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‘Jesus’, or ‘Joshua’?
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Hebrews 4:8
Beyond question, the Greek Text has ‘Jesus’, as in the AV, but most modern versions put ‘Joshua’. I suppose that ‘Jesus’ was judged to be an anachronism, and so ‘Joshua’ was elected to relieve the situation. To be sure, the Septuagint we know uniformly spells ‘Joshua’ as Ιησους (Jesus) [as a linguist I wonder why the translators transliterated ‘Iehoshua’ as ‘Iesus’], and probably in consequence, in Acts 7:45 Luke refers to Joshua as ‘Iesus’ [it was not his purpose to correct the LXX]. However, looking carefully at the context in Psalm 95:7-11, Joshua just does not fit. Consider: it is presumably Jehovah the Son who is speaking (“Jehovah our Maker”, verse 6), and since the reference is to those who fell in the wilderness during the forty years, Joshua cannot be in view. Not only that, I invite attention to Joshua 21:43-45 and 23:1, where the Text says that Joshua did in fact give them rest. So whom are you going to believe? Of course the Text is referring to physical rest, not spiritual, since neither Joshua nor anyone else could be responsible for a people's spiritual rest. Ezekiel chapter 18 is very clear to the effect that each individual is responsible for his own eternal destiny. God has no grandchildren, only sons and daughters. In Matthew 23:8-10 Sovereign Jesus forbids any attempt to dominate someone else's faith or conscience. This is consistent with His statement in John 4:23-24. The worship that the Father wants cannot be forced, imposed, controlled or faked.
In relief of the notion of ‘anachronism’ I offer the following: 1) in John 12:41 John affirms that Isaiah saw Jesus (it was Jehovah the Son on the throne); 2) in 1 Corinthians 10:4 Paul affirms that the Rock that provided water was Christ; 3) in Hebrews 11:26 the same author [as I believe] has Moses choosing “the reproach of Christ”; 4) in 1 Peter 1:19-20 Peter affirms that the shed blood of God's Lamb, Jesus, was foreknown before Creation—but blood requires a body, and the Lamb's body was that of Jesus; so Jesus, as Jesus, was known before Creation. Returning to Hebrews 4:8, it was precisely Jesus, Jehovah the Son, who did not allow that generation to enter the ‘rest’.

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© 2016 Wilbur N. Pickering, ThM, PhD