The REAL Name of Jesus
Currently, more than 2.3 billion people around the world practice Christianity, with Jesus Christ being the dominant spiritual figure represented in their faith. But what if they were all worshiping The Christ, using the wrong name?
Jesus and His original 12 apostles were all practicing Jews who lived in the Eastern Mediterranean. Because of this it is no surprise that Jesus and the 12 apostles all had names which were Hebrew or Greek in origin. For example the name Simon was originally, Shimon in Hebrew. The name Andrew comes from the Greek name Andraus. It would be very strange for men to have names such as Mathew, Mark, Luke and John in this region of the world, especially during this time period, for these are English names common in Western countries. However, many names of characters in the Bible have been transliterated to their English, or regionally specific phonetic pronunciation, in order to better integrate with the culture and language. For example in in Spanish Bibles, Peter is Pedro. In French Bibles, it is Pierre.
Scholars believe that the original name of Jesus was in fact Yehoshua, also conveyed in the shorter form, Yeshua. So how did Yeshua, become Jesus? First we have to understand that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and Aramaic, where the name Yehoshua or Yeshua first appeared in the books 1 Chronicles 24:11, 2 Chronicles 31:15, Ezra, and Nehemiah. However, the new testament of the Bible was written in Greek, which is a very different language than Hebrew and Aramaic.
The “SH” sound in Yeshua cannot be accurately represented in Greek which led translators to using the name Iēsoûs. This is through a process known as transliteration, which changes the letters from the word's original alphabet to similar sounding letters in a different language. Since the name Yeshua, found in the Old Testament was already written as such, it later was transliterated into Joshua. This is why we end up with two English versions of individuals with the same name Yeshua. From here the name Iēsoûs was transliterated into Classical Latin as Iesus. The Latin letter “I” then split into both “I” and “J”. From here the “J” sound was added to the Latin version Iesus around the year 1500 AD, and we ended up with the familiar name, Jesus.