Why the Savior’s True Name
Is Missing in Your New Testament
_______________________________________
When our Savior was put to death, Pilate made a
statement about Him in three languages, and then placed it on the torture
stake. The text reads:
“Pilate wrote a
title, and put [it] on the [stake]. And the writing was, [YAHSHUA] OF
Notice,
John does not say that Pilate wrote the Savior’s Hebrew name, His Greek name
and His Latin name. It was one name
written or transliterated into three different languages. Transliterate means the sound of the name is the same - even if
spoken in Greek, Hebrew or Latin.
A primary
goal in translating is to bring the sound of names (proper nouns) across
unchanged into the next language, usually with a foreign alphabet. Names are
not translated as are common nouns, and names do not change from language to
language. Instead, proper nouns are transliterated.
This is especially noticeable in bringing Hebrew into either Greek or Latin, as
each has its own alphabet. Different letters must be employed to simulate the
same sound in each alphabet.
The
Savior’s Name appeared in Hebrew as ucwhy. In
Greek it was IASOY. In Latin it was IASOUA. The sound
is similar in each language.
The proper rendition of the Savior’s Name is woefully lacking in the English of our King James. Hebrew scholars
agree that the English spelling that closest represents the equivalent Hebrew
sounds is “Yahshua.”
“Joshua” a Closer Rendition
The King James and most other Bibles print the
Savior’s name as “Jesus.” But enlightened authorities maintain that the name
“Jesus” is the same in the Hebrew as the Old Testament “Joshua,”
the son of Nun. Why this discrepancy? Should not these names appear the
same throughout our English Bible? If it’s Joshua in the Old Testament, why is it Jesus in the New? Why the switch?
Our Savior
was Hebrew. The Latinized Greek name “Jesus” has no meaning in Hebrew. This
fact underscores a real problem because all Hebrew names have meaning. Both
Mary [Hebrew meaning “bitter, rebellious”]
and Joseph [Hebrew = “to add”] were
told by the angel Gabriel [“mighty with
El”] the specific name they should give the baby about to be born, implying
this babe would be the Savior of the world. True to purpose, the name “Yahshua”
means in the Hebrew, “Yah is salvation.”
A good
King James study Bible such as Bullinger’s Companion Bible points out the two
places where the wrong names Jesus appears (Acts 7:45 and Hebrew 4:8), which
both refer to the Old Testament person of Joshua. Reliable reference works show
that the name of the Savior is the same as the Israelite general Joshua, the
son of Nun.
In this
study we will determine why the name “Jesus” is incorrect and how the
aforementioned enigma can be solved. This may seem a bit tedious to you at
times, but unearthing truth covered by centuries of ignorance and neglect takes
time.
Names Closely Related
Numbers
It should
be pointed out that the letter j originally was the letter i and was
pronounced “ee” as in machine, much like our letter y. The letter j should
today be pronounced as a y to be
truer to the original Hebrew, e.g. Joshua as “Yoshua.”
Hebrew
scholars point out that the name of the Book Joshua (which follows Deuteronomy)
is very much similar to the Book of Hosea (which follows Daniel). Under the
listing of Joshua, Strong’s Concordance shows this close relationship: “See also Hosea;
Hoshea; Jehoshua; Jeshua; Jeshuah; Jesus; Osea; Oshea.”
The name
Joshua (No. 3091 in Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary) is portrayed by the following:
“YeHOWSHUWA’; from No. 3068 and No. 3467; Jehovah-saved;
Jehoshua (i.e. Joshua), the Jewish leader.-Jehoshua, Jehoshuah, Joshua.”
In Strong’s Greek Dictionary under “Jesus” (No. 2424) we find: “’Ihsous Iesous, ee-ay-sooce’; of Hebrew origin [No.
3091]; Jesus (i.e. Jehoshua), the name of our Lord and two
(three) other Israelites:-Jesus.”
The best
transliteration (bringing the sound over) of the true Name of the Savior into
English is YAHshua. The name Joshua
does not appear once in the King James New Testament. Just why we do not find
the Name Yahshua (or at least Joshua) in the New Testament is interesting.
Why We Find Variance in Names
Adam
Clarke’s Commentary points out that
the early Christian translators did not know Hebrew. They refused to study or
learn Hebrew or have anything to do with those Jews who had killed the Savior.
Instead of
translating the Old Testament from the Hebrew, they chose the Septuagint (LXX),
a Greek translation of the Old Testament. This allowed them to bypass the
Hebrew text in writing the Latin Bible. But by so doing they rendered many Old
Testament names almost unrecognizable in the New Testament.
