Jesus or Yeshua?

Der Alte

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The name Jesus doesn't mean anything in English....
Should we call the Lord Yeshua or Jesus or is it not important?

To be completely accurate the Savior's name was not Ἰησους/Iesous [pronounced Yaysoos] either. In the 225 BC LXX the name יהושׁע/Yehoshua is transliterated Ἰησους. The diminutive of יהושׁע is ישׁוע /Yeshua. When the Bible was translated into German Ἰησους was transliterated Jesus. The "J" is pronounced as the English "Y" so in German Jesus is pronounced Yaysoos. Whether one says Yehoshua, Yeshua, Iesous or Jesus I think the savior understands.
 
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Uber Genius

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The name Jesus doesn't mean anything in English....
Should we call the Lord Yeshua or Jesus or is it not important?

Relationally, it doesn't matter what you call your spouse (pet name, not what you call them when you are fighting).

But in a courtroom in order for the court to prove your spouse was the correct recipient of a large sum of money in a will, you might want to be careful how to represent that name.

Point is, when we pray, pray however you like.

But the NT authors were very careful to pick names and associate Jesus with names that occurred in the OT. YHWY and adonai, elohim receive translations into Kurios, and theos, and don't forget "Ego Eimi," for "I AM"
 
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ViaCrucis

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The name Jesus doesn't mean anything in English....

Of course it does. Names have meaning regardless of what language they are transliterated in. My name is Jonathan, that's a transliteration of the Hebrew name יְהוֹנָתָן but regardless it means "YHVH is gracious".

Should we call the Lord Yeshua or Jesus or is it not important?

If your first language is Hebrew, sure.

If you're going for what His mother called Him, it wasn't "Yeshua", that's the Hebrew pronunciation and that isn't the language the Holy Family spoke, they spoke a Galilean dialect of Aramaic. To understand why that is you need to go back a few hundred years to the Babylonian Captivity, when the captives of Judah were taken into Babylonia where the lingua franca of the empire was Aramaic. With the return of the Jews to Judea under the Persian king Cyrus, Aramaic continued to be the lingua franca of the Persian Empire, and Aramaic slowly became the common tongue of the Jews, while Hebrew slowly fell into disuse except in the context of religion--Hebrew was still spoken in the Temple, and sacred texts continued to be copied and preserved in Hebrew. Aramaic was preserved as the common tongue of Judea even when Alexander conquered Persia (including Judea), and later through the forced hellenization attempts by the Seleucids.

Following the period of Maccabean independence and the Roman conquest, Aramaic continued to be spoken in Jerusalem and by the Jews throughout the provinces of Galilee and Judea. This is the language Jesus would have spoken in the home, when Mary and Joseph took Him in their lap and taught Him how to speak, they were speaking Aramaic. When Jesus addressed the fishermen in Capernaum, and made Peter and Andrew, John and James "fishers of men" He would have called out to them in Aramaic. Certain names and phrases are left untranslated in the New Testament (especially the Gospels), and they are consistently Aramaic names and phrases; for example Peter's birth name was Simon bar Jonah, "bar" is the Aramaic equivalent to the Hebrew "ben" meaning "son of"; and while the Gospels translate the name Jesus gave him as "Peter" (specifically Petros) we can be confident that this is a translation of the name Jesus gave, Paul refers to him in his letters as "Cephas" (Greek Kephas) the Hellenized form of the Aramaic Kepha, meaning "rock"; so Jesus called Simon bar Jonah Kepha, which the Evangelists translated into Greek as Petros, rather than transliterating they translated it. Other Aramaic terms are found such as "maranatha" Aramaic for "Lord, come!" and "talitha koum" meaning "little girl, rise".

So if the question is, "What did Mary, Joseph, and His closest followers call Him?", the answer is not "Yeshua", it would have been the Aramaic form, of which we aren't entirely certain, but some possibilities are "Eeshoa" or "Eesho", in modern Syriac (one of the few surviving forms of ancient Aramaic) it is (I believe) "Eashoa". Regardless, however, how it was pronounced in the family home of Nazareth, it was rendered into Greek as Ἰησοῦς (Iesous), which is also how both Joshua ben Nun and Jeshua the high priest are rendered in the Septuagint and other Greek writings; so it is a consistent form, in Greek, of this name. Ἰησοῦς, in Latin, became IESVS (Iesus) and later, with the invention of the letter 'J' to help better distinguish consonantal 'I', Jesus.

