Start here · The Owner's Manual

Introduction

The opening pages of The Owner's Manual Study Bible. Read this first and the rest of the Bible makes a lot more sense.

Also read: How to Use This Bible · Old Testament Introduction · New Testament Introduction

Be a Berean

This Bible was built to be checked. That idea comes from a small town in Greece and three verses in Acts.

The Town That Fact Checked Paul

In Acts 17, Paul and Silas are run out of Thessalonica. A mob is after them. The believers sneak them out at night, and they land in a town called Berea. Today it is called Veria, and you can still visit it.

Paul does what he always does. He goes to the synagogue and teaches that Jesus is the Messiah the Scriptures promised.

Here is what the Bereans did next. Acts 17:11 says they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if these things were so.

Think about that. The apostle Paul is standing in front of them. The man who would write 13 books of the New Testament. And they said, in effect, "Great sermon. We're going to go look it up."

God Called It Noble

You might expect Luke to scold them for doubting an apostle. He does the opposite. He says the Bereans were more noble than the people in Thessalonica.

They were not cynics. They were eager. They wanted it to be true. They just wanted to see it for themselves. Acts 17:12 says many of them believed, including leading Greek women and men.

You know that one kid in Sunday school? The one who actually finished the take home sheet. The one with tabs on every book of the Bible, color coded. The one who raised a hand when the teacher said Methuselah lived about a thousand years and said, "Actually, it was 969. Genesis 5:27." The one who reminded the teacher she forgot to give homework.

Now fill a whole synagogue with that kid. That was Berea.

Paul walked in ready to preach and got a room full of fact checkers with scrolls. Every time he said, "As it is written," fifty people started unrolling scrolls to find the spot. Nobody fell asleep. Nobody was drawing in the margins. Somebody in the back was probably taking notes on his notes.

And here is the best part. Luke did not call them annoying. He did not call them know it alls. He called them noble.

Paul didn't scold them either. I like to imagine him thinking, "Finally! People who actually want to hear this. Bring on the hard questions." Because in a lot of towns, the crowd was looking up at the sun to see how close it was to lunch.

That's not just a joke. Back then, most people told time by the sun. The daylight was split into twelve hours, from sunrise to sunset. Jesus said it Himself: Are there not twelve hours of daylight? John 11:9. That means a summer hour was longer than a winter hour. Cities had sundials, and some had water clocks, but most folks just looked up. Noon was the sixth hour. In Acts 10:9 to 10, Peter goes up on a roof to pray at about the sixth hour and gets hungry. Even apostles knew when it was lunchtime.

And Paul knew what a bored crowd looked like. In Acts 20:9, a young man named Eutychus was sitting in a window while Paul talked on and on. He fell asleep, fell out the window from the third story and died. Paul had to raise him from the dead. Nobody in Berea ever needed that.

That crowd still exists today. In Christian circles we call them the apologetics crowd, and you know who you are. You have watched a three hour debate about one Greek word at 1 a.m. and paused it to take notes. You own more Bibles than coffee mugs. You have said the words "well, actually, in the Greek" at Thanksgiving dinner. Your pastor sees you walk in with a notebook and quietly checks his sermon one more time.

If that's you, welcome to Berea. This study Bible was written partly just for you. We know you are going to check every note anyway, so let's make it official. If you find a mistake, a take you think is wrong, or a view we left out, tell us at bibletechsupport.com. All of them. Even the small ones. Especially the small ones. We would rather hear it from you than from a comment section.

And it stuck. A few chapters later, in Acts 20:4, a Berean named Sopater is traveling with Paul as part of his team. The town that checked his work sent him a teammate.

They Didn't Have It Easy

The Bereans did not have a Bible on the nightstand. There were no printed books. The Scriptures were handwritten scrolls, expensive and heavy, kept at the synagogue. Their Bible was what we call the Old Testament.

So checking Paul meant showing up, unrolling scrolls and reading, every single day. They did it anyway.

You have it much easier. You are holding the whole thing, both testaments, with notes that point you to every verse we talk about.

Why That Matters for This Bible

Every note in this Bible is a claim. A prophecy was fulfilled here. This stone was dug up there. This verse is missing from the oldest copies. We want you to check every one of them.