The King
James construes the people of Esau as
Why the
discrepancies? While both Idumea and Idumaea refer to
Perhaps
Adam Clarke says it best: “Through the ignorance and carelessness of
transcribers innumerable mistakes have been made in ancient names. These also
have suffered very greatly in their transfusion from one language to another,
till at last the original name is almost totally lost. Examples might be
multiplied without end; a very few will suffice: the [Hebrew] ucwhy Yehoshua (according to the Masoretic
punctuation) [corrected = Yahshua] of the Hebrew Bible, is changed into Joshua
and Jesus…”
“Besides, neither the Greeks, nor
Romans could pronounce either the Hebrew or Persian names; and when
engaged in the task of transcribing, they did it according to their own manner
of pronunciation. It is notorious that all the Greek and Latin historians have
committed innumerable blunders of this kind, in their accounts of foreign
nations.”
Clarke
gives Jerome’s explanation for translation mistakes from the Hebrew: “…the
Hebrews had both sounds and letters which were wholly unknown to the Greeks and
Latins.”
Jerome, the 4th century scholar who
produced the Latin Vulgate starting from the Greek Septuagint then going to the
Hebrew, reveals that there was some creativity involved when the translators of
the Septuagint came up short. They added more letters than were in the Hebrew
---as in the case of the Hebrew letters chet and ayin. Further, “Whereas the
Greeks and Romans had only one s, the Hebrews had three, s samech, x sade,
and c sin, each of which had a
different sound.” (Adam Clark’s
Commentary, Vol. 3, pp. 393-94, notes on Luke 3)
Beware of Name Bearing Greek
Today we have a problem not only with the names of Old
Testament Bible characters, but most importantly with the true names of the
Father and the Son because of the translators’ ignorance and their problems
making transitions from the Hebrew alphabet.
Most
Hebrew names in the New Testament are decidedly different from those found in
the Old Testament. They have been “Grecianized,” betraying the fact that they
were taken directly from the Greek Septuagint of the Old Testament, and not
from the original Hebrew texts.
Matthew has prime examples of name changes from the
Old to the New Testament.
Note in chapter 1, verse 3, Estrom should be Hezron. Here’s how other names are
rendered:
Verse 4, Naasson – Nahshon; Salmon – Salma;
Verse 5, Booz – Boaz;
Verse 6, Urias – Uriah;
Verse 8, Ozias – Uzziah;
Verse 9, Ezekias – Hezekiah;
Verse 10, Manasses – Manasseh; Josias – Josiah.
Even the
traitor Judas should be rendered
With numerous examples like these, it is no wonder
that the sacred Names of both Yahweh and Yahshua were progressively perverted
upon arriving in English!
A Short Course in Greek
Perhaps a brief explanation of the Greek would help
explain the background behind the bizarre changes that came about in Hebrew
names found in our New Testament.
The Greek,
like most European languages, gives gender to nouns, which can be masculine,
feminine or neuter. (The Hebrew has masculine and feminine only, lacking the
neuter gender.
How the noun is used in the sentence determines what
suffix or ending it will have.
Initially,
the spelling of Yahshua in the Greek was the equivalent of I A S O U. The
letter I has the sound of ee as in police, followed by the letter a. So far we have the sound “ee-a.”
The Greek
has no “sh” sound, so only the s (sigma) having but an “s” sound was used. This
was followed by o (omicron) and u (upsilon), having a sound like our u. The Greek letters would sound
something like “ee-ah-s-o-u.” Say
these rapidly, and we get a fairly close rendition of Yahshua’s Name, “Yahs-o-u.”
However,
the scribes, the Masoretic Jews, out of mistaken reverence for the Name had
deliberately vowel pointed the first letter, yod, in “YAH” of His Name with a shewa (:). Now it sounded more like “Yeh-s-o-u” (the “Yeh” rhymes
with they). This was done to forestall anyone blurting
out even the short form “YAH,” as in HalleluYAH.
Being
ignorant of the true pronunciation, Bible translators followed these Jewish
scribes in their superstitious change. Rather than an “ah” sound they spelled
the Savior’s Name as I H S O U,
instead of I A S O U, and
pronounced it “Yeyso-u.”
The letter
iota (i) soon became a j in Latin
letters and instead of the capital I,
His name was spelled JESOU in Latin letters. A suffix is added to nouns in both
Latin and Greek according to their use in the sentence. (Greek H is eta, sounds like “ey” in they.)
