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Help[Opinions] Messiah
It's interesting to me that in all the remarks about individual birth announcements for boys named Messiah that no one has pointed out that Messiah made the top 1000 names for boys on the USA Social Security list in 2005. There were 194 boys named Messiah born that year in the United States.
Mashiach and Mashiah, the modern Hebrew forms of Messiah, have evidently been used as boys' names in modern Israel, because they are listed as such in Smadar Shir Sidi's The Complete Book of Hebrew Baby Names. It seems to me that if the Israelis allow this name, it would be odd for people in other countries to insist it should be prohibited as "blasphemous."
I personally don't think the connotations of Messiah are any more "hard to live up to" than those of Salvador and Salvatore, which mean "savior", and have been used in Spanish and Italian culture for centuries.
From the middle names in most of the birth announcements that have been posted, it seems clear that the majority of boys now being named Messiah in the USA are African-American. We seem to be moving toward Messiah being accepted as a normal name in African-American culture, just as Salvador and Jesus are accepted in Hispanic culture. There have been times and places in the Christian world where Emmanuel, Mary, and Michael were all deemed too sacred for use by mere mortals. Nowadays no one objects to them, and we will probably all get used to Messiah, too.
Mashiach and Mashiah, the modern Hebrew forms of Messiah, have evidently been used as boys' names in modern Israel, because they are listed as such in Smadar Shir Sidi's The Complete Book of Hebrew Baby Names. It seems to me that if the Israelis allow this name, it would be odd for people in other countries to insist it should be prohibited as "blasphemous."
I personally don't think the connotations of Messiah are any more "hard to live up to" than those of Salvador and Salvatore, which mean "savior", and have been used in Spanish and Italian culture for centuries.
From the middle names in most of the birth announcements that have been posted, it seems clear that the majority of boys now being named Messiah in the USA are African-American. We seem to be moving toward Messiah being accepted as a normal name in African-American culture, just as Salvador and Jesus are accepted in Hispanic culture. There have been times and places in the Christian world where Emmanuel, Mary, and Michael were all deemed too sacred for use by mere mortals. Nowadays no one objects to them, and we will probably all get used to Messiah, too.
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