That is why each note gives you the verse. That is why our confidence ratings say HIGH, MEDIUM or LOW instead of pretending everything is certain. That is why the Big Question pages show every side. And that is why every change we made to the Bible text is listed where you can see it.

We are not asking you to trust us. We are asking you to do what the Bereans did. Open the Book and see if these things are so.

Our whole ministry is built on that one verse. No Bible college required. Just eagerness and a habit of looking it up.

How the Bible Got to You

God did not drop a leather Bible out of the sky and tell everyone, "This is My Complete Word of God!" The one exception might be the Ten Commandments, which Exodus 31:18 says were written by the finger of God. And no, the Council of Nicaea did not take books out of the Bible in AD 325. More on that in the bonus section at the very end of this Bible. God used people, scrolls, scribes and printing presses over about 3,000 years. Here is the family tree, short version.

It Started in Hebrew and Greek

Here's a fun question nobody can answer: what language did Adam speak?

The stories in Genesis happened long before anyone wrote them down, and the people in them did not all speak Hebrew. Abraham's family settled in Haran, in a region called Aram, Genesis 11:31. That's where the word Aramaic comes from. Isaac married Rebekah, the sister of Laban the Aramean, Genesis 25:20. Deuteronomy 26:5 even calls Jacob a wandering Aramean.

The Bible gives us a clue. In Genesis 31:47, Jacob and his uncle Laban stack up a pile of rocks to seal a deal, and each one names it. Laban calls it Jegar Sahadutha, which is Aramaic. Jacob calls it Galeed, which is Hebrew. Both names mean heap of witness. One rock pile, two languages. That's the first Aramaic in the Bible.

So when these things actually happened, some of the talking was probably in Aramaic, or in an older language we don't even have a name for. An old Jewish teaching in the Talmud says Adam spoke Aramaic, Sanhedrin 38b. Others said Hebrew. Genesis 11:1 only tells us the whole world spoke one language before Babel. The truth is we don't know, and anyone who tells you for sure is guessing.

Before Anyone Wrote It Down

For a long time, these stories were not read. They were told. Around the fire, at the dinner table, on long walks with the sheep. Scholars call this oral tradition. Oral just means spoken out loud. Not the dentist kind.

Now you might be thinking of the telephone game, where Grandma likes pie turns into Grandpa bought a goat by the end of the line. That's not how it worked. In a world with no books, people memorized on purpose. They used songs, rhymes, lists and the same words over and over. And if someone told the story wrong, the whole family fixed it on the spot. Try telling a family story wrong at Thanksgiving with your aunt in the room. You will be corrected before you finish the sentence.

The Bible tells families to do exactly this:

• Deuteronomy 6:7. Talk about God's words when you sit at home, when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Basically, all day.
• Exodus 12:26 to 27. When your kids ask what Passover means, tell them the story.
• Joshua 4:6 to 7. Pile up twelve stones from the Jordan River, so when your kids ask what the rocks are for, you tell them what God did.
• Psalm 78:3 to 4. What our fathers told us, we will not hide from our children.

The rest of the ancient world did it too. Many scholars think the Greek poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were recited from memory for generations before anyone wrote them down. Jewish teachers carried a huge body of teaching in their heads for centuries before it was written down as the Mishnah, around AD 200.

Here's a mind blower. Do the math with the ages in the Hebrew text of Genesis 5 and 11, and the chain is short. Methuselah was alive at the same time as Adam for about 243 years. Then Methuselah was alive at the same time as Noah for 600 years. And Noah's son Shem was still alive when Abraham was born. So a story from the garden could go from Adam to Methuselah to Noah's family to Abraham with just a few handoffs. That's fewer people than it takes to pass the mashed potatoes.

One more thing. Writing is way older than Moses. Egypt and Babylon were writing things down more than a thousand years before he was born. Genesis is divided into sections that start with words like This is the account of, Genesis 2:4, 6:9 and 11:27. Some scholars think those mark older family records that were written down early. Nobody knows for sure.

