Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Jesus Christ Named by Prophets?

2 Nephi 25:19
For according to the words of the prophets, the Messiah cometh in six hundred years from the times that my father left Jerusalem; and according to the words of the prophets, and also the word of the angel of God, his name shall be Jesus Christ, the son of God.
Now there are just a couple anomalies here. Jesus is never mentioned by name in the Old Testament. Messiah would have been the Hebrew word for Christ, as Christ is Greek, not Hebrew. I suppose I can’t comment on “Reformed Egyptian” as the language seems to be nonexistent except for its presence on nonexistent gold plates. In any case it is very hard to make any concerted investigation into the nature of that language. Yet it is still very doubtful it had any Greek influence some five hundred years before the rise of Alexander the Great, and Christ is of Greek origin, as is the pronunciation and spelling of the name Jesus, which would have been closer to Joshua, yeshua, in Hebrew, or Aramaic, and I can only assume that this “reformed Egyptian, would have its roots, or be in the same family as those two languages if transplanted Jews on the North American continent are using it. But being as Jesus Christ is never named in the Old Testament as such, one wonders what prophets Joseph Smith here means.

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