Jesus or Yeshua? What's the deal?

The word "Jesus" appears nowhere in written form before the 16th century. It was used in the first modern English translation of the Bible and was created by William Tyndale.


Where does it come from? It's a transliteration of a transliteration of a transliteration.


What does that mean?


A transliteration is different from a translation, in that a transliteration attempts to preserve the sound of the original word, rather than its meaning. It's often done with names. The first man mentioned in the Bible, for instance, doesn't actually have a name. The Hebrew word "אָדָם" simply means "the man," but we transliterate it as "Adam," which mimics the sound of the word, without giving its meaning.


Now, Jesus had a rather common name for the time. His name was "יְהוֹשֻׁ֣עַ", which is transliterated "Yehoshua." This is also the name of Moses' lieutenant, Joshua. Translated, it means "The Salvation of the LORD."

But linguistic convention being what it is, names get shortened. We don't often call a man "Laurence," we call him "Larry." "Michael" becomes "Mike." and by the Second Temple Period, "יְהוֹשֻׁ֣עַ" had been shortened to "יֵשׁוּע"... that is to say, Yehoshua had been shortened to Yeshua.


So in Hebrew it is Yeshua...

יְשֻׁ֣וֹעַ

and it gets transliterated into Greek, which is

Ἰησοῦς (Yaysous)

which is a transliteration, not a translation. Then it goes from Greek into Latin and is spelled

Jesu

(which is still pronounced Yaysu, by the way... this pronunciation of the letter "J" is preserved in the word "Hallelujah.")

and from Latin it gets transliterated into to English as "Jesus" in a time when the J could do double duty, making the sound it makes in "jar" or possibly making the "Y" sound like in "Hallelujah."


In fact, there was an 11th century copy of the New Testament written in period English (called Old English) which calls His name

Haelend

because Haelend is the TRANSLATION of the Hebrew word, and means "Savior."


So the reality is, people call His name "Yeshua" because that's what His friends called him in that day.