Then Moses Wrote It Down

Jewish and Christian tradition says Moses put Genesis and the next four books in writing, and he wrote them in Hebrew. When? That depends on when you date the Exodus. 1 Kings 6:1 says Solomon started the temple 480 years after Israel left Egypt, which points to about 1446 BC. That would put Moses writing around 1400 BC. Many other scholars date the Exodus to the 1200s BC, which would put it around 1250 BC. Some modern scholars think the books reached their final form even later. Each book's introduction tells you more. The Old Testament Introduction has three pages, starting with Why Do Some Books Have Two Dates?, that explain how we date the books and why many scholars date them later, and the New Testament Introduction does the same for the Gospels.

So here's the idiot proof version. Things happened. People talked about them, maybe in Aramaic. Families memorized the stories and passed them down. Then Moses wrote it all down in Hebrew. Same story, new language. Kind of like the Bible you're holding, which you're reading in English.

What the Books Were Written In

The Old Testament was written mostly in Hebrew. A few chapters in Daniel and Ezra, plus one verse in Jeremiah, are in Aramaic, a cousin language. The New Testament was written in Greek, the common language of the Roman world.

We do not have the original pages. Nobody does. That is true of every ancient book, from Homer to Julius Caesar. What we have is copies, and copies of copies. The good news is that we have a lot of them, and some are very old.

What Language Did Jesus Speak?

Here's the short answer: most of the New Testament happened in Aramaic and got written down in Greek. Let's untangle that.

In Jesus' day, the Jews of Galilee and Judea mostly spoke Aramaic at home and in the street. Hebrew was the language of the Scriptures and worship. Greek was the language of business and government all over the Roman world. And the Roman soldiers spoke Latin. The sign Pilate nailed over the cross covered the whole menu. It was written in Hebrew, Latin and Greek, John 19:20.

You can still hear Jesus' own Aramaic in the Gospels. Mark kept a few of His actual words:

• Talitha koum. Little girl, get up. Mark 5:41.
• Ephphatha. Be opened. Mark 7:34.
• Abba. Father. Mark 14:36.
• Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani? My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? Mark 15:34.

Even Peter's nickname is Aramaic. Cephas means rock, John 1:42.

But when Jesus stood up in the synagogue in Nazareth and was handed the scroll of Isaiah, Luke 4:16 to 20, that scroll was in Hebrew, and He read it in Hebrew. Many think someone then gave the meaning out loud in Aramaic so everybody could follow. That custom is described in Jewish writings from later on, so we can't be sure it happened that day.

Did Jesus speak Greek too? Maybe. Galilee was surrounded by Greek speaking towns, He talked with a Greek woman in Mark 7:26, and He talked with Pilate. Scholars still argue about it.

Acts has the same mix. When Paul spoke to the crowd in Jerusalem, he switched to Hebrew, which many think means the Aramaic the locals spoke, and the crowd went even quieter, Acts 21:40 to 22:2. Nothing gets a crowd's attention like speaking their language. When he preached in Athens, it was Greek.

So Why Write It in Greek?

Because Greek was the English of the ancient world. About 300 years before Jesus, Alexander the Great conquered everything from Greece to Egypt to the edge of India, and Greek spread everywhere he went. By Jesus' day, a merchant from Spain, a soldier in Egypt and a fisherman in Turkey could all get by in Greek. The kind they used is called Koine, which means common. Not the fancy Greek of the philosophers. The everyday Greek of the marketplace. Think text messages, not Shakespeare.

The apostles were writing to churches in places like Rome, Corinth, Galatia and Ephesus. Most of those people did not speak Aramaic. If Paul had written Romans in Aramaic, the Romans would have needed a translator and a snack. He didn't even write it in Latin. He wrote it in Greek, because that's what everybody could read. Jesus told them to make disciples of all nations, Matthew 28:19, so they wrote in the one language all the nations shared.

There's one more reason. The Bible most early Christians read was already in Greek, the Septuagint. So when the New Testament writers quoted the Old Testament, they could quote a Bible their readers already owned.

One honest footnote. Papias, a church leader in the early 100s, said Matthew first put Jesus' sayings together in the Hebrew language. We only know this because the historian Eusebius quoted him. Scholars still debate what Papias meant. The Gospel of Matthew we have was written in Greek, and most scholars think it was not translated from another language.