There's no reason to say "Yeshua" unless your first language is Hebrew, in which case that would be accurate. If your first language is Georgian you'd say "Ieso" and if your first language were Irish Gaelic, it would be "Iosa".

There's nothing magic about how to pronounce the Lord's name. He is Lord in every language.

-CryptoLutheran
 
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SteveCaruso

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So if the question is, "What did Mary, Joseph, and His closest followers call Him?", the answer is not "Yeshua", it would have been the Aramaic form, of which we aren't entirely certain, but some possibilities are "Eeshoa" or "Eesho", in modern Syriac (one of the few surviving forms of ancient Aramaic) it is (I believe) "Eashoa".

In Galilean it was pronounced pretty close to "Yeshua," actually, with the final "a" being pretty light (ye-SHOO-[a]) as Galileans began to weaken (but not eliminate) their emphatics in the 1st century.

The Syriac forms ("Eesho" "Eashoa" etc.) that lost their initial yotics (the consonantal-y) didn't really happen until a few hundred years after Jesus' time.

The Hebrew form was "Yehoshua" – and the Aramaic form was no a diminutive but a genuine linguistic difference due to how Hebrew and Aramaic each form theophoric elements. In Hebrew it's /yeho-/ as a prefix and /-yahu/ as a suffix. In Aramaic they are /ye-/ as a prefix and /-ya/ as a suffix respectively.

There's nothing magic about how to pronounce the Lord's name. He is Lord in every language.

^^ This! This. So much this. :)
 
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Michelangelo Goeloe

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Of course it does. Names have meaning regardless of what language they are transliterated in. My name is Jonathan, that's a transliteration of the Hebrew name יְהוֹנָתָן but regardless it means "YHVH is gracious".



If your first language is Hebrew, sure.

If you're going for what His mother called Him, it wasn't "Yeshua", that's the Hebrew pronunciation and that isn't the language the Holy Family spoke, they spoke a Galilean dialect of Aramaic. To understand why that is you need to go back a few hundred years to the Babylonian Captivity, when the captives of Judah were taken into Babylonia where the lingua franca of the empire was Aramaic. With the return of the Jews to Judea under the Persian king Cyrus, Aramaic continued to be the lingua franca of the Persian Empire, and Aramaic slowly became the common tongue of the Jews, while Hebrew slowly fell into disuse except in the context of religion--Hebrew was still spoken in the Temple, and sacred texts continued to be copied and preserved in Hebrew. Aramaic was preserved as the common tongue of Judea even when Alexander conquered Persia (including Judea), and later through the forced hellenization attempts by the Seleucids.

Following the period of Maccabean independence and the Roman conquest, Aramaic continued to be spoken in Jerusalem and by the Jews throughout the provinces of Galilee and Judea. This is the language Jesus would have spoken in the home, when Mary and Joseph took Him in their lap and taught Him how to speak, they were speaking Aramaic. When Jesus addressed the fishermen in Capernaum, and made Peter and Andrew, John and James "fishers of men" He would have called out to them in Aramaic. Certain names and phrases are left untranslated in the New Testament (especially the Gospels), and they are consistently Aramaic names and phrases; for example Peter's birth name was Simon bar Jonah, "bar" is the Aramaic equivalent to the Hebrew "ben" meaning "son of"; and while the Gospels translate the name Jesus gave him as "Peter" (specifically Petros) we can be confident that this is a translation of the name Jesus gave, Paul refers to him in his letters as "Cephas" (Greek Kephas) the Hellenized form of the Aramaic Kepha, meaning "rock"; so Jesus called Simon bar Jonah Kepha, which the Evangelists translated into Greek as Petros, rather than transliterating they translated it. Other Aramaic terms are found such as "maranatha" Aramaic for "Lord, come!" and "talitha koum" meaning "little girl, rise".

