The Etymology of Jesus Debunking the Sacred Name Only Movement Introduction I am amazed at how many times I look on social media sites and see people proclaiming the necessity of pronouncing the Father s and Son s names correctly, lest salvation steer clear of their souls. Don t get me wrong, I do believe that there is a need for believers to actually know the names of the God and Savior whom they serve, but many have taken this to the unhealthy extreme. There exists a very strong doctrine within certain circles of believers that the word Jesus actually has pagan origins and its usage or attribution to our Messiah should be avoided at all costs. This doctrine has existed for hundreds of years, but with the penning of C.J. Koster s Come out of Her My People, this doctrine has infiltrated the libraries of thousands of believers. Let s take a look at the complete etymology of the word Jesus. Hebrew Names & Translation There is no doubt that our Messiah was a Hebrew man. He was not a Greek; he was not an Englishman. Therefore, his name has Hebrew origins. The thing about Hebrew names is that Hebrew names contain meanings within them. Take for example the name of Hosea s son from Hosea 1. And YHWH 1 said, Call his name Not My People, for you are not my people, and I am not your God. (Hosea 1:9) The Hebrew word here for Not My People is Lo-ammi (Strongs 3818). It literally reads, Notmy people. Can you imagine walking up to your son and saying, Hey, Not My People, how was your day? The point is, Hebrew names have meaning behind them. Some of them are even complete sentences. Take for example when YHWH revealed his name to Moses in Exodus 3. God also said to Moses, Say this to the people of Israel, YHWH, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, has sent me to you. This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations. (Exodus 3:15) The word YHWH or Yahweh literally means the existing one or eternal. So we can see that YHWH uses names for his people and himself that have meaning within them, and sometimes 1 YHWH is what is known as the tetragrammaton or divine name of God, often times transliterated as Yahweh or Jehovah. The letters Y-H-W-H are the English equivalent of the Hebrew Yod-Hay-Vav-Hay. Anytime you find the LORD in your English bibles, the original Hebrew is Yod-Hay-Waw-Hay. English bible producers substitute the LORD in place of the divine name due to the ever-enduring truth that we are not 100% sure how to accurately pronounce his name being that ancient Hebrew has no vowels and were never audibly recorder. In this paper, I will use YHWH when the divine name appears in the Old Testament texts, so when you come to YHWH in this paper, simply read it as Yahweh or the LORD.
YHWH changes names of people to better describe them. Moses even changes the name of Joshua son of Nun in Numbers 13. And Moses called Hoshea the son of Nun Joshua [Heb. Yehoshua]. (Numbers 13:16) The word Hoshea simply means deliverer, but Joshua, or Yehoshua in Hebrew, means YHWH saves. This is a fitting name to give to the man who led Israel into Canaan after the death of Moses. YHWH literally saved his people from bondage of Egypt and the threat of the desert. For hundreds of years, Yehoshua was the name used for Joshua son of Nun. However, during the time of the building of Zerubbabel s temple, the name Yehoshua was shortened to Yeshua. This was around the 5 th century BCE and can be found in the writings of the later prophets such as Nehemiah. And all the assembly of those who had returned from the captivity made booths and lived in booths, for from the days of Jeshua [Heb. Yeshua] son of Nun to the day the people of Israel had not done so. And there was great rejoicing. (Nehemiah 8:17) So by this time, the Babylonian captivity had influenced the language of the Hebrews. The Babylonians spoke Chaldean, or Aramaic as many people know it today, and this language was very close to Hebrew. The cool thing about Aramaic is that most of the language is completely able to be rendered in Hebrew. Therefore, when the shortened name of Yeshoshua was spoken in Aramaic, it was able to come back into Hebrew as a legitimate word. That is why we have two words for Yeshua in our Strong s Concordances (#3442 Hebrew, #3443 Aramaic). If you jump a couple hundred years later, you arrive at the Hellenization of Israel by the hands of Alexander the Great. During this Hellenization, Greek language and lifestyle slowly replaced Israel s Hebrew heritage. The most notable event that took place was the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into the Greek language. This translation is known as the Septuagint (LXX). With the translation of the Scriptures underway, the translators had two options when dealing with difficult-to-translate words: 1) They could translate a word s meaning from Hebrew to Greek, which would result in the word or name sounding nothing like it did formerly in the Hebrew language; or 2) They could transliterate it so that the sound carried over but the meaning was left behind. The translators of the LXX chose option two and transliterated all names. Within this translation, both the names Yehoshua and Yeshua are transliterated into the same Greek word (Ιησους EE-AYE-SOUS), even though Yehoshua is the long, proper rendition of the name Yeshua. Therefore, during the time of the production of the Septuagint, all references to the name Yehoshua, including Yehoshua son of Nun, were rendered as Yeshua. Yeshua (Hebrew letters: Yod-Shin-Waw-Ayin) would become the base for the transliteration of the name into the Greek language. Now, I would like to show the transliteration process of the name Yeshua into its Greek cognate Ιησους.
