Alexander Pope wrote, “A little learning is a dangerous
thing.” This is true in all fields, but perhaps none more than religion.
There exists a movement claiming that it is not lawful to refer to the
Creator of the Universe as God, nor to refer to His only begotten Son as
Jesus, but rather they must both be called by their Hebrew names. Which
Hebrew name to use is a matter of dispute among them. Some say ‘Jehovah,’
others ‘Yahweh’ or ‘Yahveh’ for God; for the Son, they use everything from
‘Yahshua,’ to ‘Yehoshua,’ Y'shua,’ ‘Yeshua’ or ‘YAHU'SHUAH,’ and every
other name is unacceptable.[1] From whence did the name ‘Jesus’ come? Again,
this is subject to a great deal to variation; it has been given supposed
derivations from ‘hay-horse’ to ‘earth-pig,’ based on the appearance of
those words in one language or another (sometimes in several languages
put together at the same time). One group (which also claims that Vancouver
BC is the center of Biblical revelation) states that “Jesus Christ” (in
any language, surprisingly) is the name of a demon. The majority of the
“Sacred Name movement,” however, claims that, at some ancient time, all
Bible manuscripts were altered to honor ‘Healing Zeus’ by removing ‘YAH’
or ‘JAH’ from Old Testament names (like Elijah, ‘Jehovah is God’) and substituting
‘Zeus,’ the head of Greek mythology. Is there any substance to these claims?
First, it is a ridiculous claim that ‘all ancient Biblical
manuscripts were altered.’[2] There are tens of thousands of New Testament
manuscripts, some of which were buried before the rise of whichever organization
is being accused of this alteration, and not found again until modern
times; not a single one contains a Hebrew name for Jesus,
as they were all written in Greek.
Why would somebody go through the trouble of making such
an alteration, anyway, when the
easier solution would have been either to destroy the
texts or change them completely, so that
Yeshua Messiah’ would have bowed before a statue of Zeus?
Second, the similarity between the names “Jesus” and
“Zeus” exist primarily in English; in Greek, they bear even less of a resemblance
(‘Ihsou?j vs. Zeu]j in the nominative case; ‘Ihsou? vs.Dio<j in the
genitive case). The main similarity becomes the ‘-us’ ending, which most
nouns in the Greek language possess.So how did we get from the Hebrew ‘Yeshua’
(or some other variation) to the English ‘Jesus’? When Hebrew writers tried
to communicate to Greek readers, words were translated into Greek; names,
on the other hand, had to be transliterated; that is,
written in letters that would be pronounced as closely
as possible to the original language.[3] ‘Yeshua’[4] was rendered as ‘Iesous,’
because Greek has neither a ‘y’ sound nor a ‘sh’ sound. Ancient Greek speakers
would have been incapable of either writing or pronouncing the Hebrew form
of that name! The final ‘a’ was changed to‘s’ to fit Greek grammatical
rules, not to honor any pagan deity. ‘Iesous’ was transliterated into English
as ‘Iesus,’ and finally, with the invention of the letter ‘J,’ to ‘Jesus.’
In conclusion, the inspired writers of the New Testament didn’t write of
Him as ‘Yeshua,’ but rather by the equivalent form in that language; we
do the same when we
call Him ‘Jesus.’
Timothy W. Carignan
Covington, IN