The word Jesus has a long etymological history. Off the top of my head:
It starts out in the Hebrew, "Yehoshua" which means "YHWH Saves."
In Aramaic, instances of the tetragrammation lose their Heys, so it is transformed into "Yeshua`" which can either mean "YHWH saves" or "He will save."
Later when it was translated into Greek, there had to be some phonetic re-arrangements, as the Greek alphabet is insufficient for reproducing all of the sounds of the Semitic.
Y e SH U a ~
I E S O U S
There is no "Y" sound in the Greek alphabet, so the Yood was transliterated an Iota, followed by the Rbotso (the "EY" vowel in Aramaic) translitterated directly to an Epsilon. There is no unvoiced post-velolar fricative in Greek ("SH") so Sigma was employed in place of the Sheen. We know that this transliteration was in use, because other words in the Greek NT where Aramaic is transcribed employ it (shvaqtonee to sabachthani for example). The combination Omicron-Upsilon replaced the Wau, as the only way to obtain an "OO" sound in Greek is with a dipthong. The `E is dropped altogether, as the Greek alphabet has nothing even CLOSE to something like sound that precedes vomiting, and it is theorized that in some dialects of Aramaic, `Es were silent like modern Hebrew's Aiyn. It is alternatively theorized that the Upsilon was used to translitterate the `E instead, but this would lead to a voweling of the word that is nowhere on record. Finally, to make the word masculine, as Jesus -was- a man, a terminal Sigma was added to signify the Masculine Singular.
Next, the name went through Latin, where it was translitterated, dropping the omicron, as the "OO" sound is reproducible by the Latin letter U, giving us IESUS.
In later church Latin, initial I's were changed to J's, a new letter on the block, today, less than 500 years old, giving us "JESUS" (pronounced "YAY-SOOS"). I believe that this convention was created in Germany, where in German J is pronounced much like the English Y, but have yet to confirm this for the language at that time. This, if I am correct, is where we get initial Js for all of our Biblical words beginning with Yoods, as most of our modern Bibles went through Germany with Martin Luther and his contemporaries. To this day, the vast majority of Aramaic and, I think, Hebrew study comes from Germany.
Finally this Germanized Latin was transmitted directly into English, where all rules for pronunciation change.
- First, J has a different pronunciation. Instead of a closed frontal vowel ("EE"), J is a voiced palatial approximant ("JUH").
- Due to it's position in the word, the E is pronounced long ("EE" as opposed to "EH" or "EY").
- The first S, in its position sandwiched between vowels, gets voiced (so the first S sound like "Z"); and
- The U, due to it's position in the word, is pronounced short ("UH" as opposed to "OO"), giving us our modern English spelling identical to the Germanized Latin, but the pronunciation now as:
"JESUS" (JEE-ZUS)
Jesus in the end is not pagan, but an English Greco-Latinized Semitic word with German influence.
WHAT a game to telephone to play through 6 languages over 2000 years!
Shlomo,
(Peace)