From the
standard New Testament Greek for
Beginners by J. Gresham Machen, we find the following chart showing the
various endings for nouns, depending on their use in the sentence. Greek nouns
are masculine, feminine or neuter. The ending for each is usually different for
the five cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative.
Modifying adjectives agree with the nouns.
The suffix (endings) for declension
of the masculine singular and plural are as follows:
In addition
to the masculine gender (endings) of nouns, there are also feminine and neuter
nouns each with their own declension. Also there are plural endings for the
three genders, each with five cases (suffixes).
This means
a Greek noun in the nominative case would end in s. However, in other cases it could end in oi, i, ou, e, o, or on,
depending upon its use in the sentence. In fact the name Jason is a
transformation of the name Yahshua, being in the accusative case, therefore
ending in n.
YAHSHUA in
the Greek became IASOU, a fair transliteration of the Hebrew. However, the Jews
insisted that the letter a (alpha) be changed to h (eta) to conform to their
self-imposed rule of not pronouncing the ineffable name YAHWEH or its poetic
form YAH. IASOU then became IESOU because of an addition of the vowel point shewa.
Latin Influence and the Switch to J
The nominative in the Greek ends with sigma s (s),
which gave us IESOUS. This name was
then lifted from the Greek text directly into the Latin translations, bypassing
the Hebrew. The capital I became the
cursive J. Hebrew names that began
with yod y and had been transliterated into Greek utilizing the I and its vowel sound of Y underwent a change. In the Latin
translations they began with the letter J. IESOUS became JESOUS, which then became JESUS when the English translations were made from the Latin-Greek texts.
The
problem was, substituting the J for the I also
created a change in the pronunciation—from a Y sound to a soft G sound.
The Dutch
printers favored a capital J, using
it extensively in their printing. The letter J has been with us only five hundred years. Prior to that, printing
utilized the capital I, including
the text of the 1611 KJV Bible.
In Latin
the letter j is pronounced as our y, e.g., major is pronounced mayor.
Before the turn of the century, French had become the international language of
diplomacy and business. From Old French the present sound of j as g (as in sage) began to dominate our English language.
A Tangled Web
As stated previously, the Hebrew text was bypassed in
favor of the Greek Septuagint when translating into Latin, English and other
languages in the Old Testament. A number of scholars state that the New
Testament was written first in Hebrew and then translated into Greek. (Request
a list of Hebrew New Testament proponents, and our ministudies, Was
the New Testament Originally Greek? And How the Savior’s Name Was Changed.)
The
original Hebrew texts either wore out or were destroyed first by the Romans,
then by the Jews, later by the Crusaders, then the Inquisitors. Only copies of
the Greek text have survived. Thus, instead of the correct Hebrew Name Yahshua,
we are given a hybrid, Latinized Greek name for our Jewish Savior. The irony of
the situation is that the Bible states in Acts
Interestingly,
many Hebrew names are transliterated with no problem. Names like Daniel,
Reuben, Ruth, Esther, Abraham and others are strictly Hebrew. Yahweh’s Name,
however—the most important Name in the universe—has been replaced with Kurios
and Theos in the Greek and G-d and L-rd in English. Yahshua (meaning “Salvation
of Yah”) has been displaced by the Latinized Greek name Jesus, a name with no
etymological meaning in any language.
t should be obvious that the hybrid name Jesus in no way
derived etymologically from the Greek deity Zeus, as some believe. While
paganism has supplanted the true Savior Yahshua with a long-haired, effeminate
“Zeus-“ or “Serapis-like” individual, the names Jesus and Christ are essentially
woeful mistranslations.
Christ is a Greek word that professedly
means “anointed.” Why are we handed a form of the Greek christos (which means anoint, rub or smear with oil) instead of the Hebrew
“Messiah” or “Anointed One?” Most Bible readers have no idea what the Greek
past participle Christ even means.
(Incidentally, we should not refer to Him as “our” Messiah, for He is Yahweh’s
Messiah, His Anointed One.)
From the American
Heritage Dictionary under Christ we read: “Middle English CRIST, from
the Old English CRIST, from the Latin Christus, from Greek Khristos, KHRISTOS,
from KHRISTOS anointed, past participle of Greek KHRIEIN to anoint.” Green
Bible Dictionary says: “Christ (Christos) is the Greek equivalent of the
Hebrew ‘Messiah’ meaning ‘anointed.’”
It is
indeed strange that our Hebrew-speaking
Jewish Savior is given a Greek name
Jesus and a Greek title “Christ” for
an English-reading audience! It
should be obvious that the true Name of our Savior has been twisted and
distorted and a counterfeit has been handed us.
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