What's in a Name
Here below is written, in a first century Aramaic script, the name of our man, Yeshua Natzraya - commonly known as Jesus the Nazarene. Let's see how he received this name, what it means and how it evolved to Jesus the Nazarene.
"Therefore, she will give birth to a son, and she will call his name Yëshuå, for he will save his people from their sins." - Matay (Matthew) 1:21
Yeshua means "he will save".
Many are learning that "Jesus" isn’t exactly the original sound or form of his name. It is becoming widely known that his name was spoken Yeshua. Although no one knows exactly how his peers pronounced his name, it would have approximated something like the following popular pronunciation:
Yeshua means "he will save".
Many are learning that "Jesus" isn’t exactly the original sound or form of his name. It is becoming widely known that his name was spoken Yeshua. Although no one knows exactly how his peers pronounced his name, it would have approximated something like the following popular pronunciation:
If you don't get it quite right, or you would prefer to say Jesus or another respectable way, that is acceptable. We first want you to understand us when we say Yeshua. But let it be a little upgrade that could, in some small way, make your conversation feel more authentic.
(You may notice throughout our website and materials we will sometimes write a name and then have the more common version in brackets besides it e.g. Matithyahu (Matthew). We do this to be consistent and as an educational exercise, to introduce you to more Semitic forms, that approximate the original names.)
So how did it change from Yeshua to Jesus? The form “Jesus” did not come about overnight. It changed slightly each time it was transcribed into other languages over a period of 2000 years.
Transliteration is when the letters of the receiving language are carefully selected to best match and represent the letters and sounds of the original language. For example, the Hebrew letter ב Bet is best represented by the English letter B. This is useful for presenting proper names in another written language. Even then, languages evolve over time and so does spelling and pronunciation.
Let’s start with the original form of the Messiah’s name and show you how it changed into the English form “Jesus”. Yeshua has existed as a Hebrew and Aramaic name among Jews for thousands of years. Although "Jesus" is virtually exclusive in English bibles, in Hebrew and Aramaic scriptures one finds several people with this same name.
In Yeshua's time, Aramaic was the common language of Jews between Jerusalem and Babylon and beyond. However Greek was also popular but moreso among non-Jews. It was the language of many converts, and it was natural to write the name Yeshua in a form compatible with Greek.
The next stop along the way to the English bible is Latin. In early medieval England, the name Iesus was pronounced “Yeh-sus”, following the Latin form brought by missionaries and used throughout the Anglo-Saxon Church. Transliterating into Latin is straightforward. The pronunciation slightly changes.
With publication of King Jame's 1611 Authorized Version of the bible, printed in Blackletter in Jacobean English, we see the introduction of the letter J, which was used for initial I.
