Jesus’s real name was Yeshua, a short form of Yehoshua, which ordinarily translates to Joshua in English. It was a name commonly given to Jewish boys during the time of the Second Temple.
So why don’t we call him Joshua? Because when the Gospel was translated to Greek, the translators changed his name to make it sound more natural to the Greek ear. They came up with Iesous. When the Romans took the Greek text and translated it to Latin, they changed it to Iesus. That was how it spread across Europe via the Roman Empire and the missionaries of the early Church. At some point the letter J was introduced into the Latin alphabet and replaced the initial I, but phonetically it stayed the same. It remains the same in a number of languages today. English and French gave it their similar pronunciations of the letter J, while Spanish gave it yet another one which resembles the Latin more closely.
The “Christ” portion of his name also comes from Greek, Christos, meaning “the anointed one.” It passed into Latin as Christus. It remains unchanged in some languages today, while others, like English, dropped the “us” suffix.
- Get link
- X
- Other Apps
Comments
Post a Comment