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Ast greek letters3/2/2024 ![]() As such, many of our English spellings and pronunciations favor the Latin transliteration of the Greek over the Aramaic and Hebrew transliterations and pronunciations. The textus receptus was largely influenced by the Latin Vulgate. Take the KJV, for instance, which is based upon a text known as the textus receptus, a group of Byzantine Greek writings that was accepted by the majority of the church before the discipline of textual criticism. This discipline examines all the textual evidence that we have for a particular section of scripture and try to figure out which pieces we have are more likely to be original.īut for hundreds of years, that’s not how Bible versions worked. Our most modern translations, like the NIV or the ESV, go back as close as possible to the original documents, using a discipline called textual criticism to determine what the original texts most likely said. And even then, the earliest documents we have we only have in pieces. What we have are the copies of copies of copies of the originals. But the problem is, we don’t have the original documents. Our Old Testament comes from the Hebrew Bible and our New Testament comes from the Greek documents of the early church. At first glance, the answer seems pretty simple. To understand why we spell and pronounce certain names in the Bible the way we do, we first have to understand a bit about where our Bible came from. From Iesous to Jesus: Why We Don’t Call Him JoshuaĪfter the Greek Iesous came the Latin Iesus, from which we get our spelling Jesus. That said, the nominative case, or the default case of the Greek spelling of Yeshua had the final -s and Yeshua was mostly spelled Iesous. It all depends on if the name is a subject, an object, a direct object, etc. Sometimes Jesus’ name is spelled Iesoun or Iesou. So Yeshua then became Iesou + the Greek masculine noun ending -os.Īs a second declension noun, the final -s in Iesous isn’t always there in the text. You have to give it a declension structure. So to put the Aramaic Yeshua into Greek, you can’t simply transliterate. Neither Aramaic nor Hebrew nouns decline in the same way. This means the ending of the noun changes depending on its case, or its function in the sentence. Without getting too deep into linguistics, something you have to understand about Greek is that its nouns decline. The last three letters take a bit more explanation. There is no aspirated -sh sound in Greek, so the name had a soft -s sound. And in order to spell Yeshua in Greek, the writers would have had to make a few concessions. ![]() This means they were limited to the Greek Alphabet. ![]() However, when the New Testament writers put quill to papyrus, they wrote in the Greek language. People probably still referred to him as Yeshua. ![]() It’s highly unlikely that Jesus would have been called Iesous by anyone, even by Greek speakers. In other words, Greek is the global language that would have been spoken by everyone in the Mediterranean region for commerce and other social purposes. While Aramaic would have been Jesus’ native tongue, he definitely would have understood and spoken Greek, as it was the lingua franca of the day. From Yeshua to Iesous: Jesus’ Name in the Langua Franca (Greek) But how did we get from Yehoshua and Yeshua to Jesus? Well for that, we have Greek and Latin to thank. This spelling seems to be preferred in later Hebrew, and it’s the spelling that made its way into Aramaic. As such, his actual birth name would have been Yeshua, which is simply the Aramaic rendering of the Hebrew Yehoshua (Joshua).Īt some point in the Hebrew language, the consonant -h was dropped from the name Yehoshua, leading to the spelling Yeshua. A Rose By Any Other Name From Joshua to Yeshua: Jesus’ Name in His Native Tongue (Aramaic)Īs a second temple Jewish man growing up in early first century Israel, Jesus’ native tongue would have been Aramic.
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