Translation

[HUNT3R]

Greetings from sunny South Africa. I have a question. Hope this is the right place to post. I want to know why the names of people, incl. Jesus, was translated as well? My name is Wally and no matter which country I go to or what language they speak, they'll still refer to me as Wally. So why did Jesus's name, for instance, change from the original Yashua/Yashuhua?

 

[glorydaz]

Greetings from sunny South Africa. I have a question. Hope this is the right place to post. I want to know why the names of people, incl. Jesus, was translated as well? My name is Wally and no matter which country I go to or what language they speak, they'll still refer to me as Wally. So why did Jesus's name, for instance, change from the original Yashua/Yashuhua?

This says it better than I can. There's more at the site. It's interesting.

The name, Yahshua

Did you know that if you could go back to the time of the twelve apostles, if you walked up to Peter and said, "Please, take me to see Jesus Christ", Peter would get a puzzled look on his face and say the equivalent of, "Who, or what is that?" Did you know that no one who followed Jesus was capable of accurately pronouncing in English the name "Jesus"? The truth is, if you could go back in time, Peter would probably say something more like, "Come, let me introduce you to Y'shua the Messiah."

When the angel Gabriel came to Mary and told her she was going to have a son and what the child's name was to be, (Luke 1:31) the sound of the name that Mary heard come from Gabriel's lips was very close to, if not exactly... "Yahushua" pronounced Yah-hoo-shoo'-ah. In modern Hebrew script, "Yahushua" looks like and is read from right to left. This name is the blending of two Hebrew words. The first part, "Yah-ho", is part of God's name that is sometimes used at the beginning or end of a Hebrew name. God's full name is likely pronounced "Yah-weh". More on this in a moment. The second part of the Messiah's name, "shua", is the Hebrew word for deliverance meaning, "saves". The name "Yahushua" literally means Yahweh/God-saves. The name Yahushua was then shortened for everyday use the same way a name like Barbara is often shortened to Barb (see the name parable), and the four syllable name Yahushua was shortened to three syllables, Yahshua. And in every day usage of the name, it came out even shorter and sounded like Y'shua.

Today, to make Y'shua more English user-friendly, some Messianics have replaced the apostrophe with the letter "e" as a least pronounced vowel in the English language, rendering it as Yeshua. This version of the Messiah's name is one that I used for some time as well. But because the "e" is almost always over-pronounced, sounding like one is beginning to say the word "yes", and the emphasis wrongly placed on the second syllable, I now prefer to use the more correctly pronounced spelling of Yahshua. It is pronounced like "Joshua" with a "y". The emphasis should remain with God's name in the first syllable.


The translation process.... Hebrew to Greek

Early on, when the Gospels were being written and the story of Yahshua the Messiah was spreading to the Gentile nations, the story had to be translated to Greek. There are two ways a Hebrew name can be brought across a language barrier. Hebrew names always carry a meaning, and one way is to translate the name, which is bringing across the meaning of the name. The other method is the most common and is called a transliteration, which is the bringing across of the sound of the name. If the translators of the Gospel story had translated Yahshua's name down through history, we might well know him as "God-saves" today because that is what his name means.

In the case of the name "Y'shua", the Greek speaking world did the best they could to transliterate his name. Usually, this involves a relatively easy process of swapping like sounding letters so a reader would end up making the same sound when pronouncing the name. In many cases this is not a problem. But in the case of the name "Y'shua" there are four problems in bringing it across to Greek. Two of them are the fact that the ancient Greek language did not contain two of the sounds found in the name Y'shua. This may come as a surprise to English speaking people, but the fact is, the ancient Greek language did not contain any "y" sound as in "yes", nor did it have a "sh" sound as in "show". The closest sound a Greek speaking person could come to making a "y" sound was by putting the two Greek letters Iota and Eta together and coming up with an "ee-ay" sound. And the closest a Greek speaking person could come to making the "sh" sound was the "s" sound made by the letter Sigma. With these two changes, "Y'shua", pronounced by a Greek speaking person would naturally come out sounding like "ee-ay-soo-ah". The third problem with transliterating "Y'shua" is the fact that traditionally, masculine Greek names never ended in a vowel sound. Those that did were generally given the letter Sigma or "s" as a suffix. This tradition was likely derived from the fact that the name of the Greek god Zeus ended with Sigma. This tradition is seen in familiar Biblical names, where Judah became Judas, Cephah (which means "rock") became Cephas, Apollo became Apollos, Barnabie became Barnabas, Matthew became Matthias and so on. So "ee-ay-soo-ah" needed to become "ee-ay-soo-ah-s". The fourth problem is that the two vowel sounds before the "s" do not flow and are virtually never seen in Greek. So the last vowel sound was dropped as it was in other names, and we were left with "ee-ay-soos". Aside from the added tradition of giving the name a masculine sound, this is the closest a Greek speaking person could come to transliterating the name Y'shua. Already by this point, the name Y'shua had lost all of it's meaning and 75% of its sound. The last vestige of it's sound was found in the "oo" (as in "soon") sound. Yahshua was known as "ee-ay-soos" to the Greek speaking world for nearly 400 years. In Greek script, "ee-ay-soos" looks like , and like English, it is read from left to right.


http://www.judaismvschristianity.com/how_the_name.htm

 

[Andrew]

Greetings from sunny South Africa. I have a question. Hope this is the right place to post. I want to know why the names of people, incl. Jesus, was translated as well? My name is Wally and no matter which country I go to or what language they speak, they'll still refer to me as Wally. So why did Jesus's name, for instance, change from the original Yashua/Yashuhua?

