We habitually refer to our Saviour as Jesus Christ as if this was his full name. Originally Christ was a title, so that we should properly speak of Jesus the Christ. The habit of referring to him simply as Jesus Christ instead of Jesus the Christ stemmed from the earliest Church, as is evident in its use in the Pauline epistles. For more on Christ see Jesus' Titles. Here we look at the name Jesus.
According to the record Matthew has left us, Jesus' name was given him not by his earthly parents, Joseph and Mary. When Joseph, upon learning that Mary was pregnant and not wishing to expose her to public disgrace, was planning to divorce her quietly, an angel appeared to him in a dream and said to him (1:20-21):
Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins."
Jesus' name was given him by divine appointment. In Hebrew or Aramaic the name would have been Yeshua', a shortened version of Yehoshua', or Joshua, meaning 'Yahweh saves.'1 Seen forward, Jesus' name announces his life's work and goal, 'the salvation of humankind. Seen backwards, Jesus fulfills that which was destined for Him in his name. Matthew also understood this event to be part of the larger story of God's dealing with humankind for, immediately afterwards, he tells us that 'All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 'The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel''which means, "God with us' (1:22-23). The original prophecy, found in Isa 7:14 and given more than seven hundred years earlier, was delivered by the prophet Isaiah at a time of crisis when Judah was facing the possibility of national annihilation. Through the prophet, God had offered the king the opportunity to ask for a sign that He was with the nation and would deliver them if they would trust Him. When the king, dragging his feet in unbelief, refused to ask for such a sign (to take up the offer would commit him to trust Yahweh) Isaiah pronounced the sign as God's promise: 'a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be Immanuel.' Immanuel is simply the Hebrew for 'God is with us.' Jesus, as Matthew saw it, is the fulfillment of God's promise to be present with us to save.
It is not uncommon to find the mis-conceived notion, even among otherwise intelligent persons, that the Church corrupted the original name of the Saviour, changing Jesus for Yeshua. For example, in a letter to his friend Arthur Greaves in 1916, the 'yet-to-believe' C. S. Lewis opined,
All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name, are merely man's own invention . . . Thus religion, that is to say mythology, grew up. Often too, great men were regarded as gods after their death'such as Heracles or Odin: thus after the death of a Hebrew philosopher Yeshua (whose name we have corrupted into Jesus) he became regarded as a god, a cult sprang up, which was afterwards connected with the ancient Hebrew Jahweh-worship, and so Christianity came into being'one mythology among many. 2
C. S. Lewis may be excused this kind of nonsense on the ground that he was'at the time of his letter'still a month short of 18 years old. The same cannot be said for the preposterous rubbish from Dominiquae Bierman of Kad-Esh MAP Ministries based in Jerusalem, and self-appointed 'bishop to the Jews'; she says:
. . . when Yeshua was in EXILE after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in year 70 AD and the Jewish believers were scattered throughout the Roman Empire, the heathen who were beginning to believe in Him looked for a name that would please the masses and would demonstrate how important He was. They found no other than IESOUS, which etymologically carries the name [sic] of great Greek gods.'3
Though she used the word 'transliteration' in her book, Bierman had no idea what it meant. If she had she—and those who insist that Christians must refer to their Saviour as Yeshua—would have known that the name Jesus is the result of the process of transliteration. Transliteration is a basic tool in cross-cultural communication, especially for rendering names, in which the letters or characters of one language are replaced by those of another language to represent the same sounds. But because different languages do not always have the same sounds (and even intonations of the same sounds) and may actually lack the letters for some sounds, most of the time it never comes out quite the same. This was precisely what took place when Jesus' Aramaic name Yeshua' was rendered into Greek. In Aramaic Yeshua is composed of the letters yod-shin-waw-'ayin (Y-SH-W-'). Yod has no exact equivalent in Greek; the nearest was a combination of Iota-Eta (I-E). Again shin (which is one of four S's in Hebrew-Aramaic) has no direct equivalent in Greek; the nearest sound is represented by sigma (S). The letter waw is what is called a 'mater lectionis,' a helping letter for vocalizing the o- or u- sound. In Greek it is transliterated by two vowels, Omicron and Upsilon (OU). The final Hebrew letter 'ayin is not vocalized and is, therefore, not transliterated. This gives us IESOU, pronounced yaysoo. But words in Greek are inflected to indicate the word's case, that is, additional letters are appended to the word to indicate its function in the sentence, whether it is the subject (nominative case), direct object (accusative), etc. This is where the final letter in the name IESOUS comes in; the terminal sigma (S) indicates that the word is in the nominative case, i.e., it is the subject in the sentence. This gives us a word that is pronounced yaysoos. This, then, is the name of our Saviour in the New Testament, since it was originally written in Greek (see sv, Alberith Greek Wordbook). When the Greek is transliterated into English the name went through a second round of transliteration and we get JESUS.