Etymology of עושי to Ιησους Below is the transliteration process of the names י ש ו ע Ιη σ ου ς The Greek word Ιησους is the product of transliterating every single letter in עושי to its Greek equivalent. The method goes like this: The yod became an iota-aeta diphthong. o There is no y sound in the Greek language. The closest thing to this sound comes from creating a diphthongal iota-aeta. When the two vowels are pronounced together, there is a natural yuh sound between them. Thus, the diphthong was chosen. The shin became a sigma. o There is no sh sound in Greek; therefore, the closest equivalent is the sigma the English s sound. The waw became a diphthongal omicron-upsilon. o This is an exact match in pronunciation. The ayin was dropped because there is no Greek equivalent. The translators could have used a letter that was similar, such as an alpha, but this would have been dropped as well because of Greek syntax. o This is because the word would have become Ιησουα [ie-aye-sou-a]. Ending a Greek word in an alpha denotes femininity and a male s name could not be feminine. Therefore, the alpha was dropped and the masculine final sigma was added to denote masculinity in the nominative case. Thus, the name עושי (Yeshua) became Ιησους. From Greek to Latin to English So how did we get from Ιησους to Jesus? In the fourth century AD, Jerome was commissioned by Pope Damasus to revise the Latin, biblical text then used by the church. Jerome s revision became known as the Latin Vulgate. During the Council of Toulouse in 1229, the Catholic Church ordered that no other translation outside of the Vulgate was to be made. Five years later in the Council of Tarragona (1234), the church forbade anyone but a cleric to have a copy of both the Old and New Testaments lest they be burned at the stake. Because of this Latin exclusiveness, the name Ιησους was transliterated into Latin and became IESUS. The sound in identical between the Greek and Latin pronunciation.
Eventually there arose a man named John Wycliffe who did not like how things were going in the Catholic Church. Wycliffe was an Oxford Professor, scholar, and theologian. Wycliffe, along with help, produced the first English manuscripts of the Scriptures from the Latin Vulgate in the 1380s. The Messiah s name being translated from the Latin IESUS into English resulted in the name Iesus. Check your original 1611 King James Version Bible 2 because this will be the exact name that appears in the New Testament. The letter J (in the form that we have it today) had not yet appeared in the English language by this year. Instead, the letter J was simply a fancy I during this time. It was only until later that the J would take on its own sound distinct from the letter I. Once this change happened, the name Iesus then became Jesus. And that, my friends, is how you get from Yeshua to Jesus. Now, since we have a logical conclusion as to how the name Yeshua became Jesus, is there really any evidence to suggest that the word Jesus is pagan in origin? To say that Jesus is pagan in origin is to say that its derivative (Ιησους) is pagan as well which is what most Jesus-is-pagan advocates proclaim. More specifically, does the word Ιησους mean Hail Zeus? Let s answer that, shall we? Does Ιησους really mean Hail-Zeus? There exists a doctrine today among people within the Hebrew roots movement, as well as other, non-labeled sects, that claims that the name Ιησους literally means Hail Zeus. The proponents to this theory usually possess nothing more than a Strong s concordance, a copy of C.J. Koster s Come out of Her My People, and a bias towards the Greek language, thereby lacking an education in linguistics, syntax, grammar, morphology, and the like. In order for the word Ιησους to mean Hail Zeus, the word must contain the Greek word for Hail and the Greek word for Zeus. Let s take a look at the structure of the word Ιησους to see if this theory matches up. The word in Koine Greek for hail is χαριω (Pronounced: KAH-RIO). To say, I hail, one must pronounce this exact way. In order to say, You hail, one must pronounce this word as χαριεις (Pronounced: KAH-REE-ICE) I could go on and on about the way this word is declined but I assure you that no pronunciation of this word becomes anything close to the pronunciation of Ιησους (Pronounced: EE-AYE-SOUS). Ιησους does not even contain four out of the five letters in χαριω (KAH-RIO)! The word for Zeus in Koine Greek is Ζευς (Pronounced the same in Greek as English). The letters in Ζευς are zeta-epsilon-upsilon-sigma. The letters in Ιησους are iota-aeta-sigma-omicron-upsilon-sigma. Ζευς only contains two of the six letters that Ιησους contains. Though, some will claim that since Ζευς sounds like Ιησους, Ιησους must be a reference to the king of the Greek gods. First of all, the word Ζευς begins with a zeta a letter that had a harsh DZ sound (similar to the buzz a bee makes), completely different than the sigma in Ιησους. These two words, when pronounced by someone who actually has an understanding of Greek pronunciation and linguistics, have no pronunciation connection whatsoever. The linguistics, or lack thereof, of some of these internet scholars is quite hilarious; but to make this even more hilarious, let s see a few quotes from some of the Jesus-means-Zeus advocates. 2 The KJV you are using is most likely not a 1611 KJV. The original 1611 KJV is rarely used today; most people who use a KJV use a later edition produced in the 18 th century. Check the first few pages of your KJV to find the edition and production date.
