Not "Jesus" but "Joshua"

And the Confusion of New Testament Names

Since the previous article was on “Christ,” it might be fun to discuss the name, “Jesus,” which is also a bit of an untranslated. Here, however, some linguistic convolutions take place before the name gets rendered into Greek. Our English translations add a lot of different kinds of oddity to the names of those in the Bible. Many of these names are completely disconnected from the names in the original Greek.

The untranslated Greek adjective, christos, should be translated to “anointed.” It is a description used like a title, not a proper. When it comes to names, we might think that there is nothing to translate. Whatever the name sounds like should just be rendered into a new set of letters. Especially since many names today supposedly have a Biblical origin. I wish that were true. Jesus is hardly the worst of it. Some English Biblical names seem to be almost pulled out of thin air.

The Name Above All Names

The name “Jesus” was among least common words in Jesus’s Biblical vocabulary. He only uses it once in John 17:3. He often refers to himself, however, in the third person, but by the phrase “the son of the man,” not Jesus.

In Greek, the word is spelled, Iesous (Ἰησοῦς), a word that looks a lot like our “Jesus.” It takes another step closer in the Latin Vulgate to Iesus. There was no “J” in either the Greek or Latin. The “J” was a special form of the Latin “I” used at the end of a series of numbers, as in XIII being written as XIIJ. So, no mystery here. Except there is. Why was the ‘I” changed to “J” in languages where the “J” had a different sound?

Because the English meaning of “Jesus” is “Joshua.”

“Wow! Really?” you might wonder. “ Those words don’t look much alike. How did that happen?”

Good question. The answer is that one sloppy translation leads to another. Even "Joshua” is a mistranslation of the original Hebrew as much as Jesus is. In Hebrew, we might render the name as Jehoshua (יְהוֹשׁוּעַ). This was supposedly pronounce as something like yeh-ho-shoo'-ah. So, in translating “Joshua” into English, the “-eh-” following the “J” was dropped, but in translated it to Greek the “-ho-” was dropped, and the “sh” changed to “s,” and the Greek ending added. Makes perfect sense. When Paul mentions the Old Testament Joshua in Hebrews 4:8, what is written in the Greek is the same word, Iesous), that is translated everywhere else in the NT as “Jesus.”

Of course, we don’t know how these words were pronounced at the time. We only know the letters they were written in and how those letters are pronounced today. In Jesus’s case we know even less. From Biblical sources, it is clear the Jesus taught in Greek and spoke the Aramaic of the era as well. Did people use his Aramaic name, Jehoshua, or his Greek name, Iesous?

And don’t ask me where people get the abomination, Yeshua, that we often see today. Are we trying to speak Hebrew with a Yiddish accent? Jawohl? Oy-vey!

By Another Other Name

I am too lazy and it is too boring to delve into all the crazy misnaming in the English Bible, but let me point out “Jesus” is far from the worst of it. For me, the stupidest is “James.” That name is symptomatic of the indifference translators have toward what the Bible says. I feel sorry for the two apostles bearing the cross of “James.” I wonder what they did to deserve it.

The name of these two apostles in the Greek is Iakobos (Ἰάκωβος). Given the knowledge that the initial “I” is a “J,” we get Jakobos, which is just our English “Jacob” with a Greek ending.In Latin, it is Iacobi. Bibles in other languages usually translate it as their local variation of “Jacob.” So where did “James” come from? It could only be a translation miracle, similar to changing water into wine.

Of course, there are a lot of other Biblical games with names. There is even a Hebrew Names Version of the English Bible that tries to straighten out all the Bibles nonsense of changing names. However, even that is wrong-headed because many names in the New Testament are not Hebrew but Greek. Both Andrew and Phillip were Greek names.

Another interesting is our “Thomas.” It comes from the Greek Thomas (Θωμᾶς), but the word, thomas means “twin” in Aramaic. Was he, however, called “Thomas?” John says:

John 11:16 (NKJV) Then said Thomas, who is called Didymus…

You can probably guess what didymos (δίδυμος) means in Greek. It is the adjective that means “double,” “twofold,” and, in the case of people, “twin.” So Thomas was always addressed as “Twin,” both in Aramaic and in Greek. However, the funniest thing about this name to me is that thomas (Θωμᾶς) is also a Greek verb. It means “you will wonder at.” A good name for a famous doubter.

Conclusions

Of course, we can guess what happened to these names historically. It is just the typical drift of languages over the centuries. In English, the Latinized version of the name, “Jesous,” from the Latin Vulgate was shortened to “Jesus” in common usage. When the first English Bible translations were made in the seventeenth century, “Jesus” was the standard name people knew rather than something closer to Joshua.

However, it is funny that the first English translation was called the King James Version rather than the King Jacob Version.