Jesus wasn't called Jesus

This may come as a shock to many outside the Christian faith, but when Mary, the mother of Christ popped her head out of the family home and yelled at our Lord to stop playing with the other children and come in for tea, she did not shout the name ‘Jesus’.

The name that Jesus responded to during his earthly life was Yeshua. It is a derivative of the Hebrew phrase ‘to rescue’ or ‘to deliver’, which fits rather well for the saviours of all humanity, and is a later form of the Hebrew name Yehoshua or Joshua as we would recognise it.

There are quite a few people called Yeshua or Yehoshua in the Bible as well as in other contemporary texts, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which tells us that it was a pretty common name. Based on the names that have been uncovered by scholars so far, it is believed that relatively few first names were used and it is possible that around one in 10 people had the name Yeshua at that time of Jesus.

This is interesting in itself, particularly for Western Christians today, for whom Jesus is not a common name. In some cultures Jesus (pronounced Hay-soos) is a relatively common name, but in most Western cultures it is not. In fact, it is often called the ‘name above all names’ and is treated reverently, not to be taken in vain.

But in first century Palestine, Yeshua was probably as common as Dave or John to a Brit today. Or the names Chad or Bret, for Mouse's American chums.

So when Mary summoned the young Christ for his dinner, it was quite possible that several heads turned at the sound of the name Yeshua to check whether it was their mum calling them in.

Which all leads to the question, if He was called Yeshua, why does almost everyone on the planet today call Him Jesus?

The first thing to know about this questions is that He has not always been called Jesus. In fact, the first recorded use of the name Jesus in that form is as recent as the 17th century.

So how did we get here?  

When the New Testament was first written in Ancient Greek, the writers transliterated the Hebrew name into Ancient Greek. Since there are several differences in the available vowels and consonants between the two languages the Gospel writers needed to make a transliteration. They also had the complication that Greek names changed the ending depending on the gender of the name’s owner – male names end with a consonant, typically an s. So in the translation into Greek, Yeshua became Iesous.

The next shift came when the New Testament was translated into Latin which turned Iesous into Iesu or Iesus.

The final step is subject to some historical debate and reflects the development of language and pronunciation of Is, Ys and Js. When the King James Bible was printed in 1611 Iesus was still the normal form, but by 1632 Court of High Commission, the supreme ecclesiastic court in England at that time, had opined on the correct spelling of the name and concluded that the J was correct. And so we landed on Jesus.

At the time, translators saw the difference as minor – essentially switching different versions of the same letter – as the 'j' was pronounced as we would use a 'y' today. But the continued evolution of the English language has meant that the variant spelling now takes on quite a different pronunciation.

Since the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew rather than Greek, the translation of Yehoshua into Joshua took a different path and skipped the Greek translation, so we have in our modern English Bibles two names which were originally very similar – Yeshua and Yehoshua – turning into two quite different names in the English – Jesus and Joshua.

For the avoidance of doubt, it should be pointed out here that Jesus’s surname wasn’t ‘Christ’ either. Christ is simply a title given to Him by Christians meaning ‘announted one’. People didn’t have surnames as we do in Jesus’s time but would be known by names describing their parentage ( e.g. Son/Daughter of Joseph) or place of birth (e.g. of Weston-super-Mare) and in the Bible Jesus is known as Jesus of Nazareth, so his surname was really ‘of Nazareth’ and known to His contemporaries as Yeshua haNotzri.

Through history it has been common to translate or transliterate names of people and places, but the modern view is that it isn't so hard to learn to pronounce people's names properly, and is considered far more respectful. In many organisations, email footers contain pronunciation guides for names for this purpose.

On one level you could argue that it doesn't matter much. Jesus is the Son of God, however, we translate His name. But Mouse finds it helpful to remember the actual, authentic, walking, talking Jesus. Or as we should say, the actual, authentic, walking, talking Yeshua.