The idiot proof version: Jesus talked in Aramaic. He read the Scriptures in Hebrew. The apostles wrote it all down in Greek so the whole world could read it. And now you're reading it in English. Same story, fourth language.

The Old Testament Copies

For centuries, Jewish scribes copied the Hebrew Bible by hand. They were famous for being careful. A group called the Masoretes counted letters and words so they could catch mistakes. Their work gave us the standard Hebrew text.

The oldest complete Hebrew Bible we have is the Leningrad Codex, copied around AD 1008. The Aleppo Codex is a little older, from around AD 930, but part of it was lost in the 1900s.

Then around 1947, as the story goes, a shepherd boy threw a rock into a cave near the Dead Sea. He heard pottery break. Inside were the Dead Sea Scrolls, copies of Old Testament books about a thousand years older than the Leningrad Codex. The Great Isaiah Scroll, from around 125 BC, lines up closely with the Isaiah we read today. A thousand years of copying, and the message held.

The Greek Old Testament

Around 250 BC, Jewish scholars in Egypt began translating their Scriptures into Greek. This translation is called the Septuagint. Many Jews by then spoke Greek better than Hebrew.

The Septuagint matters because the New Testament writers often quote from it. When a New Testament quote reads a little differently from your Old Testament, this is usually why. Our notes point it out when it matters.

The New Testament Copies

We have more than 5,000 handwritten Greek copies of the New Testament, whole books and scraps. No other ancient book comes close. The oldest scraps are often dated to the 100s, though scholars debate exact dates. The oldest nearly complete Bibles, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, come from the 300s.

With that many copies, there are differences. Most are spelling and word order. A few are bigger, like the ending of Mark. That is why this Bible uses [square brackets]. We show you where the oldest copies differ. We don't hide it.

Latin Takes Over

Around AD 400, a scholar named Jerome translated the Bible into Latin. It became known as the Vulgate, which means common. For about a thousand years, it was the Bible of the Western church.

The problem was that most regular people didn't speak Latin. The Bible was read to them in a language they couldn't understand.

Into English, and Into Trouble

In the 1380s, John Wycliffe and his followers put the whole Bible into English by hand. They translated from the Latin. The church banned unapproved English Bibles in 1409.

Then came the printing press. In 1516, a Dutch scholar named Erasmus printed the Greek New Testament. Now scholars could translate from the Greek instead of the Latin.

Martin Luther used it. In 1522, he put the New Testament into German so a farmer could read it for himself. The full German Bible followed in 1534. He did it while the church wanted him dead.

William Tyndale used it too. He read Luther and borrowed from his prefaces. In 1526, Tyndale printed the first English New Testament translated from Greek. He had to do it in hiding in Germany, and copies were smuggled into England in bales of cloth. Bishops bought them up and burned them. Tyndale was strangled and burned in 1536. According to the old account by John Foxe, his last words were a prayer: "Lord, open the King of England's eyes."

Within a few years, England had approved English Bibles. The Geneva Bible of 1560 was the Bible of Shakespeare and the Pilgrims. It was the first full English Bible with verse numbers.

The King James

In 1611, a team of about 50 scholars finished the King James Version. It became the Bible of the English speaking world for over 300 years. Most of its New Testament wording comes straight from Tyndale. One computer study found about 83 percent. The man they burned wrote most of the Bible they printed.

The KJV most people read today is not the 1611 printing. It is a 1769 update that fixed spelling and printing errors.

Then We Found More Copies

In the 1800s and 1900s, scholars found older copies than the KJV translators ever saw, including Codex Sinaiticus and the Dead Sea Scrolls. New translations used them. You have probably heard of a few: the NASB, NIV and ESV. Their New Testaments are translated from what scholars call the critical text, a Greek text built by comparing the oldest copies.

Not every new translation went that way. The New King James Version, finished in 1982, updated the King James English but kept the same Greek text the King James used, called the Textus Receptus, or Received Text. Good scholars still disagree about which Greek text is best, and our TEXT notes show you where the two differ.

