Most people know him as Jesus, but that wasn’t the name people used during his lifetime.
Original name
Jesus was a Jewish man who lived in first-century Galilee, where the Aramaic language was commonly spoken. At the time, he was called Yeshua, a common Jewish name at the time.
In fact, historical and religious records show that there were several men called Yeshua in the first century. The name is also a shortened form of Yehoshua, a Hebrew name which became known as Joshua. So anyone living during Jesus’s time, including his family and friends, would have called him Yeshua.
The Greek translation
The name started to change when the narrative of Jesus began to be written and spread in Greek, one of the eastern Roman Empire’s lingua francas. Greek lacked phonemes necessary to transliterate Yeshua faithfully, so the New Testament authors chose the closest approximation ‘Iēsous.’
The name’s original Y sound was replaced with another, and its ending was changed to conform with Greek grammatical rules.
The Latin version
As Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire, Latin gained influence in Christian writings and liturgy. Iēsous was transliterated into Latin as Iesus. The spelling was later used in Latin copies of the Bible, and was still familiar through Medieval Europe.
The English name
The English name we all know today, Jesus, developed over time from the Latin name Iesus. The letters J and I were not treated as separate letters, so it was often written with a J in older English texts.
As spelling rules developed, J became a distinct letter and spelling it as J became standard. But this change took place centuries after Jesus’ life.
Origins of Christ
It’s a common misconception that Christ was Jesus’ last name. However, it was actually a title. Christ comes from the Greek word Christos, which means “the anointed one.”
This translates to the Hebrew word Mashiach, which we know as Messiah. To refer to him as Jesus Christ was a way of saying Jesus the Messiah. So they weren’t used as his first and last name.
Name change
For historical purposes, being aware of how Jesus’ name would have originally been pronounced helps us to understand him as a member of first-century Jewish society. It emphasizes that Jesus was a Jewish man from the first century, who would have thought and spoken differently than later European Christians.
Using the name Jesus is not, however, being historically dishonest or incorrect in English. Jesus is the anglicized version of his name, just as many other historical figures are known by names different from what they were called in life.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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