In the early 1950s a group of Bedouin arrived at the Palestine Archaeological Museum, now known as the Rockefeller Museum, in Jerusalem with documents they had discovered in a cave. These were not the original findings of the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, but from another location between Ein Gedi and Masada. The scrolls contained some biblical texts, one of which is very important for our understanding of Scripture. It was a Scroll of the Minor Prophets, written in Greek.
Details of this scroll were published in the 1950s and it has been a source of study since. This is an important discovery as so much of the Jewish literature recorded in the Greek language—such as Josephus and Philo of Alexandria and the book of Enoch—and especially those Greek language documents that predated the time of Jesus Christ have been preserved by communities of professing Christians rather than by the Jews themselves. As a result, we never know how much “editing” has been done to the texts to support a particular Christian position, or to suit a particular group’s ends.
Most importantly, the text itself—although in Greek—is clearly a Jewish text noted for its closeness to what became known as the Masoretic Text compared with the later Christian renditions of the Greek formalized by Origen at the beginning of the third century. The accepted date for the writing of this text is the end of the first-century bc, in other words, contemporary with the birth of Jesus. The text had been deposited in the cave at Nahal Hever at the end of the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome (135ad) and was hidden in the caves with other biblical writings and correspondence in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.
So why is this important to us in the 21st century?
Solving a Problem of Names
Because of the time of its writing, this scroll, its Jewish origins and above all the language it is written with enables us to solve a problem of names. People have contended that the name Jesus was a pagan name and that the Son of God would have to have a Hebrew name alone. They contend that it is a matter of breaking the third Commandment to use the term Jesus in the English language, or as it might be translated in any other language. Was the name Jesus—or in Greek IESOUS—an accepted name among the Jews at the time of the early Christian Church?
The Minor Prophets Scroll tells us yes it was. In Zechariah 3:8 we have a High Priest who was purged of his sins and made to stand righteous before the Eternal. He was named in English Joshua. That is the translation of the Hebrew, YEHOSHUA. In Greek, this scroll tells us the name is IESOUS, the term from which we derive Jesus in the English language.
So comes the claim that “[t]he Savior was never called Jesus in His lifetime. In fact, the name ‘Jesus’ did not exist until about 500 years ago, as scholars point out” (DeWitt Smith, “The Heavenly Father’s Great Name”), is proved wrong by this archaeological discovery. Irrespective of the ability to pronounce Jesus in English, the reality is that Jesus in Greek, IESOUS, is not a “pagan name” so to speak but the traditional and acceptable translation of the Hebrew YEHOSHUA, commonly known to English readers as Joshua.
But, the evidence for the name Jesus does not stop there.
As a result of all the archaeology, especially since the 1950s to the present, names recovered from archaeological discoveries have been catalogued. One of these is a lexicon of Jewish names by Israeli scholar Tal Ilan. In her lexicon, Ilan shows the widespread use of this name throughout Palestine during the period from Alexander the Great until the end of the Mishnaic era (200ad) (Tal Ilan, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity: Part 1, Palestine 330BCE–200 CE., Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism, 91. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002. pp. 127–133). Of specific interest is the frequency with which the Greek name IESOUS was discovered carved into ossuaries, or stone burial boxes. This was a particularly Jewish form of burial process. Bodies were laid in tombs, as was Jesus Christ’s after His crucifixion. But stone-hewn tombs were too precious to use only once. Families intended to bury generations within the family tomb. So after a period of decay—about a year—the bones were placed in a stone box—an ossuary—that could then be placed in a niche within the tomb and the tomb readied for another deceased family member.
One idea put forward as to why ossuaries came into use is that these stone boxes ensured that an individual’s bones could be kept intact awaiting the resurrection, so they would not risk becoming mingled with those of others, thus (they feared) jeopardizing the individuality of the deceased in the resurrection (L. Y. Rahmani, “Ancient Jerusalem’s Customs and Tombs: Part Four,” Biblical Archaeologist, 1982, p. 111). One of the largest known of these tombs, The Sanhedra Tombs, could accommodate 70 bodies at a time and had provision for numerous ossuaries. Ossuaries were then often engraved with the name of the individual whose bones they contained. This practice was only used by the Jews in the vicinity of Jerusalem for a century leading up to the fall of the city in 70ad. It was continued elsewhere in the land for some time after the fall of Jerusalem. So, it gives us an interesting insight into the names used by Jewish families at the time our Savior walked this earth and during the formative years of the early Church.
According to Ilan’s listing, the name IESOUS has been found engraved on eleven ossuaries, while an abbreviated form of the Hebrew, YEHOSHUA-YESHUA, is found on twelve other ossuaries found in the precincts of Jerusalem. The abbreviation of the name Joshua is found in Ezra 2:2 and in the books of Nehemiah and 1 Chronicles. The contracted name was the norm after the return from captivity.
More Evidence
What can we know about the individuals who were interred in caves around Jerusalem and whose remains were placed in ossuaries? Jerusalem was a favored place to be buried, close to the temple in expectation of the resurrection and coming of the Messiah. Families from outside of Jerusalem, even from remote locations such as Cyrene in North Africa, purchased tombs in Jerusalem in which to be buried. Joseph of Arimathea, in whose new tomb the body of Jesus was interred, is an example. So the names engraved on the ossuaries were not pagans, but people who had in some way and to some degree looked for the redemption of Israel and the resurrection of the dead. These individuals could be likened to the devout Jews, assembled in Jerusalem, who heard Peter’s sermon on the Day of Pentecost in 31ad. Their response to the truth of God’s plan helped to lay a strong foundation as among the first “building blocks” of the early New Testament Church.
The other location that provided numerous entries for Ilan’s lexicon was the documentary discoveries of the Babatha archive at Nahal Hever, the same location where the Minor Prophets Scroll, discussed at the start of this article, was found. Other documents were to be found at Muraba’at and Masada, adding to the frequency with which the name IESOUS was found among Jewish people. Of these discoveries, we find the Greek IESOUS some 20 times while the Hebrew YESHUA appears 25 times. Bear in mind that the discoveries of the Babatha letters and the documents from Muraba`at were not just from any Jew who may have been influenced by pagan ideas. These documents belonged to and described supporters of Simon Bar Kochba, a messianic pretender. So once again these people were looking for a messiah to save them from their enemies and to establish the Kingdom of God.
The evidences from both the ossuaries and the archaeological discoveries from the caves provide watertight proof of the widespread usage of the Greek name IESOUS, before, during and after the physical life of Jesus Christ.
So the idea that the name Jesus was pagan, or that He would not have a Greek name and only a Hebrew or Aramaic name, does not hold up to the evidence. Greek names, which were translations of, or equivalents to, Hebrew names are very well attested. Early Church members were not expected to know Hebrew names as a prerequisite for baptism into the body of Christ.