SkepticBoyLee

Did they call him Yeshua? If you called out to him "Hey Jesus" then would he think you were talking to someone else?

Can someone clear up this "Jesus/Yeshua stuff?

Toto

We don't actually know. We don't know if this person really existed, or who his contemporaries were, or what languages they spoke.

If you think that Jesus was an Aramaic speaking Galilean, he would have been known as Yeshua, and there are Messianic Jews today who have adopted that name for him - but there is no historical record of that name ever being used in the Christian churches or among any Christians before the 20th century, except possibly where the Greek gospels were translated into Aramaic.

If Jesus spoke Hebrew, he would be called Joshua. If Jesus spoke Koine Greek, he would be referred to as Iesous. Joshua and Jesus are the same name - when the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Koine Greek, Joshua was translated as Iesous.

Transient

Next obvious question is would the name Iesous have a "J" sound at the start as "Jesus" does these days? Was their "I" like our "J"?

darstec

The 'J' comes by way of German. Modern invention.

Transient

So if they did not make a "J" sound with their mouths then why would anyone want to change a person's name to make it sound different. It would be a bit like changing Bush into Tush - what would be the point?

Toto

The letter J is a modern letter that represents different sounds in modern languages.

The Greeks pronounced the initial 'i' of Iesous as a hard 'y' - but that sound evolved into the modern pronunciation of 'j' at some point in the development of the Romance languages. English imported the 'j' sound from French. More at J.

The name Jesus is pronounced he-sus in Spanish due to a different linguistic evolutionary path.

OLDMAN

And yet every week, someone will ask me,"Do you know Jesus?"

spin

Let's look at the available linguistic evidence over the relevant range of languages.

The name Julius in Latin is Iulius (where the initial "i" is pronounced like "y" as in "yacht"), in French Jules (the initial "j" is the strange looking "ʒ" or the "s" in "Asia" and "measure"), in Italian Giulio ("gi" is our "j") and Spanish Julio ("j" is our "h").

John: Latin "Ioannes", French Jean, Italian Giovanni, and Spanish Juan.

The same sequence we find with Jesus.

Further, we can tell from the words "courage" and "barrage" when the "ʒ" pronunciation entered English, for "courage" was introduced by the Normans while "voyage" came into English several centuries later.

The Anglo-Saxon approach would probably have been similar to the German, ie using a "y" sound as the initial consonant, as in "yes" and "ja" (pronounced "yah"). Whereas the Anglo-Saxon period would have seen priests using the initial "y", the Norman conquest brought the "j" as the Norman priesthood would have displaced the Anglo-Saxons (or at least the upper echelons). The Normans were originally Vikings and adapted French, using their own pronunciation, hence the "j" in "courage" (village", "homage", "carriage", etc.). Later English borrowed terms from mainstream French, such as "barrage" ("fusilage", "corsage", "entourage", and other more complicated examples). It would seem the earliest Normans had difficulty pronouncing the French "ʒ", so Norman French developed with a "j" instead of a "ʒ". Of course, French itself might have changed to the "ʒ" later, if they inherited "j" from vulgar Latin. Whatever the case, we are looking at the Norman period for the "j".

The change from the initial "y" sound seems from our Romance language evidence to have happened early, touching all the Latin children. It didn't happen in German, Greek or Polish, so we can exclude other directions.

We can plot a development from classical Latin "y" to vulgar Latin *"j" (we can't be sure of the exact sound, but there is no problem for example in Italian with an initial "y") to French "ʒ" to Norman "j".


spin

mountainman

The earliest manuscripts do not call him "Jesus" or "Yeshua" or "Yogi" or anything like this at all. The earliest Greek manuscripts, whether they are complete greek codices or fragmentary papyri from the Oxy Rubbish Dumps all agree that his name was hidden in a code --- and this code was "ΙΣ". You may search the earliest scriptures of the Greek bible all you want, but you will not find in it the name of Jesus. Today of course his name is plastered throughout the NT, but the earliest bibles did not mention him by name at all and one has to go outside the bible to find out that this code "ΙΣ" is being translated as "Jesus" or, in the case of the Greek LXX, as another name "Joshua".

They codifed a name and they represented it as "JS".
That's it --- that is exactly what our earliest evidence reveals.
A coded name "JS" ---- or in the Greek "ΙΣ".

The code "JS" has been taken to mean "J_esus_S".
But the New Testament could have been about "Jack Smith".

Doug Shaver

Something like that, assuming he really existed.

Yep.

Names often change when they move from one language to another. The NT author we know as Paul would have been called Paulos by the people who knew him.