What Was Jesus' Real Name?

The first century prophet likely went by the name "Yeshua," which was short for "Yehshu'a." According to Learn Religions, it means something akin to "God is salvation." And if it looks somewhat familiar, that is because another Bible character had the same name: the Old Testament's Joshua. However, the New Testament was written in ancient

The first century prophet likely went by the name "Yeshua," which was short for "Yehōshu'a." According to Learn Religions, it means something akin to "God is salvation." And if it looks somewhat familiar, that is because another Bible character had the same name: the Old Testament's Joshua. However, the New Testament was written in ancient Greek, which rendered Jesus' name as "Iēsous," which wound up in English as "Jesus."

PBS' "Origin of Everything" reported that while a more direct translation of Yeshua in English would be Joshua, it was the efforts of the writers of the New Testament to make the Hebrew and Aramaic name work in Greek that lead to the evolution of the name. As PBS reported, "that's because the original authors of the New Testament were trying to convert the sound of the Hebrew name into Greek letters, but since they didn't have the letters or spelling to represent the 'sh' sound in their language, they substituted an 'S' sound in the middle and that led them to Iēsous."

Later, the 16th century translations of the Bible changed the "I" at the beginning of the name and replaced it with a "J," per PBS, and eventually his name was spelled "Jesus." However, there is no explanation exactly why the replacements happened, other than to say it had largely to do with transliteration, or changing sounds and letters from one alphabet to a separate alphabet — like a square peg in a round hole.

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