What's In A Name? [Part 1]

What's in a Name? [Part 1]

What is His name and what is His son's name? [Proverbs 30v4]



"She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins" [Matthew 1v21]

One thing we can be certain of, when the Angel Gabriel addressed Joseph (in the verse above) and Mary (see Luke 1v31), he was not speaking English nor did he use the Anglicised name 'Jesus'. Although the New Testament might have been written in Greek, it is unlikely that the Angel used the Greek form of his name either. Mary and Joseph would most likely have spoken Aramaic as their every day language and Hebrew in the synagogue on Sabbath. Therefore, when the Angel Gabriel told them they were to have a son and they were to call him 'Jesus' he would have used the Aramaic or Hebrew form of the name: 'You shall call his name Yeshua' (pronounced Ye-SHOO-ah, with the emphasis on the second syllable).

The name Yeshua means 'salvation, deliverance, rescue', so in Hebrew/Aramaic Matthew 1v21 is a play on words: 'You shall call his name Yeshua, for he shall save (yoshia) his people from their sins'. All Hebrew words have a three letter root. Yoshia (save) and Yeshua (salvation) have the same root: yod-shin-ayin (Y-SH-A). It is a contraction of the name Yehoshua, which means 'the LORD saves'. The prefix 'yeho' is a shortened form of the sacred name of God (also known as the tetragrammaton, or four-letter Name). 

In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word translated 'salvation'  is frequently some form of the word 'yeshua', for example:

Genesis 49v18: "I have waited for thy salvation (yeshua)"
Psalm 9v18: "I will rejoice in they salvation (yeshua)"
Psalm 119v155: "Salvation (yeshua) is far from the wicked"
Isaiah 49v8: "In the day of salvation (yeshua) I have helped thee"

In Luke's gospel, when the child Jesus was presented in the Temple, Simeon took Him in his arms and said, in Hebrew, "Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation (yeshua)" (Luke 2v30). It is ironic that at the time he uttered these words, he was actually holding a child whose name was Yeshua! Did Simeon know the child's name, or was this an accidental play on words?

[NOTE: While the New Testament was written primarily in Greek, the speakers in the narratives would have spoken either Aramaic or Hebrew]

The English equivalent of the name Yeshua is actually Joshua. Joshua and Yeshua mean the same thing. By association with its origins, the word Jesus has come to mean 'salvation', but as far as etymology is concerned, it has no actual meaning of itself. By that I mean, if you look up 'yeshua' in a Hebrew dictionary, it will say 'salvation'; if you look up 'Jesus' in an English dictionary, it simply says 'Jesus Christ, Christ Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, born 4? BC., crucified AD 29?, the source of the Christian religion', but does not give a meaning for the word. 

Where then does the name 'Jesus' come from? And why do we not call Jesus Joshua?

Firstly, it is not a translation of the Hebrew name. It is not possible to translate a name. You can substitute an equivalent (eg Etienne in French is Stephen in English). But to translate 'Yeshua' into English would render His name 'Salvation', which is not a name at all.

Secondly, as one author put it, the name Jesus is 'a Germanic adaptation of a Latin transliteration of a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew original'. Greek and Hebrew use different alphabets - different from each other and different from English, which uses the same alphabet as Latin. To render the Hebrew 'Yeshua' into Greek first and then later into Latin, the individual Greek letters and sounds had to be substituted for the Hebrew letters and sounds. And that posed something of a difficulty. Greek has no 'y', nor does it have the 'sh' sound. In addition, a male name in Greek had to end in '-us' or '-ous' to denote that the name was masculine. Thus the 'y' at the beginning of 'Yeshua' became 'Ie', the 'sh' became just an 's' and '-ous' was added to the end to denote a male name - hence Ἰησοῦς  or, in English lettering, Iesous.

When the Bible was further translated into Latin, the substituted letters became Iesvs (v in Latin is written as u in English and is pronounced as the English u). By the time the name reached the English language, it had also passed through a Germanic adaptation. The 'y' sound in German is written as 'j' (eg the German word for 'yes' is 'jah' but pronounced 'yah'). Some time in the Middle Ages, the J in English became 'hard' - that is, it began to be pronounced as we do today. Thus the name had finally morphed into the familiar form, 'Jesus' .


(To be continued...)



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