery in virtually every language that received the Greek New Testament. The name itself became the accusation....    see more >>

Only the Lion

The Name Holds Both

Part 5 of 8

What the Greek Translation Erased

The Greek form Judas created a distinction that the Hebrew did not permit. In the Greek-speaking world that received the New Testament, Judas was a traitor and Judah was a patriarch, two separate names, two separate identities, separated by centuries and by the distance between a villain and a founding father.

In Hebrew, they are the same word. There is no distance. The man who arranged the arrest...    see more >>

The Usurper

A Name That Accuses Itself

Part 6 of 8

He Was Not Named James

Of all the name-changes examined in these documents, none is more consequential for the history of Christian confusion than this one.

The man known in Christianity as James, author of the epistle that bears his name, presiding authority of the Jerusalem council, half-brother of Yeshua — was not named James.

His name was Yakov. Jacob. The usurper. The heel-grasper. The one who came out of the womb...    see more >>

The Man Who Never Left an Empty House

Part 7 of 8

The Temple Trap

Acts 21

When Paul came to Jerusalem near the end of his ministry, Yakov received him and listened to his report of what YHWH had accomplished among the Gentiles. Then Yakov told Paul there was a problem. Thousands of Jewish believers had heard that Paul was teaching Jews to abandon Moses. Whether true or distorted, Yakov had a solution.

Four men had taken a Nazirite vow. Yakov told Paul to join himself...    see more >>

God Was Already Gone

And Yakov Was There

Part 8 of 8

The Empty House

Here is what must be said plainly, and without evasion.

While Yakov knelt in the temple, day after day, year after year, callousing his knees on its floors, praying for the people, maintaining his position at the center of the structure he believed to be the dwelling place of YHWH, the God of Israel had already left the building.

This is not a Christian assertion laid over a Jewish story. This is...    see more >>