jesus's real name

Believers for centuries have worshiped and loved and prayed to a divine man known to them as Jesus. Scholars have written thousands, if not millions, of tomes extolling and deriding him, holding him up as a paragon of virtue or decrying him as a madman--or worse, a myth.

It might surprise you to learn, then, that "Jesus," an English translation of Iesou, itself a translation of the ancient Hebrew Y'shua, is not in fact the prophet and messiah's real name.

Renowned linguist and antiquities scholar Raymond P. Olney writes,

In 1989 two Bedouin sheepherders stumbled upon the greatest discovery in archaelogical history. While clambering into a cave after a lost ewe, a fifteen-year-old boy cracked his knee on a stone jar. His father, hearing his cries and coming to the rescue, saw the jar and, after dressing the wound, broke it open.

What the Bedouins found inside, and later sold to a German antiques dealer for a pittance, would crumble the foundations of New Testament scholarship and bring fear and trepidation to the Christian masses. A parchment bearing but one line, in an obscure variant of Aramaic (Jesus's native tongue), translating thusly:

PERCIVAL [S]ON OF JOSEPH, ALSO KN[OWN] AS JESUS THE [MESSIA]H

Their earthshaking discovery would lie dormant for almost two decades, since the dealer was stricken by a fatal virus, leaving the parchment in a safe deposit box until it was found in December 2004 by his grandson.

Early this year six competent textual experts secretly examined the fragment, declaring it authentic, and now, in a paper appearing in Literaria Biblica, a leading journal of Biblical archaeology and criticism, the astounding news has reached a global audience.





[fifty-ninth in a series]