Published in

Catholic DigestJanuary 1992

vol.32,no.6

The Mystery of the Magi

How Yeshu’a become Jesus

page 17

How

Yeshu’a

become

Jesus

By:JOSEPH STALLINGS

We usually don’t think about it, but our Lord’s name was not always Jesus. It was in fact originally the popular Aramaic name Yeshu’a.

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In first century Judea and Galilee, the name Yeshu’a was very common and shared fifth place with Eleazar (Lazarus) in popularity as a name for Jewish men. The most popular male names at that time were Shime’on (Simon), Yosef (Joseph), Yehuda (Judah or Judas) and Yochanan (John).

In the Holy Land at the time of Christ, Aramaic had replaced Hebrew in everyday conversation, but Hebrew remained the holy language and was used in worship and daily prayers. The rabbis also used Hebrew when instructing their

disciples. The two languages were closely related, however, as close as Italian is to Spanish, and both used the same alphabet.

Yeshu’a was the Aramaic version of the Hebrew name Yehoshu’a (Joshua), and means “Yahweh saves”.

Throughout Christ’s lifetime in Galilee, Samaria and Judea of course the name Yeshu’a presented no problem for those who spoke Aramaic and read the Bible and prayed in Hebrew. But outside the Holy Land it become a different story as Good News spread.

The Gentiles of the Roman Empire spoke Greek and Latin and simply could not pronounce Yeshu’a. It contained sounds that did not exist in their language. When the Gospels were written in Greek, therefore, the Evangelists had a real problem regarding how they might render our Lord’s name into acceptable Greek.

The initially ‘Y’ (Hebrew and Aramaic letter ‘yod’) was easy. The Evangelists could use the Greek letter ‘iota’, written ‘I,’ since it was pronounced like the ‘y’ in yet.

The next sound was a vowel, and that was a little more difficult. Unlike Greek, all the letters of the Aramaic-Hebrew alphabet are consonants. The marks for the vowels were not invented until some centuries after Christ and were simple dots and dashes, placed above or beneath the letters. At the time of Christ apparently, the first vowel in our Lord’s name was pronounced like the ‘a’ in gate. And the Evangelists believed they could approximate that sound by using the Greek letter ‘eta’. (The capital Greek letter looks just like our English letter H).

Then followed the first of two almost insurmountable problems with Hebrew and Aramaic pronunciation. There was no letter for the ‘sh’ sound in the Greek alphabet. Such a familiar name as Solomon was actually Sh’lomo in Hebrew, Samson was Shimson and Samuel was Sh’mu-El. Like the Greek translators of these Old Testament Hebrew names, the Evangelists used the Greek sigma (s) for the Hebrew shin (sh) when rendering Christ’s name.

The first three Greek letters ‘iota’, ‘eta’, and ‘sigma’, moreover came to be used in early Byzantine religious art as an abbreviation of Jesus name. As they look very much like the Latin letters HIS, the letters were adapted in Western European religious paintings and church architecture as a symbol for Christ’s name.

The next letter in the Aramaic name Yeshu’a was the Hebrew letter ‘waw’, which here represents the sound ‘oo’, as in too. It was easy for the Evangelists to duplicate this sound in Greek. It takes two letters, however, the omicron (o) and upsilon (u).

But that easy substitution was followed by the biggest problem of all: the final ‘a’ sound. In Greek, there was no substitute for the Hebrew letter ‘aiyin’. Though the ‘aiyin’ has no sound of its own, it causes the vowel that it controls to be pronounced deep in the throat. The Greek couldn’t do that, and neither could the Romans when speaking in Latin. Usually, a Greek or Roman would pronounce an ‘aiyin’-controlled ‘a’ like the ‘a’ in father.

A final ‘a’ on a name however was most commonly feminine in both Greek and Latin. Thus it was decided to drop the Hebrew ‘aiyin’ completely and replace it with the final Greek sigma (s) which most often indicates the masculine gender in nouns.

Throughout the Roman Empire then our Lord’s Aramaic name Yeshu’a, had become the Greek name Iesous, pronounced yeh-SOOS. And this remained Christ’s name throughout the Roman Empire as long as Greek remained the dominant language.

But after some centuries Greek lost its favored position and Latin took its place. In the last quarter of the fourth century, the Bible was translated from Greek into Latin by *St. Jerome who had no trouble rendering the Greek Iesous into Latin, it became Iesus. The accent, however, was moved to the first syllable and the name pronounced YAY-soos, since the Romans liked to accent the second from the last syllable.

In about 14th century, in the scriptoria of the monasteries where Bibles were copied by hand, Monks began to elongate the initial ‘I’ of the words into a ‘J’. (The pronounciation remained the same-like the ‘y’ in yet but the Monks thought a ‘J’ looked better). Probably the first Monks to do this were Germans because the letter ‘j’ in that language sounds the same as the ‘y’ in English. The name Iesus, consequently, evolved into the familiar written form of Jesus by the 17th

century. Everyone still pronounced it YAY-soos, however, as it was in the official liturgical Latin.

Way back in the fifth and sixth centuries, some pagan Germanic tribes called the Angles and Saxons invaded England. St Augustine of Canterbury came to convert them to Christianity in A.D.396. Of course St. Augustine established Jerome’s Latin translation as England’s official Bible. The Anglo-Saxon learned that our Lord’s official Latin name was Iesus. Naturally the Germanic Anglo-Saxon converted the initial Latin ‘I’ into the German ‘J’. They pronounced the name, however, as YAY-zoos, since a single ‘s’ between two vowels is sounded like our ‘z’ in Germanic languages.

When the Normans invaded England in A.D.1066 they brought with them the French language. Since neither the Anglo-Saxons nor the Normans would surrender their language to the other, the two become wedded and eventually evolved into Modern English.

The Normans did influence the pronunciation of the first letter of Our Lord’s name, though, they brought the French pronunciation of ‘j’ (jh), which evolved into our English sound of ‘j’.

When King James commissioned the first official translation of the Bibles into English in the early 17 th century, the Latin Jesus was carried over unchanged into the new English Bible. The average English citizen of the day probably pronounced the name JAY-zus which ultimately evolved into our modern English JEE-zus.

The long process was now complete. A name that began as the Aramaic Yeshu’a would remain written in English as it was in Medieval Latin, but now would be pronounced in English speaking countries as the familiar and loving name of the One who is our Savior, JESUS.

• Jerome is Eusebius Hieronymus A.D.347 – A.D.419

• Yeshu’a in Aramaic is pronounced Yahshu’a in Hebrew