Is It Ok That Jesus's Name Was Changed

Explainer

Happy Birthday, Dear Yeshua, Happy Birthday to You lot!

Was Jesus a mutual name at the showtime of the first century?

Jesus Christ — Painting by Ary Scheffer, 1851.
Photo courtesy Walters Art Museum via Wikimedia Commons

Many people shared the name. Christ'southward given name, usually Romanized equally Yeshua, was quite mutual in first-century Galilee. (Jesus comes from the transliteration of Yeshua into Greek and then English.) Archaeologists have unearthed the tombs of 71 Yeshuas from the menstruum of Jesus' death. The name also appears 30 times in the Old Attestation in reference to 4 dissever characters—including a descendent of Aaron who helped to distribute offerings of grain (2 Chronicles 31:15) and a man who accompanied onetime captives of Nebuchadnezzar back to Jerusalem (Ezra 2:two).

The long version of the proper noun, Yehoshua, appears another few hundred times, referring most notably to the legendary conqueror of Jericho (and the second nearly famous bearer of the name). And then why practise we phone call the Hebrew hero of Jericho Joshua and the Christian Messiah Jesus? Considering the New Attestation was originally written in Greek, non Hebrew or Aramaic. Greeks did not use the sound sh, so the evangelists substituted anSouth sound. And then, to go far a masculine proper noun, they added anotherSouthward sound at the end. The earliest written version of the name Jesus is Romanized today every bit Iesous. (Thus the crucifix inscription INRI: "Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum," or "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.")

The initial J didn't come until much afterward. That sound was foreign to Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Not even English distinguished J from I until the mid-17^th century. Thus, the 1611 Rex James Bible refers to Jesus as "Iesus" and his father as "Ioseph." The current spelling probable came from Switzerland, where J sounds more like the English Y. When English Protestants fled to Switzerland during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I, they drafted the Geneva Bible and used the Swiss spelling. Translators in England adopted the Geneva spelling by 1769.

In contrast, the Old Testament was translated directly from the original Hebrew into English language, rather than via Greek. And then anyone named Yehoshua or Yeshua in the Old Attestation became Joshua in English. Meanwhile, the holy volume of the Syrian Orthodox church building, known as the Syriac Bible, is written in Aramaic. While its Gospels were translated from the original Greek, the early scribes recognized that Iesous was a corruption of the original Aramaic. Thus, the Syriac text refers to Yeshua.

Bonus Explainer: What was Jesus' last name? It wasn't Christ. Contemporaries would have called him Yeshua Bar Yehosef or Yeshua Nasraya. (That's "Jesus, son of Joseph" or "Jesus of Nazareth.") Galileans distinguished themselves from others with the same starting time name by adding either "son of" and their father's proper noun, or their birthplace. People who knew Jesus would not take called him Christ, which is the translation of a Greek discussion meaning "all-powerful one."

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Explainer thank you Joseph P. Amar of the University of Notre Dame and Paul V.M. Flesher of the University of Wyoming.