"They (the Graeco-Roman World) had worshipped Zeus as the supreme deity. Their savior was Zeus, so now they were ready to accept Jehoshua as Jesus - Iesous, meaning - hail Zeus. Now our translated scriptures say that Jahwah's (Jehovah's) Son's name is Jesus, which is a compound word made up of Ie and Zeus (Hail Zeus)." -The Origin of Christianity by A.B. Traina Zeus was one of the most popular gods at that time. And conjecture has it that perhaps Jesus name was changed to please the pagans in the empire - who were reluctant to accept the New Faith - of the Roman Emperor. - http://www.hiddenbible.com/jesuszeus/jesuszeus.html Both of these scholars believe that the Roman Empire changed Messiah s name to Ιησους to better please the Zeus worshipers. There is just one major problem with this logic: the Roman Empire did not speak Greek; it spoke Latin! Latin was the only language of the Empire until the 6 th century AD. How could a bunch of Latin-speaking Romans who worshiped Jupiter, not Zeus, change the name of Israel s Messiah to better honor a Greek god? The new faith of the Roman Empire was not Christianity until the year 325 AD 300 years before Greek was adopted by Rome. People forget that it was Alexander the Great who brought in Greek influence and not Constantine. So what makes sense now, that the word Ιησους came from a Roman conspiracy that aimed to give homage to their chief god (who wasn t even in their pantheons), or that the name Ιησους was an accurate translation of Yehoshua/Yeshua in the penning of the Septuagint 300 years before Messiah was ever even born? The word Ιησους is not pagan and it is not the product of a Roman conspiracy; it is the Greek equivalent to the Hebrew/Aramaic name of our Savior. Moreover, there are over 5,000 Greek New Testament manuscripts that contain this name. Even the beloved Hebrew Matthew that is growing ever so popular, contains the name Yeshua the Hebrew/Aramaic equivalent of Ιησους. Word has it that in the year 1553, on September 9 th, a French Bishop by the name of Jean du Tillet was visiting Rome shortly after Pope Julius III permitted the execution of a decree to forcefully confiscate all Hebrew-written documents from the Jewish people of Rome. Tillet acquired a Hebrew manuscript of the Gospel of Matthew and returned with it to France. To this day, the manuscript is supposedly remains in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, France as Hebrew manuscript No. 132, though I was unable to locate the manuscript in their online archives. Nonetheless, a man by the name of Todd Effren has produced a literal English translation from this Hebrew Matthew, which he has named Paleo Name Version (w4w). However, like I have mentioned before, this manuscript contains the name Yeshua rather than Yehoshua. Effren is quick to admit this, but is even quicker to show that he rendered the yod-shin-waw-ayin (Yeshua) into Paleo yod-hay-waw-shin-ayin because he feels as though Yehoshua was the original. So to those who are reading this that are convinced that the Hebrew Matthew is more authoritative than the Greek, the name Yeshua is still present and any other variation is absent. At this point, if you still believe Yeshua or Ιησους is pagan then you should probably throw away whatever English translation you are using because they all come from the thousands of ancient Greek manuscripts that we possess today which contain these names.