Translations sit on a line. On one end are word for word translations like the KJV, NASB and ESV. In the middle are thought for thought translations like the NIV and NLT. Way out on the far end are paraphrases like The Message. Each has a job. Word for word helps you study. Thought for thought helps you read fast.

Where The Owner's Manual Fits

The Owner's Manual, or TOM, is a word for word style translation. TOM starts from the Berean Standard Bible, a modern English translation made from the Hebrew and Greek. Yes, it is named after the same Bereans from Acts 17. In 2023, its makers did something generous. They gave it to the public for free, so anyone could print it, share it and build on it. We did exactly that, and we thank them in our acknowledgments. Then we changed it.

We print God's name, Yahweh, where the Hebrew has it. We brought back some King James wording where it hits harder and still means the same thing today. And we put words missing from the oldest copies in brackets instead of deleting them. Every change is listed in our change log, verse by verse, with the reason why.

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Follow any arrow up and you land on the same Hebrew and Greek copies. TOM borrows from two branches: the Berean Standard Bible for its base, and the King James for some of its wording.

The King James: Respect and False Friends

Let's get this out of the way. We love the King James Bible.

It shaped the English language. It gave us phrases people still use without knowing where they came from, like the salt of the earth, a labor of love and the powers that be. Revivals were preached from it. Missionaries carried it around the world. Your grandma probably underlined hers until the pages were soft. If you read the KJV, you are reading a Bible that God has used for over 400 years. Keep reading it.

The Translators Agreed With Us

Here is something most people never see. The 1611 King James had a long preface called The Translators to the Reader. In it, the translators said the Bible should be in the plain language of the people, so even the simplest person could understand it.

They also said that even a weak translation of the Bible is still the word of God. And they filled the margins with thousands of notes showing other ways a word could be translated. They were Bereans too. They wanted you to see their choices.

So when a newer Bible changes an old word, it is not attacking the King James. It is doing what the King James translators did. Putting God's Word in the language people speak today.

Why We Kept Some KJV Wording

Sometimes the King James just says it better. Daniel 11:32 says the people who know their God shall be strong and do exploits. Try saying that with less punch. You can't.

So TOM brings back KJV wording in some places. Our rule is simple. The KJV words must be faithful to the Hebrew or Greek, and they must still mean the same thing to a reader today. Every one of these swaps is listed in our change log.

Watch Out for False Friends

That second rule matters, because English changes. A false friend is a word you think you know, but it meant something else in 1611. It looks friendly. It is not.

The teacher Mark Ward made this idea famous for KJV readers, and he is right. These are not mistakes in the King James. In 1611, these words were perfect. The language moved. The Bible didn't.

Here are some of our favorites.

That last one is a good example of how TOM works. We kept the King James phrase rightly dividing the word of truth, because it is strong and still clear. But we changed Study to Be diligent, because Paul was not telling Timothy to cram for a test. He was telling him to work hard at handling God's Word right.

So when you see an old word in TOM, it is there on purpose. When you see an old word changed, that is on purpose too. Either way, it's in the change log.

What We Changed, and Where to Check

Any time someone changes the Bible text, you should get nervous. We would. So we wrote down every single change.

The Change Log

Our change log lists every place where TOM's wording is different from the translation we started with. Each line gives you the verse, what it said before, what it says now and why we changed it.

Scan the QR code on the copyright page to open it. It's free, and it updates as we fix things. Nothing is hidden in the fine print, because there is no fine print.

The Four Kinds of Changes

Almost every change falls into one of four groups.

1. God's name. Where the Hebrew has God's personal name, we print Yahweh. That is the biggest change by far, in thousands of verses. The next section explains why.
2. King James wording. Where the KJV is stronger and still clear, we brought it back. For example, 1 Timothy 3:16 reads God was manifest in the flesh. The note under it tells you that the oldest copies say He who was manifest, and that both readings point to Jesus.
3. Brackets. Some verses that older Bibles had and newer Bibles dropped are back in TOM, inside [square brackets]. One example is Acts 8:37, where the Ethiopian official confesses his faith before he is baptized. You see the verse, and you see that the oldest copies don't have it.
4. Plain English measures. In some places we turned ancient weights and measures into ones you know, like inches and pounds, so you can picture the thing.

