Clouseau

I think it's already sorted. The word is a descriptor, not an actual appellation. No problem.

Not as a formal name, no. But if the Isaiah passage is a prophecy, and whether it is or not is of course nothing to do with this thread, it has come true. Because many people thought and think that Jesus of Nazareth was God, with us.

No Robots

I still think they should have gone with "Brian". A slip-up on the part of that mysterious editorial braintrust that cooked the whole thing up, I guess.

Diogenes the Cynic

The prophecy was not supposed to be about the Messiah at all. It referred to a specific kid in the context of that specific story. The kid himself was not even significant except as a marker of time.

gurugeorge

I've already responded to that point. Your irony only looks cute if you think of the "whole thing" that was cooked up as being the full-blown Messiah Jesus H. Christ. Then the ordinary name looks silly, and "Brian" would, indeed, have been better

But the MJ idea isn't like that. It starts with a small group that has a sketchy idea of an obscure Everyman Messiah whose work is already done and dusted. That simple idea is what was initially "cooked up", and in that context, "Joe Schmoe", "Brian", "Bob", or whatever - a common, ordinary name - is perfectly apt, and not at all anti-climactic.

Clouseau

That's one view, but what does this have to do with the names issue?

Diogenes the Cynic

It's not a "view," it's an objective fact. The text itself tells us exactly who Emmanuel was and when the prophecy was fulfilled. There is no mention of the Messiah in the story and no more reason to connect the story to Jesus than to connect it to Eric Clapton (who was also called "God").

I'm not the one who brought it up but I commented it on it to point out that there should not have been any expectation that Emmanuel would be a particularly prospectve name for a hypothetically mythical Messiah because no one before Matthew had ever tried to interpret Isaiah 7:14 as having anything to do with the Messiah.

No Robots

The problem is that the only thing that is common and ordinary about this character is his name.

Clouseau

It's a point of view that it's a fact, but what does it have to do with names?

Clivedurdle

Trying to construct a time line of the name above all names, what do we really have?

Is Lord Jesus Christ the earliest formulation? Or in English, Yhwh, saviour messiah - a set of descriptors without capital letters as everything was written in capitals?

(or voldemort)

John Kesler

The simplest explanation is that "Jesus" really was Jesus' name. To give Jesus and John the Baptist--who both had common names--more honor, the claim was made that God, via the angel Gabriel (Luke 1:13 and 1:31) foreordained their respective names, though Matthew (1:21) only claims this distinction for Jesus.