Honouring our Lord and Saviour the Proper Way

It seems ridiculous that I am even writing about this. The saviour of the world, of our lives being called by the wrong name? How is that even possible? Let's clarify where the name Jesus came from and what name we should be using instead.

A History Lesson

First off, in the time when Jesus walked this Earth, Hebrew (Or Aramaic, which is almost the same language) was the spoken language in this time (Not Greek or English as some may argue). The disciples and everyone referred to his name as "Yeshua".

The authors who translated Hebrew into various other languages had to somehow translate words, but also try and keep the original phonetics as close as possible. These translations would have gone from Hebrew/Aramaic to Greek, then from Greek to Latin and then eventually to English.

So how did Jesus come about?

Jesus is a product of the order of translations that I mentioned above. The original Hebrew word is:

Ἰησοῦς - Jehoshua - G2424 (Strongs) - "Yehovah's Salvation"

"Jehoshua" in Hebrew is pronounced "Yeshua".

The next order of translation is from Hebrew to Greek. The Greek transliteration for this is:

Ἰησοῦς - Iesous.

Where the confusion starts to arise, is that the Greek language at that time did not have a "Ya" or "Sha" sound, so the authors instead made Yeshua into "Iesous", replacing the "Ya" with "Ie", "Sh" into "S" and "Ua" into "Ous".

Iesous turned into Iesus with later versions of Greek, and Iesus then morphed into Yesus, until eventually we ended up with Jesus.

Does it Matter?

Some may say it does not matter what we call our Lord and Saviour, as long as we know him. I do not agree, because if someone mistakenly called me Chad instead of Grant, and I corrected them, but they continued calling me Chad, is this not offensive?

Also, we know the name Yeshua carries incredible meaning. It literally means "Yehovah's Salvation", or in other words, "God's Salvation". Jesus is a derived word with no ties to the original texts.

These name changes are all over the Bible, and also unavoidable. All Bibles translated from the original texts have some kind of name change, and I will be making another article just like this one on the name of Yahweh.

Conclusion

Jesus is a name almost everyone has heard, but this name is not a true reflection of the true name of the Son of God. Through many transliterations, His true name, Yeshua, was turned into Jesus. I encourage you all to listen to what the Lord is telling you regarding how you address Him going forward. As for myself, and going forward on this site, I will address Him by His true name.