The True Name of Jesus

There is some disagreement among scholars about how Jesus would have said his name. However, they all agree it was not pronounced as we say Jesus today. The earliest versions of the New Testament books that have survived today were written in ancient Greek.

I looked at high-resolution scans of the earliest papyrus copies of the New Testament to see how Jesus’ name was written. In all the papyri I examined, Jesus’ name was written in Nomina Sacra, abbreviations of sacred names. There are several different forms using the first two letters, the first three letters, the first and last letter, or the first two and the last letter, of Jesus’ name in ancient Greek, all with a bar over them, like this:

Using those, scholars assert that his full name in ancient Greek would have been spelled:

However, Jesus was not Greek, and his name was not a Greek name. Many scholars assert that Jesus’ name is based on a common Jewish Hebrew name from His time, written like this:

This is also one of the ways the name of Joshua, the successor to Moses, was written in ancient Hebrew. It is derived from Yehoshua, which means "God is salvation." The shorter form Yeshua also means "salvation" and was used in Jesus’ time. It makes sense why Jesus would be named Yeshua, given that he was the Messiah.

The Hebrew transliterates to Yeshua in English and would have been pronounced YEH-shoo-uh, or in the original form, Yehoshua pronounced Yea-HO-shoo-ah. The current name Joshua in English is closer to how the original Hebrew would have been said than the name Jesus we use today.

Other scholars point out that Jesus is thought to have spoken ancient Galilean Aramaic as his first language. Jesus’s name in Syriac Aramaic is shown below, and it transliterates to Isho’, which is pronounced ee-sho. This view appears to be a minority view among scholars.

Jesus was Jewish, and the language of the Jewish religious texts, the Torah, was Hebrew. So, it is likely that Jesus’ name was Hebrew, even if his first language was Aramaic.

To get to the name Jesus, Hebrew was first transliterated to Greek, changing how it was pronounced. Transliterate means to change the word in the original language to the closest same letters in the destination language trying also to preserve the sound of the word. This is often done with names, but when that is done, the way the name is pronounced in the destination language may be quite different from the original language if the sounds in the original language do not exist in the destination one.

The Greek language did not have all the same sounds as the Hebrew language, making it impossible to have a Greek spelling pronounced the same as the Hebrew. For example, there was no letter in ancient Greek for the sh sound. So, Yeshua (YEH-shoo-uh) became IHƩOYƩ, transliterated to Iesous in English and pronounced ee-ay-sooce'. This is where the main change in pronunciation occurred.

When Greek was later transliterated to Latin, it was represented as Iesus, which is pronounced YAY-sus, similar to the pronunciation of the Greek version. When Latin was later translated into other languages, like German, the Latin I, which sounds more like Y in English, was changed to German J, which is also pronounced like Y in English (for example, the German Jäger for hunter is pronounced Yager.)

The letter J was first added to the English alphabet in the early 1500s. It was pronounced more like I, and they were used interchangeably. In the first English translation of the New Testament Bible, the Tyndale Bible (1526), Jesus’ name was written as Iesu. In the Coverdale Bible (1535), the first complete Bible that was mass-produced in English, the Latin spelling Iesus was used. The famous Geneva Bible (1557) used the spelling Jesus, influenced by German or Swiss. In the 1611 King James English translation of the Bible, Jesus was spelled the Latin way as Iesus and was pronounced like the Latin or Greek versions. The first revision to the King James Bible in 1629 used the spelling Jesus, still pronounced Iesus. That spelling stuck, but over time, the pronunciation of J has changed, and Jesus is now pronounced Gees-us or JEE-zuhs.

Summary

In Summary, most scholars agree that Jesus’ name was the Hebrew name from the Old Testament mentioned above, and it is more correctly represented as Yeshua (YEH-shoo-uh) in English. It should probably have ended up as Joshua in English, as did Joshua, the successor of Moses. Some people today have gone back to using Yeshua, and others think we should be using Joshua. Some say that if you are speaking Hebrew, maybe you should say Yeshua, but not in English. The spelling Jesus and the pronunciation we use in English have been used for a few hundred years, so it would be difficult to change now.

The sounds and alphabets of languages vary and cannot always be represented correctly in another language, and pronunciations change over time. You could make arguments for using the historic Hebrew, Greek, or Latin pronunciations, the current English pronunciation, or even Joshua. English is just one of many languages, and the name of Jesus is pronounced in many different ways across modern languages. When we meet Him, we can ask how He prefers that we say his name.

Douglas A. Leas, October 2024

Sources:

I read many articles about this topic and summarized what I found. Here are just a few of those sources:

Amador, Jeroen, (n.d.) "How Yeshua Became Jesus – the Journey of Language," https://www.oneforisrael.org/bible-teachings/messianic-perspective-bible-teachings/how-yeshua-became-jesus-the-journey-of-language/ , retrieved Oct 19, 2024.

Jesus (name) Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_(name)

Maas, A. (1910). Origin of the Name of Jesus Christ. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08374x.htm

Meet The Man Responsible For The Letter "J," (Apr 2011), dictionary.com, https://www.dictionary.com/e/j/.

Parsons, John J. (n.d.) Codex Sinaticus Nomina Sacra and the name Ἰησοῦς, https://hebrew4christians.com/Names_of_G-d/Sinaticus/sinaticus.html, retrieved Oct, 19, 2024.

Understanding the Names Yeshua and Yehoshua in the Bible, (Aug 2024), Fellowship of Israel Related Ministries (FIRM), https://firmisrael.org/learn/understanding-the-names-yeshua-and-yehoshua-in-the-bible/

Schochenmaier, Eugen (28 September 2022). "How did Jesus get his English name" https://mondonomo.com/article/How_did_Jesus_get_his_English_name/

Strong’s G2424 – iēsous https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/g2424/kjv/tr/0-1/

Gibson, Paul, (1/25/2020) What are Nomina Sacra? BibleQuestions.info https://biblequestions.info/2020/01/25/what-are-nomina-sacra/