Other Popular Variations to Messiah s Hebrew Name I would now like to address the question of pronunciation of Messiah s name in the Hebrew language. Since we have determined how the name Yeshua became Ιησους, we have logical proof that Yeshua was indeed his original name and not some of the Sacred Name Movement variations such as Yahshua, Yahushua, Yahusha, etc. But since people will still be reluctant to accept the logical etymological road from Yeshua to Ιησους, we will investigate even further. Let s begin with Yahshua. Yahshua is first documented during the early days of the Sacred Name Movement back in the 1930s by SNM (Sacred Name Movement) founders Angelo B. Traina and C.O. Dodd with their Holy Name Bible. Prior to this penning, there exists no evidence for this name s existence. The proponents to this pronunciation assert that the name of our Messiah must be rendered, in Hebrew, identical to the rendition of Joshua son of Nun s name is rendered: yod-hay-waw-shin-ayin [Y-H-W-SH-A]. The vowel a is placed between the yod and the hay to signify YAH for YAHWEH. Then, the vowel u is placed between the shin and ayin. This results in the rendition Yahshua. However, to render the consonants in this way is to completely ignore Hebrew linguistics. The problem is that the third letter waw is completely ignored and unpronounced. If this is the true pronunciation, the waw must be deleted from the name. Another rendition is Yahushua. Advocates of this pronunciation typically believe that the Yahshua rendition is almost correct, aside from ignoring the waw. Therefore, they simply add the waw sound and out comes the true divine name. So this name seems to make more sense than Yahshua does, so let s test it. Advocates of this pronunciation believe that the first two vowels between the yod & hay and the waw & shin must be an a and a u so that it matches the name of YHWH [YaHuWeH]. They believe that the endings of many Old Testament prophets attest to this theory. Such prophets include Yeshayahu [Isaiah], Yermeyahu [Jeremiah], Eliyahu [Elijah]. The theory is that the Masoretes, which formed the Masoretic Text of the Tanakh 3, wanted to blot out the name of YHWH by changing the vowel points whenever parts of His name would come up in Scripture. Thus, Yehoshua s [Joshua] should also be rendered Yahushua because it was the Masoretes that changed it to Yehoshua. The problem is, if this was really the intent of the Masoretes, why did they leave these thousands of occurrences on the ends of the names? It seems a little odd that they would go so far out of their way to eliminate all occurrences of Yahu on the ends of names, yet fail to eliminate the same exact rendering on the beginnings of names. Furthermore, since we know that Ιησους is the proper rendition of Messiah s name in Greek, we can use this word to go back in translation to see if Yahushua really does line up. Remember the chart that we have that takes us from Yeshua to Ιησους: ' ש ו ע Ιη σ ου ς By going back in translation, we can actually see if the word Yahushua is able to be a cognate. 3 Tanakh is the Hebrew name for what we today call the Old Testament.
Yahushua: If the beginning syllable of Messiah s Hebrew name sounds like Ya, then the Greek spelling would be iota-omicron [EE-AH]. o Does it match up with Ιησους? Negative. If the second syllable of Messiah s Hebrew name sounds like Hu, then the Greek spelling would be upsilon [U as in the word book ] o Does this match up with Ιησους? Negative. There isn t even a Greek letter in Ιησους between the iota-aeta and sigma. If the third syllable in Messiah s Hebrew name sounds like SHu, then the Greek spelling would be sigma. o Does this match up with Ιησους? Positive. If the final syllable in Messiah s Hebrew name sounds like a as in un-der, then the Greek spelling would be alpha. o Does this match up with Ιησους? Positive, only after the feminine alpha is dropped and replaced with the masculine final sigma. So there are two positives and two negatives to this. For the sake of skepticism, here is the rendition of the equivalent Greek spelling of Yahushua : Ιουσους [EE-AH-U-SOU-UH or EE-AH-U-SOUS with the end change] This is very different from the proper rendition of Messiah s name in Greek: Ιησους [EE-AYE-SOUS] We could go on and on testing all variations of Messiah s Hebrew name but they would all prove the same: Yeshua was the name from which Ιησους comes, and no other Hebrew rendition can produce this word, which is found in over 5,000 authoritative Greek New Testament manuscripts, as well as the hundreds of Septuagint manuscripts that we still possess. May His Name be Blotted Out There exists yet another doctrine that states that the name Yeshua is actually an acronym for three Hebrew words: Yimach SHmo V'zichrono, meaning may his name and memory be blotted out. This is only slightly true. This three-word curse is one of the strongest curses in the Hebrew language, and appears in reference to Jesus of Nazareth only a handful of times. This curse was coined in the time of Purim for the Jewish people in reference to Haman, but would eventually reach the likes of many other people, such as Shabasai Tzvi, Joseph Stalin, and Adolph Hitler. However, if this phrase was coined during the birth of Purim (5 th century BCE), how could it determine the name of Messiah? Messiah was named by a messenger from Heaven to Joseph and Mary, not to the Jewish leaders. It just so happened that Yeshua contains three of the four consecutive letters of the curse yod-shin-waw. To say that Yeshua could not be his name because of this pre-messianic curse is illogical.
