The Name of Jesus

Indiana Jones, facing a minefield-trap with marked stones: The name of God.... Jehovah.

Henry Jones: But in the Latin, 'Jehovah' starts with an 'I'...

Indiana Jones: J... (takes a step and almost dies)

In one of the forums which I frequent, there was recently a discussion about a Christian Mythology claim brought forth by one of the members. The claim is that Jesus spent His early adulthood traveling to India to learn Buddhism from the monks. This is cited for the similarities between Jesus's morality and that of Buddhism, which entreats you to do revolutionary acts like caring for the poor and treating people decently.

Of course, there are numerous problems with the claim, among them the fact that it is very difficult to shoehorn Joseph of Arimethea into his proper role within the myth as secret favorite uncle (or great-uncle?) to Jesus. The problem that taught me the most, however, is the scroll that supposedly proves that someone of Jesus's description learned at the temples at around the time of His lifespan. This person carries the Arab/Indian name "Issa".

I thought I had seen that name before, and I was correct. "Isa" is widely and incorrectly cited as the "Arab name for Jesus." It is, in fact, the Muslim name for Jesus. Arab Christians call Him "Yasu".

Now some people might ask why that makes any difference at all. What is the importance of what Arab Christians call Jesus? We don't even have His name perfectly translated from the Aramaic. Jesus comes from the Latin "Iesus", which comes from the Arabic "Yesua/Yeshua", which is a diminutive of the Hebrew "Joshua/Jehoshua".

Ah, but there's the problem. "Yasu" translates nicely to "Yesua", and the Arab Christians have a very close form of Jesus's earthly name. "Isa/Issa", however, correlates far more strongly to another Hebrew name: "Isaac/Isaiah". (Some scholars say that "Isa" may be closer to "Esau".)

To veer into the realm of pure conjecture, I would like to ask this: Why do Muslims refer to Jesus as if His name was Isaac or Isaiah? There is, of course, the obvious conclusion: Muslims would say that Mohammed was correcting problems in the New Testament, while Christians and Jews would say that Mohammed was working off a flawed memory of old Biblical lessons, citing that earlier Muslim scholars were quite certain from his wording that Isaac and Jacob were both meant to be sons of Abraham. For the scroll from India, I would submit that the fact that it was not Jesus's name suggests that another man, either an Arab named Isa/Issa or a Hebrew named Isaac, Isaiah, or Esau once traveled up to India and learned from the monks there.

I like to look into both the physical and spiritual world when making conjecture, and I wonder sometimes if there is something preventing or, at least, discouraging certain types of heresies from comfortably using Jesus's name correctly when assigning Him to their belief systems. Why would I think that? Well, in the face of overwhelming evidence of Jacob's parentage, modern Islamic scholars have changed their minds from earlier times and now lay out the same Abraham-Isaac-Jacob line as the Jews and Christians. Nothing, however, seems capable of turning them from referring to Jesus as "Isa", even though I have known Christians to choose readily and without censure to refer to Jesus as "Yeshua".