by Harry BuererThere are many names of individuals and places that that begin with the letter ‘J’ in our English Bible translations. We can all think of a bunch of them: Jerusalem, Judah, Jeremiah, Jonathan, Jacob, Joshua, Jeroboam, and Jesus for starters.
A case can be made that these are very poor transliterations for these names. There is no letter in Hebrew that remotely resembles the ‘J’ sound in English. Nor is there in Greek, nor even Latin. Where, then, do we get all these names that start with, or even include, a ‘J’?
It’s interesting that in the 1611 version of the King James Bible, these names all had an ‘I’ instead of a ‘J’. The ‘J’ was first introduced later. It seems to be the result of the familiarity of the early translations into German.
These names in their original Hebrew form invariably begin with the Hebrew letter “yodh”. It is the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the “jot” of Matthew 5:18, and it looks something like an apostrophe. It is often used to designate a vowel, like a long ‘i’ or ‘e’, but when it begins a word, it is pronounced as a consonental ‘y’. When it’s transliterated into Greek, a “iota” is usually used to replace it.
Based on that background, you would think that it would be transliterated into English with a ‘Y’, or at least an ‘I’. In German the ‘y’ sound is represented by the letter ‘j’, but even in German there is nothing like the English ‘j’ sound. Apparently these names became so well-known with the ‘J’ spelling in German that English translators kept the ‘J’ when recording them in English, at least after a certain point in time.
Let’s consider for a moment the name of the person most of us know as “Jesus”. There is no chance that he was addressed this way by his contemporaries. In the Greek of the New Testament his name is rendered something like “Iesous”. The culture in which he lived was more likely Hebrew or Aramaic. In that culture his name would have been “Yeshua”, or perhaps “Yehoshua”.
The person whom we know as “Joshua”, the successor of Moses, is recorded in the Hebrew Bible as “Yehoshua”, a word that means “the LORD saves”. His name was originally “Hoshea”, but was changed by Moses (Numbers 13:16). Interestingly, in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, he is transliterated as “Iesous”, the same Greek word as “Jesus”. This accounts for the confusion often accompanying the King James reading of Hebrews 4:8, “For if Jesus had given them rest…”, when it’s actually referring to Joshua. The names are the same in the Greek.
Why then was “Yehoshua” transliterated as “Iesous” in Greek? It seems that in later Jewish history the name was typically shortened to “Yeshua”. We have it occurring in that form a number of times in Ezra and Nehemiah (e.g. Ezra 2:2; Nehemiah 3:19). It’s easier to conceptualize “Iesous” as a transliteration of “Yeshua”. There was no letter in Greek representing the “sh” sound, so they used a sigma. Greek masculine names typically ended in “-us”, so they tacked that on.
It makes more sense for the man from Nazareth to be named Yeshua rather than Jesus in at least one other passage. The word “yeshua” by itself in Hebrew means “salvation”. In Matthew 1:21 Joseph is told by the angel that “you are to give him the name Yeshua, because he will save his people from their sins.” The word “Iesous” has no such meaning in Greek; it’s simply a transliteration of the Hebrew name. The more we thnk of Jesus as Yeshua, the more likely we are to place him in his correct cultural context with the correct meaning for his name.