Hebrew Roots Movement, Part 1

December 28, 2022 at 1:03 pm (Hebrew Roots Movement, Hermeneutics)

The Hebrew Roots Movement (HRM) has not only been around a while, but it has gained steam. There are many blogs, video conferences, and even now a seminary to train pastors in the HRM. Why has this movement gained so much headway? In part, I think it is because the church has failed to preach the true gospel, and has transitioned to moral therapeutic deism. Also, with the rise of progressivism, Christians believe that there needs to be something in place to stem the tide. They think to find that in obedience to Old Testament civil and ceremonial laws. To build on R. Scott Clark’s categories for a moment, it is a quest for illegitimate religious certainty (QIRC). It comes from a desire to live by sight and not by faith, especially in opposition to the shifting sands of progressivism. I dare say many HRM proponents would not agree with this assessment of the situation. They just want to be obedient. Of course, in desiring to answer these points of the HRM, we must be very careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The moral law of the 10 Commandments still applies today, not in order to obtain or keep salvation, but as our expression of gratitude for the salvation we have received.

Previous treatments of the subject on this blog have been somewhat piece-meal, though there are some excellent contributions (especially those by Reed). See here, here, here, and here. I would encourage readers to go back through those, as they are helpful. Today I want to address one particular issue, the name of Jesus. HRM proponents almost always call Him “Jeshua.” They believe that when the NT became Greek (they think it was originally written in Hebrew), that Hellenism took over and distorted the message of the NT. While there have been a fair number of scholars who have believed the NT was originally written in Aramaic (read Isaiah 36-39 to see that Aramaic and Hebrew are not the same language, despite being about half cognate), very few reputable NT scholars of which I am aware believe the NT was originally written in Hebrew. For one thing, there are absolutely zero Hebrew manuscripts of the New Testament that have any antiquity, whereas we have Greek manuscripts that date to the second century A.D.

One of the main problems here for the HRM on this point is Pentecost. At the very least, the Cretans of Acts 2:11 would have spoken Greek. The Holy Spirit didn’t have any problems with translating the gospel into all of these languages. Why would Greek only be the problematic language? It was the lingua franca of the day. HRM proponents use many languages today. Why are modern languages any better than the supposedly devilish Greek language? Iesous is a direct transliteration of “Yeshua.” The two names mean exactly the same thing: “The Lord saves.” Matthew 1:21 explicitly ties Jesus’ Greek name with the salvation God brings. One thing the HRM proponents have never done is explain how the meaning of the Hebrew name and Greek name is supposedly so vastly different that it is somehow almost heretical to call Jesus “Iesous.” I am thinking James Barr’s The Semantics of Biblical Language has escaped their attention. If Pentecost proves that the gospel may and should be translated into all languages, then Greek cannot be the exception. I don’t believe for one second, incidentally, that the New Testament was originally written in anything other than Greek.

Most importantly for this point, there is no biblical text whatsoever that would even support the idea that Hebrew is a holier language than Greek. They cannot argue this from Scripture. Instead, they base everything off a highly questionable assumption that the NT was written originally in Hebrew, even though there is next to no evidence for it.

They typically argue that the disciples could not possibly have known Greek. This is almost universally rejected in the scholarly world today. For example, Karen Jobes’s excellent commentary on 1 Peter shows how Greek was the original language of writing the letter, and by someone for whom Greek was a second language (she measures Semitic interference). If Greek was the lingua franca, why would anyone make the preposterous claim that the disciples (and Jesus, for that matter!) could not possibly have known the language? Yet many HRM proponents make that precise claim.

Why is this important? Is calling Jesus “Yeshua” really all that bad? Of course it isn’t bad at all, in and of itself. Modern Hebrew speakers call Jesus “Yeshua.” It is all the baggage that comes with it in the HRM movement that introduces the problems. HRM proponents want to make the OT more important than the NT. This is part and parcel of their claim that Jesus really doesn’t change anything with regard to OT law. The fact is simple: believing that Jesus’ name cannot be translated from one language to another is pure superstition. There is no difference in meaning AT ALL between “Yeshua,” “Iesous,” and “Jesus.” They all mean “Yahweh saves.”

Speaking on a more personal note, most HRM proponents I have come into contact with tend to look down their noses at people who say “Jesus,” because they are somehow being less holy by translating the name. This is part of the larger attempt to make people feel like they are missing out on something if they do not obey the entire OT law. Galatians and Hebrews would beg to differ, despite the exegetical gymnastics the HRM tries to pull to make those texts say something different than what they actually say. Up next is hermeneutics.