What We Never Do

We never change a verse to win an argument. We never change a verse to fit a doctrine. If a verse makes our side uncomfortable, it stays exactly as it is.

And we never make a change without telling you. If you find one that isn't in the log, that's a mistake, and we want to know.

Find a Mistake?

This Bible was made by people, and people miss things. If you find an error in a note, a date or a highlight, tell us at bibletechsupport.com. We will check it, fix it in the next printing and add it to the log. Bereans are welcome here.

God Has a Name

God is not God's name. God is His title, like President or Coach. He has a personal name, and He told us what it is.

The Burning Bush

In Exodus 3, Moses is standing barefoot in front of a bush that is on fire but not burning up. God tells him to go back to Egypt and lead Israel out. Moses asks a fair question. If the people ask me Your name, what do I tell them?

God answers in Exodus 3:14, I AM WHO I AM. Then in verse 15 He gives His name. In Hebrew it is four letters, YHWH. And He adds, This is My name forever, and this is how I am to be remembered from generation to generation.

Most scholars connect the name to the Hebrew verb for to be. He is the God who is. He was before anything else, and He will be after everything else.

The Most Used Name in the Bible

That four letter name shows up about 6,800 times in the Old Testament. That's more than any other name or title for God, and more than any other name in the Bible.

So why have most of us never seen it?

How a Name Went Missing

Ancient Hebrew was written with consonants only, no vowels. Readers just knew how to say the words. Imagine reading a text from your friend that says GD MRNNG and knowing exactly what it means.

Over time, Jewish readers became so careful about God's name that they stopped saying it out loud. They did not want to misuse it and break the commandment in Exodus 20:7. Ancient Jewish writings say that only the high priest spoke it, in the temple, on the Day of Atonement.

So when readers came to YHWH, they said Adonai instead, which means Lord. Later, the Greek translation of the Old Testament mostly used the Greek word for Lord in those places too.

Then, hundreds of years after Jesus, Jewish scribes called the Masoretes added little vowel marks to the Hebrew text. On YHWH, they put the vowels of Adonai, as a reminder to say Lord. It was like a sticky note that said, don't say this word out loud.

After enough centuries of nobody saying it, the exact sound of the name was lost.

Where Jehovah Came From

Christian scholars in the Middle Ages read the Hebrew text and took the sticky note literally. They mixed the consonants YHWH with the vowels of Adonai. Spell that in Latin letters, where the letter J was said like our Y, and you get Jehovah.

The name spread in English Bibles. Tyndale used it. The King James prints Jehovah four times on its own, in Exodus 6:3, Psalm 83:18, Isaiah 12:2 and Isaiah 26:4, plus in a few place names like Jehovah jireh in Genesis 22:14.

Everywhere else, the King James did what most English Bibles still do. It printed LORD in capital letters. When your Bible says LORD in all caps, that is God's name hiding in plain sight. When it says Lord GOD, the Hebrew is Adonai YHWH.

Jehovah has been used in great hymns and by sincere believers for centuries. It is just not how the name was pronounced in Bible times. Scholars across the board agree on that.

Why We Say Yahweh

Nobody alive can be 100 percent sure how the name was said. But scholars have strong clues, and they mostly agree on Yahweh.

Clue one is the short form of the name, Yah. You already say it. Hallelujah means praise Yah. Psalm 68:4 uses Yah by itself.

Clue two is names. Elijah means my God is Yah. Isaiah means Yah saves. Many Bible names carry part of God's name inside them.

Clue three is early Christian writers. Around AD 200, Clement of Alexandria wrote the name in Greek letters with a sound close to Yahweh. A later writer named Theodoret said the Samaritans pronounced it Yabe.

Put those together and you get Yahweh, which is how most scholars write it today. That's what TOM prints.

Isn't It Wrong to Say It?

This is a fair question, and good people disagree.

Many Jewish people today still will not say the name. Some will not even spell out the word God in full, and many call Him HaShem, which means The Name. That comes from deep respect, and we respect it too.

Many Christians prefer LORD for a different reason. The apostles wrote the New Testament in Greek, and when they quoted the Old Testament, they used the Greek word for Lord. That tradition is old and honorable.

