Yeshua Is Lord.com

How do we know that Jesus was the Messiah?

The word “Messiah” means “Anointed One,” the name given to the promised Deliverer who would some day come to the people of Israel as their great Savior and Redeemer, “anointed” as Prophet, Priest, and King by God Himself.

Some, of course, are still looking for the fulfillment of these Old Testament promises in the future, when the “Messiah” will come to establish a world kingdom of peace and justice centered around the chosen nation, Israel.

On the other hand, the group of Jewish believers who became the first founders of Christianity were convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was their promised Messiah. The name “Christ” is the Greek equivalent of “Messiah,” so that the name Jesus Christ really means “Jesus the Messiah,” or “Jesus the anointed.” They preached this truth with such conviction and power that not only many Jews but, later, a still greater host of Gentiles, believed on Jesus, both as the Christ and also as the Lord and Savior of all men.

And indeed they had good reason for such faith. The Old Testament Messianic prophecies were found to be uniquely fulfilled in the Lord Jesus Christ. There are hundreds of these prophecies, so that the possibility of their accidental convergence on any ordinary man is completely ruled out by the laws of probability.

Some of the prophecies are so framed, in fact, as to preclude their fulfillment by anyone living after the first century A.D. For example, the patriarch Jacob said, in Genesis 49:10, “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come.” The name “Shiloh” is a title of the Messiah, and the prophecy states that Judah’s tribe would remain the chief tribe in Israel, in particular providing their kings, until Messiah would come. The prophecy must have been fulfilled prior to the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem in A.D. 70, by which time certainly all semblance of a sceptre had departed from Judah.

Similarly the promise was given to King David that the Messiah should be one of his descendants, as the King eternal, the one of whom God said, “I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever” (II Samuel 7:13). Isaiah said, “There shall come forth a rod out of the stem (literally ‘stump’) of Jesse (that is David’s father), and a Branch shall grow out of his roots” (Isaiah 11:1). This is another name of the Messiah, and indicates that, even after it would appear that the family tree of Jesse has been cut down, yet one Branch will grow out of the stump. Evidently the very last one who could be known to have come of this lineage would finally prove to be the promised Messiah!

This was fulfilled uniquely in Jesus. His foster father, Joseph, was in the royal line from David and thus held the legal right to the throne (Matthew 1:1-16). His mother, Mary, was also a descendant of David, as shown by her genealogy in Luke 3:23-31. But ever since the time of Jesus, it would be quite impossible to establish the legal or biological lineage of any pretender to David’s throne, as all the ancient genealogical records were destroyed soon after that.

An even more striking prophecy is given in Daniel 9:24-27. There Daniel was told explicitly that Messiah would come 69 “sabbaths” (that is, 69 sabbatical years – a total of 483 years) after the decree was given to rebuild Jerusalem, which at that time lay in ruins after Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, had destroyed it.

Such a decree was given later by the Persian emperor. Although the exact date of the decree is somewhat uncertain, the termination date of the prophecy must have been some time in the first century A.D. In fact, it must have been before the destruction of the city and the temple by the Romans in A.D. 70, because the prophecy said quite explicitly: “After (the 483 years) shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself; and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary” (Daniel 9:26). Not only must Messiah come before this destruction, but He was also to be“cut off,” rejected and killed, before it came.

It is obvious that no one but Jesus could have fulfilled these prophecies. The prophecies absolutely preclude any still future Messiah, except that even that hope also will find its fulfillment in the second coming of Christ.

And then, of course, there are still hundreds of other prophecies, all of which were fulfilled by Jesus Christ: His virgin birth (Isaiah 7:14); His birth in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2); His sacrificial death (Isaiah 53:5); His crucifixion (Psalm 22:14-18); His bodily resurrection (Psalm 16:10); and many others. All of these unite in their witness that “Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (John 20:31).

The probability that hundreds of such specific predictions, each quite independent of the others, could all be fulfilled concurrently in one individual, is unlikely in the highest degree, especially in view of the miraculous nature of many of them (e.g., the virgin birth, the resurrection, etc.). No rational conclusion seems possible except that Jesus is all He claims – Messiah, Savior, Lord and God.

Excerpt from The Bible Has the Answer, by Henry Morris and Martin Clark,
published by Master Books.

Messiah
In Hebrew: mashiah

In all the thirty-nine instances of its occurring in the Old Testament, is translated by the LXX. [Septuagint] “Christos”
It means anointed. Thus priests (Ex. 28:41; 40:15; Num. 3:3), prophets (1 Kings 19:16), and kings (1 Sam. 9:16; 16:3; 2 Sam. 12:7) were anointed with oil, and so consecrated to their respective offices.

The great Messiah is anointed “above his fellows” (Ps. 45:7); i.e., he embraces in himself all the three offices.
The Greek form “Messias” is only twice used in the New Testament, in John 1:41 and 4:25 (R.V., “Messiah”), and in the Old Testament the word Messiah, as the rendering of the Hebrew, occurs only twice (Dan 9:25,26; R.V., “the anointed one”).

The first great promise (Gen. 3:15) contains in it the germ of all the prophecies recorded in the Old Testament regarding the coming of the Messiah and the great work he was to accomplish on earth.

