Jesus & Joshua(s)

In a thread over on the Freethought and Rationalism Discussion boards, the topic came up of Jesus being a 'reincarnation' of the Joshua(s) of the Old Testament. In doing some research on the topic, I stumbled on the following site, which is one of the first results in a Google search for "Jesus and Joshua": Jesus as a Reincarnation of Joshua. Allow me the pleasure of exterminating that site's argument point by point:

Identical Title: "Branch"

The site claims that both Joshua and Jesus are 'branches'. But this isn't really what the Bible says, nor is it what the provided citations say either. The site offers up Zechariah 6:11–13 and Jeremiah 23:5–6 in support of its claim. But these passages support no such similarity. The second passage, which they claim to be the one about Jesus, is quite obviously not about Jesus: it was written years upon years before Jesus would even be born about a person is supposed to be a king that rules the land—none of these things come even close to matching Jesus, even as he is described in the Bible.

Not sure who this similarity could be drawn between, but Jesus certainly cannot be one of the players.

Identical Roles: Leader of Israel

To support this notion, the site offers passages from Deuteronomy 1:37–38 and Matthew 2:6. Cleverness can be seen here in the site's use of a passage that at least appears to be from part of the Bible that talks about Jesus. But let's take a closer look. Ignoring that this point could never apply to Jesus since he never led Israel, we examine the passage from Matthew only to find it faulty in the same way the previous point's Jesus passage was faulty: this passage in Matthew is actually a quote from part of the Old Testament book of Micah, chapter 5 verse 2.

And let's not forget that the Joshua mentioned in this point is a different Joshua than the one mentioned in the first point.

Identical Mission: Peace

Oops; same problem as the previous two points: the passage meant to be about Jesus is in no way actually about Jesus.

Identical Number of Appointed Men: Twelve

This is one of the stronger points, but still a failure. The use of twelve in relation to Jesus' disciples is clearly symbolic of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. And this, of course, is nothing new, nor is the list shown in Mark exhaustive. Mark indicates that Jesus had many followers (crowds frequently gather around him) and the number of people close to Jesus varies throughout this gospel and the others. Paul (1 Cor 15:5) mentions about thirteen seemingly important figures around Jesus.

Twelve is mentioned for symbolic effect, but none of the authors writing about Jesus appear to give it any credence as representing a definite and historical number of close companions to Jesus.

Identical Representations: Twelve Stones

Obviously everything that was said about the previous point can be repeated here. Along with that we can add what has been said about all the points previous to that one: The stuff supposedly about Jesus isn't about Jesus. The passages cited to support this claim concerning Jesus all come from the book of Revelation, a book written years after Jesus' death which is not meant to be a history of his life but a dream of the future.

Conclusion

Taken together, the points might seem interesting, but now that we have broken each one of them down and discredited them, we can see just how little the 'Jesus as Joshua' theory has to stand on: nothing.

SR