What's in a Name? | Critical Thinking Ministry

welcome welcome to critical thinking Ministry thank you for tuning in to this short Food For Thought hopefully everyone is trying to stay positive during these wild and wacky boy these are some wild times but God is still in control I want to start this video off with a actually a true story uh um when I was over the Youth Department at my local church we had a uh an annual picnic in June for the kids to enjoy it was the youth day uh during uh one Gathering I found myself sitting at the table with a sister in Christ whom I had known probably 20 years but as most people do we would only engage in small talk after church services and just kind of exchanging pleasantries and then give each other a hug and go about our business but on this day she and I along with my mother uh we talked actually for about an hour and I learned more at this picnic during that hour than I did about her the entire 20 years I had known her yep and it got me to thinking how we sometimes think we know somebody or something but we don't really know as much as we think we do give you another example back in my old neighborhood as in many African-American neighborhoods it was popular for many people to have nicknames I had a nickname but I'm not going to tell you it there were names like uh red big red manman nenei poochie you get the idea but most people never knew these individuals official government name and many times we wouldn't figure that out until they passed away and it was at the funeral when we would look at the obituary the program and never knew that poochie's real name was Raymond Theodore thirston II but we knew him as poochie we knew this person for over 15 years and never knew his real name about 6 years ago I stumbled across something that surprised me and since I've been on my spiritual journey I've come to expect the unexpected in my Discovery I ran across an article that said did you know Jesus's mother's name Mary was not her true name when I read it I thought what in the world are they talking about well after reading the article I found out Mary's original name was Miriam and Mary is quote unquote an angiz form of Miriam supposedly so you know how we do at critical thinking Ministry if I was wrong about her what other names did I have incorrect so I did some research and as you can see posted on the screen I have listed the names of the original disciples that we know them as but then I have their original names it was quite interesting to see this um some of the original names you can kind of make out although they may be of Greek origin or Hebrew origin but some of them uh don't look anything like we know them as and I'll let you look at the screen and I'll let it stay up uh for a moment so you can just kind of look at it um look at Simon Peter's name look at John of zebede boy that looks nothing like what we know as Andrew looks pretty

similar Phillip looks similar uh Bartholomew I can see a little similarity Matthew I can make that out but I can see the Hebrew name um James son of alaus that looks totally different Fus looks a little different uh Judas es scariot again that's I could make it out but again it looks a little different so um on your leisure just kind of look at the names um and see how familiar you were with them and learn something new this was certainly insightful for me uh again some of the names I didn't know and as always I want you to kind of just fact check me and when you look through um different sites you're going to see a slight difference in spelling but they're basically the same names so just like people from the old neighborhood the disciples had official government names that we were not familiar with and you know what that's okay because this is what critical thinking Ministry is all about out unlearning some things and learning some new so until we meet again remember Faith plus critical thinking will always lead you to truth God bless