Yeshua, the Hebrew Name: this book begins where most church history books stop. Not with creeds or councils or theological abstractions, but with a name. The name a Jewish mother gave her son in first-century Nazareth. The name that carried a mission, a meaning, and a message that two thousand years of translation have slowly obscured.
His mother was Miriam, not Mary. His brother was Ya'akov, not James. His closest follower was Shimon Kepha, not Simon Peter. And he himself was Yeshua, a Hebrew name from the root yasha, meaning Yahweh saves. When the angel announced his birth, the instruction was not a random label. It was a prophetic declaration embedded in Hebrew etymology, connecting the child's identity to his redemptive purpose. When that name was filtered through Greek, Latin, and English, the declaration became a sound, and the sound became a name without a meaning that most believers today can explain.
This book investigates how that happened and why it matters. It traces the linguistic journey of the name Yeshua into the Anglicized "Jesus." It examines the theology of supersessionism, the doctrine that the Christian church replaced Israel and made Judaism obsolete, and shows how that doctrine drove the systematic de-Judaization of the Jewish Messiah. It draws on decades of Jewish Jesus scholarship to demonstrate that Yeshua can only be understood within the world of first-century Judaism, and it confronts the uncomfortable truth that replacement theology is not a relic of the ancient church but a living presence in modern Christianity.
Inside this book you will find:
- A clear account of how the Hebrew name Yeshua became the English name Jesus
- An accessible introduction to supersessionism and replacement theology
- The historical and theological case for reading the Gospels through a Jewish lens
- A study of how Jewish identity was erased from the New Testament through renaming and translation
- Practical reflection on what it means to recover the Hebrew roots of Christian faith
Whether you are a lifelong believer, a serious student of church history, or someone who simply wants to understand the Jewish roots of the world's largest religion, this book offers a clear, honest, and deeply researched answer to the question almost nobody thinks to ask.
His name is Yeshua. This is the story of how we forgot.