The prophecies became more definite and fuller as the ages rolled on; the light shone more and more unto the perfect day. Different periods of prophetic revelation have been pointed out:

1. the patriarchal
2. the Mosaic
3. the period of David
4. the period of prophetism, i.e., of those prophets whose works form a part of the Old Testament canon.

The expectations of the Jews were thus kept alive from generation to generation, till the “fulness of the times,” when Messiah came, “made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law.” In him all these ancient prophecies have their fulfilment. Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, the great Deliverer who was to come.

(Compare Matt. 26:54; Mark 9:12; Luke 18:31; 22:37; John 5:39; Acts 2; 16:31; 26:22,23.)

Author: Matthew G. Easton.

 
Yeshua is the original Hebrew proper name for Jesus of Nazareth, who lived from about 6 B.C.E. to 27 A.D. In other words, Yeshua was the name His family would call Him. Since most scholars hold that Jesus was an Aramaic-speaking Jew living in Galilee around it is highly improbable that he had a Greek personal name.

In Hebrew Yeshua means both “Salvation,” and the concatenated form of Yahoshua, the “LORD who is Salvation.”  “He will save”, Is.43:3

The name Jesus has no intrinsic meaning in English, except as it is known as His name in English. (Therefore, we cannot deny the name Jesus, since this name commonly identifies the Messiah to English speaking people.)  

The English form Jesus is derived from the New Testament Greek name Ihsouß, pronounced “Yesous.” According to Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the bible, Yesous (Strong’s #2424) is “of Hebrew origin” and can be traced back to Joshua’s Hebrew name, Yehoshua (#3091, [wvwhy).

But how do we get the Greek Yesous from the Hebrew Yehoshua?

The name Joshua sometimes appears in its shortened form, Yeshua ([wvy) in Neh. 8:17 it is apparent even in English: “Jeshua the son of Nun.” (The letter J was pronounced like a Y in Old English.) Strong does not tell the reader that the Greek Yesous is actually transliterated from this shortened Hebrew form, Yeshua, and not directly from the longer form Yehoshua.

The process from “Yehoshua” to “Jesus” looks like this:

Hebrew Yehoshua à Hebrew Yeshua
Hebrew Yeshua à Greek Yesous
Greek Yesous à English Jesus

There is no “sh” sound in Greek, which accounts for the middle “s” sound in Yesous. The “s” at the end of the Greek name is a grammatical necessity, to make the word declinable.

In Neh. 8:17, Joshua’s name is 100% identical to the name which today’s Messianic Jews use for the Messiah, Yeshua ([wvy). Strong’s confirms this pronunciation, and tells us that there were ten Israelites in the Bible who bore this name (#3442). Therefore the shortening of Yehoshua to Yeshua predates the Christian era by at least 500 years. The form Yeshua existed for several hundred years before the Messiah was even born. Even in the pre-Christian Septuagint, we see the Greek form IHSOUS (Yesous) in the title of the Book of Joshua. (This is also proof that Yesous has no connection to the pagan god Zeus.)
 
YESHUA THE SAVIOR

Many people of the world believe Yeshua to be the promised Lamb of God, who was chosen to be sacrificed for all mankind’s sin. The Bible declares that mankind must have a blood sacrifice to substitute punishment for their sins by placing them on the sacrifice, figuratively speaking. The sacrifice has to be blameless, else the punishment could not be substituted, since the thing sacrificed would be dying for its own sins. Clean and spotless animals were once sacrificed as a temporal measure until a fully qualified sacrifice could be supplied at the proper time. Followers of Yeshua believe He was that perfect sacrifice. He is a man, who could be properly substituted for mankind, yet God in the flesh, for only God is sinless. Only God Himself is a pure enough sacrifice to satisfy His holy justice, for all men have sinned.
Yeshua came speaking the Torah Word of God with absolute authority. He made no mistake in regards to all God’s commands. Only God Himself could act this way. For this reason people accept Yeshua as God in the flesh. Not that God is consigned or limited to flesh, but that He can manifest Himself in whatever form He pleases to fulfill His task. Yeshua of Nazareth was and is the form of flesh that God was manifest in. In this form, Yeshua is the Son of God and the Son of Man.
 
 
YESHUA THE MESSIAH
 
Messiah in Hebrew is “maschiah” and in Greek: Christ. Messiah is not a name but a title and means “anointed one”.
 
Messianic Psalms Ps.2:1-12   67:1-7  68:1-35  69:1-36  72:1-20  96:1-13  98:1-9  110:1-7
 
Prophecies concerning the Messiah:  Dan. 9:25,26  Acts. 3:18-20
 
Simeon’s testimony to the Messiah: Jn.1:41,45
 
Peter’s confession of the Messiah: Mt.16:15,16  Mk:8:29  Lk. 9:20  Jn. 6:69
 
Jesus was proclaimed as Messiah by the apostles: Act. 9:22  13:27  17:2,3  26:6,7,22,23  28:23  Ro.1:1-3  1 Co. 15:3  1P.1:10,11  2P. 1:16-18  1 Jn. 5:6-9
 
Jesus’ own testimony to his messiahship (Mt. 11:3-6  26:63,64  Lk. 24:27  Jn.4:25,26,29,42  5:33,36,37,39,46  6:27  8:14,17-18,25,28,56  13:19
 
Jesus was called David’s son:  Mt.22:42-45  Mk.12:35-37  Lk.20:41-44
 
Jesus is the anointed of God : Ps.2:2  Acts. 4:26,27