I have no idea why glorydaz required all that rambling.
Yashua is Hebrew
Jesus is Greek.
Yashua is Joshua and it means "The Lord saves."

 

[cyberjosh]

Just a slight correction:

Iesous is the Greek form, with 'Jesus' being the Germanized/Anglicized form. The written Greek form is as below (ignoring the erroneous epsilon which should be an eta - sorry, it surprisingly was the only stand-alone image I could find, but see the second picture below):

'Yeshua' is believed to have been Jesus' Hebrew name, being a shortened form of 'Yehoshua' which is the name for the Biblical character "Joshua" in the Old Testament. While I completely believe this is possible, and infact refer to Jesus as Yeshua sometimes, it should be said that we don't actually have any original/contemporary proof that Jesus went by the Hebrew name Yeshua. It does make sense though in view of the Jewish culture of the day (with strong evidence of other 1st century Jewish men being named Yeshua) and some word plays in the Gospels (though written in Greek) that might not be obvious in Greek and work better in Hebrew, such as, "you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins" (Matthew 1:21), which would involve more word play in Hebrew between the name 'Yeshua' and the word 'save'.

The following picture shows the Greek and (proposed) Hebrew forms of Jesus' name:

 

[cyberjosh]

By the way, I know someone at my university that is from South Africa. His parents were missionaries in South Africa for several years and he grew up there, though he is now living in the US.

~Josh

 

[HUNT3R]

Greetings from sunny South Africa. I have a question. Hope this is the right place to post. I want to know why the names of people, incl. Jesus, was translated as well? My name is Wally and no matter which country I go to or what language they speak, they'll still refer to me as Wally. So why did Jesus's name, for instance, change from the original Yashua/Yashuhua?

I have no idea why glorydaz required all that rambling.
Yashua is Hebrew
Jesus is Greek.
Yashua is Joshua and it means "The Lord saves."

So what you're saying is that the meaning of His name, rather than the pronunciation of it was translated to Greek?

 

[cyberjosh]

Greetings from sunny South Africa. I have a question. Hope this is the right place to post. I want to know why the names of people, incl. Jesus, was translated as well? My name is Wally and no matter which country I go to or what language they speak, they'll still refer to me as Wally. So why did Jesus's name, for instance, change from the original Yashua/Yashuhua?

I have no idea why glorydaz required all that rambling.
Yashua is Hebrew
Jesus is Greek.
Yashua is Joshua and it means "The Lord saves."

So what you're saying is that the meaning of His name, rather than the pronunciation of it was translated to Greek?

Actually it is mostly the opposite. The letters in Hebrew and Greek are not equivalent (Greek has vowel letters for one - while Hebrew has no vowels [only "vowel points/dots" called nikud]). Therefore, when transliterating (not translating - see the definition) Yeshua into Greek the 'Y' (yod in Hebrew) becomes an 'I' (iota in Greek) the 'sh' (shin in Hebrew) becomes a 's' (sigma in Greek), etc.

Thus the best approximation, via transliteration, of Yeshua into Greek is Iesous.

So basically Yeshua -> Iesous when transliterating the name character-by-character from Hebrew into Greek. Also, adding an 's' (sigma) at the end of the name is common practice for many names in Greek. The meaning can only be explained by looking at the Hebrew form of the name because it has no inherent meaning in Greek.

I hope that helps.

~Josh

 

[HUNT3R]

Josh, that's pretth much how I understood it to be. I wonder though why, when translating the Bible to English, they didn't translate the names from Hebrew to English since we can represent the sounds much better?

 

[mondar]

Josh, that's pretth much how I understood it to be. I wonder though why, when translating the Bible to English, they didn't translate the names from Hebrew to English since we can represent the sounds much better?

Interesting question. I honestly don't know how we get the J sound in Jesus name from. As Josh mentioned in Greek it is "Iesous." If I can speculate, the English language went through a lot of change in its history, I wonder what the history of the "J" sound is? Good point.

As far as trying to transliterate from Hebrew strait into English when we see a proper name in the GNT, I guess we could do that too. But then we would loose the greek pronunciation. Things get complicated when we transliterate letters in a proper name through 3 different alphabets.

