One of the things I like to do in the morning is to check on the news headlines. I typically use the BBC website, not least because it includes a daily round up of what is on the front pages of the national newspapers. That lets me get an impression of what various organisations regard as the big stories, the different angles they take and, not least what they choose to quietly ignore.
Most of today’s papers were casting an eye on Richie Sunak’s five point plan for fixing the country. It all looks very aspirational but I’m not sure he managed to show his working for how things will be fixed. However, The Sun completely ignored that and picked a story of a pregnant woman from Peterborough who dressed up as Mary on Christmas Day to amuse her family and ended up going into labour and giving birth. The headline declares “Virgin Mary Gives Birth in Peterborough” and tacks on the byline “… and one of his names is Joseph”.
That gives an interesting insight into either the level of biblical literacy of The Sun’s editors or what they expect of their readers. You see, the baby in question has been given the Christian names Joshua Joseph. Nowadays, we are normally expected to call them forenames but ‘christian’ seems a pertinent description in this case. Joseph is of course a key figure in the nativity story and, in my opinion, often not celebrated enough. However, isn’t Joshua just a little more important?
Joshua? It is a Hebrew name with a long history, used as the title of the sixth book of the Bible after the leader of the Hebrew people who took on that mantle from Moses. In Hebrew, though, they don’t use the anglicised ‘Joshua’ but ‘yᵉhôšua’. I checked that on the BibleGateway website (I recently subscribed for a year so I can access their Greek and Hebrew resources), looking at Joshua 1:1. That would normally be transliterated into English as ‘Yeshua’.
You will find the name commonly used in the New Testament too. If you don’t have passing familiarity with the biblical languages, you might miss it but Joshua the Messiah is all over the pages. Joshua the Messiah? The Greeks called him Iēsous Christos but you will probably again be more familiar with the English transliteration, that is Jesus Christ.
Joshua is the English version of the name that some other languages, such as Spanish, still call Jesus. I’d say that he is more important than even the wonderful Joseph to the Christmas story! The name means ‘God saves’ and that is the reason why a child’s birth in humble circumstances over 2,000 years ago still has resonance today. I rather suspect that our modern Mary (real name Lauren) had a canny idea of why this pair of names was at least as good a choice for a Christmas baby as Noel and a shame The Sun couldn’t shine at a brighter level than the average school Nativity play.