How is it that the name “Jesus Christ” appears in the Book of Mormon prior to the time of Christ?
Of course Hebrew speaking people did not use the English term “Jesus Christ”. The Greek term from which Christ – a title – is derived was equivalent to Messiah in Hebrew. The Hebrew name related to Jesus is Joshua or Yeshua. Thus, the name Jesus Christ expressed in Hebrew could have been something like Yeshua Messiah. Certainly the revelations given to the Hebrew speaking people early in the Book of Mormon were in Hebrew and used Hebrew forms of names and titles, not Greek or English. When translating, one could keep the original name or title intact (Yeshua Messiah, for example), but it is more typical to convert the name into the “proper” form for the destination language. Thus we have forms of many Bible names which sometimes sound quite different from the true Aramaic or Hebrew terms. The point, though, is that Book of Mormon prophets knew of the coming of the Messiah and were even privileged to know his name (or a form of it). Joseph Smith translated that name into the form we all