Some of the rest of the transliteration makes some sense, but I dont get the J sound in Jesus.
* Hebrew has the SH (yeshua) sound, greek does not. So the SH got moved to an S in Koine Greek. English has both sounds and so the greek "S" sound is kept in Jesus. This is because we are transliterating the greek and not going back to hebrew.
* The U sound in Yeshua gets moved to an "ou" in greek. Again, while English maintains the U spelling, we pronounce it closer to the greek OU.
* The final S in Jesus is also from the greek sigma at the end of the nominative for the proper name.
* The crackpot crazy "J" sound is a puzzle to me. The J sound is not found in either Hebrew or Greek. So my guess is that the "J" in Jesus goes back to an early anglo-saxon tradition of transliteration or something like that. Can I blame it on someone like Bede or some Old English (anglo-saxon) tradition of transliteration? We do not transliterate Ie to J today. Its been a while since I was in a greek class, but I dont think it worked that way. I honestly do not know where the "J" sound in Jesus english name comes from. For lack of any knowledge, I am going to blame it on Bede.... : ) Anyone else know?

 

[cyberjosh]

I am note sure exactly when, or due to whom, the I/Y became represened as a J but I have always heard that it was a Germanized/Anglicized form.

The same can be said for many Biblical names though. "James" in Greek is actually Iakobos (Jacob!) and should be translated Jacob in the New Testament for the most accuracy, yet apparently Latin morphology led to the 'b' becoming an 'm' (based on pronounciation/bilabels), thus Iacomus, then the 'I' changed to 'J' and then the 'C' dropped out, to become James. I am going from memory here, so I will have to double check my accuracy on that later, but I learned most of what I know about morphology of Hebrew & Greek names from the Bible from a book called "The Brother of Jesus" by Hershel Shanks & Ben Witherington III about the James Ossuary. There is a chapter that discusses how the Hebrew name Ya'akov on the ossuary is equivalent to 'James' and Yeshua to 'Jesus'. I will try to quote it later when I get the chance.

The pattern continues though with "Mary" which is actually written "Mariam" in Greek (quite Hebrew-like). It seems that "intermediate" forms of the name (in Latin and other languages) took on such popularity that to translate them directly afresh from the rediscovered Greek texts in the Middle Ages (Latin had been the only available biblical text for near 1,000 years) would have rendered the name forms nearly unrecognizable to most people. Yet oddly this did not prevent the translation of the famous KJV passage "For if Jesus had given them rest, then would he not afterward have spoken of another" (Hebrews 4:8) where the translators remained consistent with translating Iesous as "Jesus", yet later translators realized this to be a reference to "Joshua" (another slight morphology from Yehoshua) and therefore changed it. It seems this conscious changing of the name form in today's versions (Iesous -> Joshua) reflects the same general intent in the Medieval versions for their spelling. To keep a consistent reference, regardless of actual form in the originals. Just a theory.

P.S. For the record, I advocate some of the name changes, because if I had to read "Elias" every time in my Gospel I would go crazy. It seems to be a way to reconcile Hebrew with Greek forms of the same name, instead of having two versions of each (e.g. Elijah & Elias).

~Josh

 

[glorydaz]

Greetings from sunny South Africa. I have a question. Hope this is the right place to post. I want to know why the names of people, incl. Jesus, was translated as well? My name is Wally and no matter which country I go to or what language they speak, they'll still refer to me as Wally. So why did Jesus's name, for instance, change from the original Yashua/Yashuhua?

I have no idea why glorydaz required all that rambling.
Yashua is Hebrew
Jesus is Greek.
Yashua is Joshua and it means "The Lord saves."

As it's translated into our language. It wasn't a question of my "rambling". If it was as easy as you claim, then translations would not be necessary. I found it interesting and decided to share...it seems a little petty to deride me for that. :nag

 

[glorydaz]

I have no idea why glorydaz required all that rambling.
Yashua is Hebrew
Jesus is Greek.
Yashua is Joshua and it means "The Lord saves."

So what you're saying is that the meaning of His name, rather than the pronunciation of it was translated to Greek?

Actually it is mostly the opposite. The letters in Hebrew and Greek are not equivalent (Greek has vowel letters for one - while Hebrew has no vowels [only "vowel points/dots" called nikud]). Therefore, when transliterating (not translating - see the definition) Yeshua into Greek the 'Y' (yod in Hebrew) becomes an 'I' (iota in Greek) the 'sh' (shin in Hebrew) becomes a 's' (sigma in Greek), etc.

Thus the best approximation, via transliteration, of Yeshua into Greek is Iesous.

So basically Yeshua -> Iesous when transliterating the name character-by-character from Hebrew into Greek. Also, adding an 's' (sigma) at the end of the name is common practice for many names in Greek. The meaning can only be explained by looking at the Hebrew form of the name because it has no inherent meaning in Greek.

I hope that helps.

~Josh

Thank you, Josh...I'm glad to see it isn't quite as simple as Andrew implied. :amen