Here is why we still print Yahweh. In the Old Testament, people said God's name all the time. In Ruth 2:4, Boaz greets his field workers with Yahweh be with you, and they answer, Yahweh bless you. That's farm small talk. The commandment in Exodus 20:7 is about misusing God's name, like a false promise or a fake prophecy. It's not about saying it with love.

God said this is My name forever. We think He meant for it to be used. So when you see Yahweh in TOM, read it, say it and know that you are calling God by the name He gave Himself.

How TOM Prints God's Names

In the New Testament, TOM keeps Lord, because that is what the apostles wrote in Greek. The next section explains how that ties right back to Yahweh.

God's Other Names and Titles

The Bible pairs God's name and titles with words that describe Him. Some are names He gives Himself. Some are names people gave Him after He showed up in their lives. Here are the big ones.

A quick note on Elohim. Some Christians see the plural form as an early hint of the Trinity. Many scholars, Jewish and Christian, say it is a plural of majesty, the way a king might say we. Both views are out there. Neither one changes what Deuteronomy 6:4 says. Yahweh is one.

See how El Roi was spoken by a runaway servant girl alone in the desert? God's names are not just theology. A lot of them were given by people who just met Him on their worst day.

Jesus, Yeshua and Lord

God's name doesn't disappear in the New Testament. It's hiding inside the name of Jesus.

His Name Means Yahweh Saves

Jesus's mother and friends did not call Him Jesus. They spoke Aramaic and Hebrew, and they called Him Yeshua. It's a short form of Yehoshua, the same name as Joshua, the man who led Israel into the Promised Land. In Ezra and Nehemiah, a high priest has the same name, written Jeshua in many English Bibles.

Yeshua means Yahweh saves. That's why the angel tells Joseph in Matthew 1:21, You are to give Him the name Jesus, because He will save His people from their sins. The name was the mission statement.

So How Did We Get Jesus?

The New Testament was written in Greek, and Yeshua in Greek is Iesous. In Latin it became Iesus. English later added the letter J, and Iesus became Jesus. The 1611 King James actually printed Iesus, because English hadn't fully split I and J yet.

Every step was a normal translation, the way your name might sound a little different in Spanish. The apostles themselves wrote His name in Greek. So TOM prints Jesus in the text. You will find notes on Yeshua at Matthew 1:1 and 1:21.

Some believers prefer to say Yeshua only. That's a beautiful name, and you're welcome to use it. But nobody needs to feel guilty for saying Jesus. Peter, Paul and John wrote His name in Greek, and heaven did not lose any mail.

Christ Is a Title, Not a Last Name

Jesus Christ is not Mr. and Mrs. Christ's boy. Christ comes from the Greek word Christos, which means Anointed One. In Hebrew that word is Mashiach, which gives us Messiah.

In the Old Testament, kings and priests were anointed with oil to set them apart. Saying Jesus Christ means Jesus the Messiah, the King everyone was waiting for.

Lord in the New Testament

The Greek word for Lord is Kyrios. It could mean sir, master or God, depending on who you were talking to. A servant called his boss kyrios. A Greek Bible reader called Yahweh Kyrios.

That is why TOM keeps Lord in the New Testament. It's what the apostles wrote. But watch what they do with it. Again and again, they take an Old Testament verse about Yahweh and apply it to Jesus.

In Isaiah 45, the One speaking is Yahweh, and He says there is no other God. Paul takes those exact words and gives them to Jesus. That's not an accident. That's the point.

Jesus did it too. In John 8:58, He says, Before Abraham was born, I am. Remember the burning bush? The crowd did. They picked up stones.

And in John 20:28, when Thomas finally sees the risen Jesus, he doesn't say, nice trick. He says, My Lord and my God.

So when you read Lord in the New Testament, pay attention. Sometimes it just means sir. Sometimes it means a whole lot more. Our notes will flag the big ones.

Not everyone reads these verses the same way. Jewish readers, Jehovah's Witnesses, Oneness Pentecostals and others understand them differently, and the Big Question page on Is Jesus God? in the Gospel of John lays out every view fairly. But this is where the trail leads. The God who told Moses His name is the God who walked out of the tomb.

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