Jesus on the Name So since we have concluded the proper original name of our Messiah in the Hebrew tongue, the proper rendition of that name in Koine Greek, the etymology which produced the name Jesus, the true answer to whether or not Jesus means Hail-Zeus, and the recipient-influence on the Hebrew curse, let us see what Jesus himself had to say about his name. Many advocates to the Messiah s name must have YHWH s name in it doctrine like to quote John 5:43 to try and prooftext their theology. I have come in my Father s name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive Him. (John 5:43) As Dr. Donald A. Carson would say, A text without a context is a pretext for a prooftext. That is exactly what has happened with this verse from John s Gospel. If one reads the context of the entire passage, specifically verses 19-40, one can see that Jesus is using the idea of coming in his Father s name as a means by which to testify about himself. As Dr. Gary Burge would say, Thus as his trial is played out in this chapter, he turns the tables and moved from defense to prosecution. The final impact of his defense in 5:31-40 leaves the impression that Jesus hearers bear some responsibility for what God has done. The irony runs deeper still since these people do not indeed measure the validity of human witness (5:43) and seek eagerly the affirmation and recognition that come from human quarters. (NIV Application Commentary: John) What Burge is trying to communicate is that Jesus is on trial pleading his case with the authority of his Father s witness. That is what this means; YHWH himself is testifying about his son. This has nothing to do with possessing the Yahu of YHWH s name within his own. If this is the case, no one not possessing a Yahu in his or her name could come in YHWH s name. That means that no Tylers, no Kens, no Ambers, and no Davids could come in YHWH s name. However, there was a David that came in YHWH s name: And when the Philistine looked about and saw David, he despised him, for he was a youth, and ruddy and of handsome appearance. And the Philistine said to David, Am I a dog, that you come to me with sticks? and the Philistine cursed David by his mighty ones. And the philistine said to David, Come to me, and I give your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field! But David said to the Philistine, You come to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a javelin. But I come to you in the Name of YHWH of Hosts, God of the armies of Israel, whom you have reproached. (1 Samuel 17:42:-45) What part of David (Pronounced in Hebrew: DA-WEED) sounds like Yahu? Absolutely nothing in his name remotely resembles the name of YHWH. So we are left with two options: 1. David lied and did not come in the name of YHWH because his acoustic identification does not contain the sound Yah/Yahu within it.
2. David did come in the name of YHWH because it is about the reputation of YHWH being behind your actions or presence, and not about the phonetic presence of a Yah/Yahu within your audible, personal name. I believe at this point we can all easily choose option two. Conclusion I hope now that the readers of this document can see that the name Jesus has no pagan origins to it whatsoever, and that it is not bringing shame to YHWH by attributing that name to his son. Yes, we speak a language that is completely capable of pronouncing the name Yeshua, and I will continue to sometimes refer to Messiah by that name, but using a transliteration of that particular name that made its way through multiple translations is not shaming anything. Yes, Jesus is a wrong name, but it is not a bad name. It does not convey the full meaning of Yeshua, but neither does it give homage to a Greek god. The transliteration which you have now seen dates from around 1400 BCE to approximately the 1700s AD. What you have read is fact and not fabrication. Too many times we get hung up on the words of these internet scholars and refuse to listen to facts. As truth seeking Christians, we should be more willing to open our mind and consider the options when presented to us in logical and fact-based fashions. I hope that this teaching has shed some new light on this debated topic, and maybe that it has at least prompted you to reconsider your position on the name of our Messiah. - Joshua Ensley Mount Pisgah Baptist Church JoshuaEnsley.org MtPisgahChatsworth.org twitter @JoshuaEnsley & @MtPisgahChatsworth Facebook.com/Josh.Ensley & Facebook.com/MtPisgahChatsworth