February 13, 2023
This morning, I spent a considerable amount of time ‘talking’ with a reader. It seems he believes that we are not following the right Messiah because Jesus is not the name of the Messiah, Yeshua is. I have done a little bit of reading up on this. Each transliteration of the name of Jesus is limited by the alphabet of the particular language it is translated into. I looked up how many different languages that Jesus’ name has been translated into and learned that the Bible has been translated into more than 2000 languages and parts of scripture have been translated into countless more languages. Each with its own form of the Name of Jesus.
Jesus’ name was the same in Hebrew and Aramaic which was the language of Judah in Jesus’ time. Both languages are Semitic languages. They are similar but not the same. By the time Jesus was born, the use of Hebrew had shifted to Aramaic. Hebrew is still used for worship and reading scripture. It is interesting to note that Aramaic is still spoken in Israel today.
Yehoshua is the name in the original Hebrew and over time it was shortened to Yeshua. By the time Jesus was born Yeshua was a common name. The meaning of the names is still the same: “the Lord is salvation”. Yeshua was His given name. Jews only used their given name. They had no last names. They were known as the son or daughter of their father. So, he would have been Yehoshua, ben Joseph or Yeshua, son of Joseph.
Most of the writers of the New Testament wrote in Ancient Greek, which was the trade language of the day. The authors of the New Testament wrote in Greek, where is name is translated to Iesous. There is no “J” in Greek, nor is there a symbol for the “sh” sound. The Greek writers had to transliterate Yeshua into Greek. So, the ‘Y’ became ‘I’, there is no Greek letter for ‘H’ or ‘O’, the ‘sh’ sound became a soft ‘S’ and the ‘U’ is the same in both languages. Now I am not writing in Greek here. Iesous. This is the phonetic of the Greek word. It is pronounced ‘ee-ay-SOOCE’
When Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, the name was translated into Latin. As with Greek, there is is no ‘J’ in Latin. So, the first letter became and ‘I’ as well and the rest fell into place as Iesus and it was pronounced ‘YAY-soos’. Gradually, as the scriptures were copied by hand, The ‘I’ became longer at the bottom. In German, the ‘Y’ sound was represented by ‘J’, so they used it in translated Jesus’ name into German. Then, when the Bible was translated into English, it was ‘Jesus’.
To make a long story short: a rose by another name is still a rose. Jesus, regardless of which language the name is spoken or written in, is STILL Jesus, the Son of the Living God and our Savior and our Messiah.
Back to today’s blog: https://bringingjesusn2focus.com/its-his-breath-in-our-lungs/