Incidentally, the early church (and Constantine in particular) had nothing to do with rendering Yeshua into IESOUS, as Bierman declares. When droves of Jews starting adopting Greek as their spoken language in the wake of the Hellenization of the Mediterranean world as a result of Alexander the Great's conquests, the synagogue decided that a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible was needed. In the translation made in the 3rd Cent BC known as the Septuagint, Joshua was already written as IESOUS. When the New Testament refers to Joshua (who led ancient Israel in their conquest of Canaan), the name it uses is exactly the same one it uses of Jesus; only the context tells us who is referred to (e.g., in Acts 7:45 & Heb 4:8). In this the New Testament was simply following a practice already long established by the Jews. So, while it would be quite natural for a Jewish Christian to call Him Yeshua, there is no merit whatsoever in insisting, as some modern-day 'judaizing' Christians are wont to do, that Christians from non-Jewish backgrounds should also call Him Yeshua' instead of Jesus.
The name Jesus was a more common name in New Testament times than most of us imagine; with the tremenous strides made in biblical research we now know that Jesus was the sixth most popular names among Jews in Palestine in New Testament times (Simon was the first). One of Paul's co-worker was also called "Jesus, who is called Justus" (Col 4:11). Of this Jesus we know nothing apart from what Paul says of him in the rest of the verse, that he was among "the only Jews among my fellow workers for the kingdom of God [who] have proved a comfort to me." The author of the apocryphal book known as (Wisdom of Ben-) Sirach (Greek name) or Ecclesiasticus (Latin name), written probably in the early 2nd Cent BC, was also called Jesus. There is little surprise in this since Jesus was simply the Greek rendition of the Hebrew-Aramaic name Joshua. By the end of the 1st Cent AD, however, it completely dropped out of use, possibly because it was abhorrent to Jews and too sacred for Christians.
Still there remains some who insist that, instead of using the name Jesus, we should use Jeshua or Jehoshua. As, for example, one explanatory note in a South African English translation puts it:4
For example the authoritative Greek-English Lexicon of Liddel & Scott, under Iaso: the Greek goddess of healing reveals that the name Iaso is Ieso in the Ionic dialect of the Greeks, Iesous being the contracted genitive form! In David Kravitz, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Mythology, we found a similar form, namely Iasus. There were four different Greek deities with the name of Iasus, one of them being the Son of Rhea. Further, it is well known that Iesous, and Dr. Bullinger, in The Apocalypse, p. 396, says Ies was part of the name of Bacchus! Also see Come out of her, My people, by C. J. Koster.
Whether various forms of the Greek transliteration of Jesus's name were indeed be found to be names of various ancient Greek gods or not is beside the point. The argument does nothing to justify the avoidance of the use of 'Jesus' as the name of our Saviour or to encourage the use of Jeshua instead. (Various pagan gods in OT times used variations of 'El; this did not stop the Hebrews from calling God 'El.) The question is what has these other names of the ancient Greek gods got to do with Christians. Is this expalanation meant to suggest that the use of Jeshua will prevent confusion with these pagan gods? But these pagan gods are dead-er than dodos and no one worships them anymore! More importantly, we can assume that the apostles and the other writers of the New Testament, writing in Greek, would well have been aware of such gods in their world. Knowing that, they wrote of our Saviour as Iesous, which English translations transliterate as Jesus. Quoting the names of Liddel & Scott (no mean lexicologists them) may make their argument seem weighty, but the explanation remains empty of real explanatory power.5 If the New Testament has authorized Iesous as the name of our Saviour, it is simply silly and a frivolous distraction to argue otherwise.
Low Chai Hok,
©Alberith, 2013
Not directly relevant but instructive for the segment on Jewish names in the Gospels, see this excellent video from Tyndale House: Peter Williams, "Can We Trust the Gospels?" 40 mins.
Video N (Open on Phone)