Source: https://threader.app/thread/1435209294547324934
People’s names, regardless of language and culture usually carry a meaning. What does Jesus mean in any language? Nothing! Don’t believe me? Read on.
Jesus and his followers were all Jewish and so they had Hebrew names, although they would likely have spoken Aramaic. “J” soundw in Jesus’ name does not exist in Hebrew or Aramaic. So, the actual name is “Yehoshua”, pronounced, Yeh-ho-shoo-ah. This name is the blending of two Hebrew words:Yeh-ho + Shua. Yeh-ho = Jewish god’s name, sometimes used at the beginning or end of a Hebrew name. Shua = Hebrew word for deliverance, meaning, SAVES. Yehoshua literally means JEWISH GOD SAVES. The name Yehoshua was then cut short the same way Rajesh becomes Raju; Srinivas - Srinu; Rajeshwari - Rajjo/Raji. Thus, the 4-syllabled name Yehoshua became the 3-syllabled Yeshua.
The earliest Messiah believers most likely called their god Yeshua which was a fairly common Jewish name around 1st century. So, how and when did Yeshua become Jesus? Through the long-process of transliteration into Greek first, then into Latin and finally into English. What was the process? And why did the name have to be changed? Though Jesus was a Jew & he likely spoke Aramaic, his story was originally written in Greek. Yehoshua/ Yeshua was a Hebrew name, which carried a meaning and would be lost if translated. So, what did historians do? Historians had two ways of incorporating the Hebrew name in to the Greek narrative:
- 1.To translate - bring across the meaning of the name.
- 2.To transliterate - bring across the sound of the name.
The Greek writers employed transliteration. Transliteration = process of swapping like-sounding letters so the same sound is made when pronouncing the original name. But in the case of Yeshua the transliterators encountered 4 problems.
- Prob.#1: The ancient Greek language didn’t contain Y sound found in Yeshua. Y as in Yes. The closest sound a Greek-speaking person could come to making the “y” sound was by putting the two Greek letters IOTA and ETA together and coming up with an “ee-ay” sound.
- Prob.#2: Greek also didn’t contain SH sound found in Show. The closest a Greek-speaking person could come to making the “SH” sound was the “S” sound made by the letter Sigma. With the 2 changes, Yeshua pronounced by a Greek-speaker came out sounding like EE-AY-SOO-AH.
- That gave rise to-Prob.#3: Traditionally, male Greek names never ended in a vowel sound. Those that did were generally given the letter Sigma or “S” as a suffix. So EE-AY-SOO-AH needed to become EE-AY-SOO-AH-S. This gave rise to Prob.#4.
- Prob.#4: The two vowel sounds (oo & aa) in between the two S sounds do not flow and are virtually never seen in Greek. So, the last vowel sound (aa) was dropped.
Now they were left with EE-AY-SOO-S. This is the closest the story-tellers came to transliterating Yeshua. By now, Yeshua lost all of his meaning and most of his sound, with just the vowel sound “oo” remaining. Yeshua was known as EE-AY-SOOS to the Greek-speaking world for nearly 400 years. Hebrew Yehoshua –> Pet name Yeshua –> Greek ee-ay-soos.
In 400 CE., Latin became the predominant language of Christianity. Time for the NT to be translated into Latin. This was called the Vulgate. The phonetics of Latin and that of Greek were identical, although the letters of their respective alphabet varied. But…Latin is identical to English in letters. What little was left of Yeshua’s Greek name ee-ay-soos, was easily transliterated into Latin. Nothing had to be added or dropped. The phonetics of “ee-ay-s-oo-s” were all intact. Just the Greek EE-AY-SOOS was spelled IESUS in Latin. The Latin spelling & the Greek pronunciation dominated the Christian world for nearly 1,000 years. The English language was still evolving, at this time.
The letter J did not exist in the Old English language, before the 12th century. The J sound was not even heard of, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek or Latin languages. Sometime during the early 12th century, J began showing up in some obscure dialects of the Middle English language. Over the course of the next 500 years, infatuation with the new sound increased. This caused letters like I & Y in the English language to be replaced by a J. The new hard sound was considered more masculine.So, the male names that began with I or Y now came to begin with J. Yeshua underwent a change one last time, into Jesus. Stripped of all meaning!