Is the Jesus of Rome the same as the Yeshua of Jerusalem? When we say that we beleive in Yeshua as the Messiah is THAT the same thing as saying that we believe in "Jesus"?? Yeshua means "salvation". Yehoshua (the longer form of the Messiah's Name) means "HaShem Saves". The name Jesus literally means nothing. It has no meaning what-so-ever.
It is not uncommon to read on messianic web site or to have people suggest that Yeshua is the same as Jesus. Often we see things such as Yeshua (Jesus) or Yeshua / Jesus. But is it true that the Yeshua of the gospels is the same Jesus of the church? Rabbi explores this topic in a way that you have likely never heard before.
FROM YESHUA TO JESUS
The Greek iesous was used to translate the Hebrew Yeshua which is Joshua in English. So how did we get “Jesus”? Why would we want or need to translate the Name of the Divine Messiah to begin with? Even if we wanted to translate it, then why do we use a made up name? Why not use Joshua? (As an aside, one might notice that no other religion translates the name of its prophet or diety, not one. The only name that is changed is the one that it supposed to be definite. Selah).
A team of professional etymologist wrote the following: “Jesus was first referred to in Old English as hǽlend, or “savior” (the word wasn’t capitalized). The name we now spell “Jesus” didn’t come into our language until the early Middle English period (1150-1250). But even then, it wasn’t spelled “Jesus.”
In its earliest written form, the name didn’t end in “s” and didn’t begin with “j” (the letter “j” didn’t exist at the time). The name was spelled “iesu” (names weren’t capitalized then). Before getting any further into how the spelling developed in English, let’s take a little detour into the etymology of “Jesus.” The name came into English from the Latin Iesus, a Roman transliteration of the Greek Iesous. It had come into Greek from the late Hebrew or Aramaic Yeshua, which was a common name for Jewish boys at the time of Jesus’s birth. Yeshua, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, came from the earlier y’hoshua, which can be translated as “G-d is salvation” or “God saves.” The name was first recorded in English as “iesu” around 1175, as part of “iesu cristes” in a book of homilies.
The absence of a final “s” was an influence of Old French, the OED says. “Iesu” represented the Old French objective form of the Latin Iesus, and that was the form that came into Middle English and was used for some 400 years. The spelling “Iesus,” representing the Latin nominative form, was rarely used in Middle English but became the regular English spelling in the 16th century, according to Oxford.
As we mentioned above, “Jesus” wasn’t originally spelled with a “j” because the letter didn’t exist at the time. The “j” showed up in English, the OED says, as “a comparatively late modification of the letter I.” The sound itself—the “j” we hear in words like “judge” and “jail”—is relatively new as these things go. Here’s how it developed.
In the ancient Roman alphabet, the letter “i” had two sounds—it was a vowel, but also a consonant sounding like “y.” Sometime before the sixth century, as the OED explains, this “y” sound in Latin and other languages using the Roman alphabet began changing into a “consonantal diphthong.” This blend of the consonant sounds “d” and “y” (similar to the sound heard in the English words “odious” and “hideous”) gradually passed into what we now know as the “j” sound. The result, Oxford says, was that from the 11th to the 17th centuries the letter “i” had two extremely different sounds—it was both a vowel and a consonant sounding like “j.”
Meanwhile, according to the OED, the guttural letter “g” was undergoing its own evolution, and began to develop a “softer” sound, similar to that of the modern “j.” Clearly, European printers needed a new letter for a sound hitherto represented by both “i” and “g.” Thus “j,” looking in its lowercase form like an “i” with a tail, appeared—first in 15th-century Spanish and later in other languages using the Roman alphabet. The new letter became established in English in the mid-1600s, too late for the 1611 King James Version of the Bible. The earliest example in the OED of the “Jesus” spelling is from a 1632 case in the Court of High Commission, the supreme ecclesiastic court in England at that time. [The name “Jesus” has existed for only 389 years!]”
Text to Give: (817) 859-6613. This is a teaching by Rabbi Mordecai Aaron Griffin #RabbiMordecaiGriffin #RabbiGriffin #MordecaiAaronGriffin
Lapid Judaism | [ Ссылка ] | Lapid Judaism represents an authentic Orthodox Judaism centered on Messiah Yeshua. For more info please visit www.RabbiGriffin.com
Baruch HaShem, may the Ahavat Ammi (Love for my people) grow.