So if the question is, "What did Mary, Joseph, and His closest followers call Him?", the answer is not "Yeshua", it would have been the Aramaic form, of which we aren't entirely certain, but some possibilities are "Eeshoa" or "Eesho", in modern Syriac (one of the few surviving forms of ancient Aramaic) it is (I believe) "Eashoa". Regardless, however, how it was pronounced in the family home of Nazareth, it was rendered into Greek as Ἰησοῦς (Iesous), which is also how both Joshua ben Nun and Jeshua the high priest are rendered in the Septuagint and other Greek writings; so it is a consistent form, in Greek, of this name. Ἰησοῦς, in Latin, became IESVS (Iesus) and later, with the invention of the letter 'J' to help better distinguish consonantal 'I', Jesus.

There's no reason to say "Yeshua" unless your first language is Hebrew, in which case that would be accurate. If your first language is Georgian you'd say "Ieso" and if your first language were Irish Gaelic, it would be "Iosa".

There's nothing magic about how to pronounce the Lord's name. He is Lord in every language.

-CryptoLutheran
I admire your knowledge, Great!
 
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Shempster

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I know that in the East, names were more descriptive than in the West where its more about a sound and a spelling.
Yet, a name is a name. He seemed to make a big deal about HIS NAME, so why was it changed?

If He told His followers to cast out demons in the name of Yeshua, then how could casting them out in a completely different name have the same effect?
 
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Steve Petersen

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I know that in the East, names were more descriptive than in the West where its more about a sound and a spelling.
Yet, a name is a name. He seemed to make a big deal about HIS NAME, so why was it changed?

If He told His followers to cast out demons in the name of Yeshua, then how could casting them out in a completely different name have the same effect?

Do you really think God is such a purist that He won't respond to prayer unless you say the name correctly?
 
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ViaCrucis

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No, not me, it was Yeshua who made the big deal about the name. I was only pointing it out.

But the importance of the name isn't in its constituent phonemes, but in the One which the name identifies.

If prayer depends on us being able to pass a rigorous course on ancient Aramaic linguistics, then the whole lot of us are in a great heap of trouble.

-CryptoLutheran
 
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SteveCaruso

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If He told His followers to cast out demons in the name of Yeshua, then how could casting them out in a completely different name have the same effect?

"In the name of" meant in the authority of. Not passing a pronunciation test. Think "in the name of the King!" :)
 
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Der Alte

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The Sun doesn't rotate around the earth, it's the other way around. So if the only way for the sun and the moon to stay in the same place for a whole day is actually if the earth stops spinning and the moon stops rotating around earth.
But this would have have enormous repercussions on earth's orbit and would eventually disturb the entire solar system, so the only way to interpret this passage literally is if the whole universe had stopped moving for a day. If anyone could make that happen it would be God
:)
Not necessarily. I go on the assumption that God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Since God did do that I see no problem with God refracting the light of the sun and moon so that it appeared to Joshua that they were standing still.
 
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Jon Goode

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Not necessarily. I go on the assumption that God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Since God did do that I see no problem with God refracting the light of the sun and moon so that it appeared to Joshua that they were standing still.

You're absolutely right. Also, God could have made a new sun which he planted in our solar system for one day, and so it would appear to Joshua that the sun was standing still. Also, he could have influenced the vision of people, so that they got the illusion that the sun and the moon were standing still. Do you see how pointless your post was?

I was only pointing out the theorical error in the thread.
 
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Der Alte

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You're absolutely right. Also, God could have made a new sun which he planted in our solar system for one day, and so it would appear to Joshua that the sun was standing still. Also, he could have influenced the vision of people, so that they got the illusion that the sun and the moon were standing still. Do you see how pointless your post was?
And you were doing so good. Wonder how many more illogical examples you could come up with? The influenced the vision one is not too bad. God did cause many people to see visions in the Bible.
I was only pointing out the theorical error in the thread.
And I was pointing out the error of your "theoretical error."
 
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