Ray, I would like your opinion on the name Yeshua verses Jesus Christ. Yeshua means basically salvation. Jesus is a replacement name from constintine, and is not a translation. Please give me what the Lord has shown you on this regards since we both know about the KJV was tampered with. The name Jesus Christ was replaced. Masons created the KJV as well. I need help. There is safety in a multitude of counslors. I pray you will be able to respond to this concern. In His Service Leslie
Dear Leslie: No, "Jesus" is not "a replacement name from Constintine. It is a transliteration not a translation (see definition below). I don't know what you mean by "the KJV was tampered with?" How and when was "the name Jesus Christ replaced?" I don't believe the Masons had anything to do with the translation of KJV. Rather than give you my understanding of this name, and all the research I have done on it, I believe this short excerpt from the Internet explains the situation very satisfactory:
"Basically, we see that around 250 B.C. in Alexandria, Egypt there was a mass of Jewish people who spoke Greek rather than Hebrew and therefore the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek would be very beneficial to these Greek speaking Jews. Knowing this we should take note that those men who made the translation must have known both the Hebrew and the Greek language – and would therefore be scholarly men, able to make the translation. How did these men treat the names Yehoshua or Yeshua when transliterating them from Hebrew to Greek? We will simply use both Numbers 13:16 and Nehemiah 8:17 to make the proper comparisons in the transliterations.
In Numbers 13:16 where the name Yehoshua appears in the Hebrew Scripture, the name Iesou appears at this place in the Septuagint. The only difference being that the last letter of this Greek transliteration is the Greek letter nu , which is simply the case ending of the name of Numbers 13:16. What we see here is that this is the transliteration that Hebrew/Greek scholars of the third century B.C., 250 plus years before Christ, chose to use in transliterating this particular name from Hebrew to Greek. In looking at Nehemiah 8:17 where we find the contracted form of the Hebrew name of Numbers 13:16 we also find the Septuagint, once again using the Greek name Iesou, which is simply another form of the above Greek name with simply a different case ending because of its use in the grammar of the Greek language.
Now we need to better define how this particular Greek name is pronounced. Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible gives ee-ay-sooce as the pronunciation of this Greek name. Most other Greek lexicons give Iesous as the exact English transliteration of the Greek name. The most proper pronunciation we could give would most likely be pronounced yey-sooce (Yesous). Notice particularly that this transliteration does not come from someone transliterating with the Messiah in mind, but from Jewish scholars of the 3rd century B.C. which transliterated the name of Moses’ successor. These scholars weren’t trying to pull some kind of “switch-a-roo” with the text of Scripture when they came to such passages as Numbers 13:16 or Nehemiah 8:17; they were simply transliterating the Hebrew name into the Greek language, using the corresponding Greek letters in the best possible way. Why would Jewish scholars transliterate the name of the leader of Israel after Moses incorrectly?
It may be needful at this point to define what exactly transliteration is. Here are the definitions of transliteration in a couple of English dictionaries: quote: Transliterate… 1: to represent or spell (words, letters, or characters of one language) in the letters or characters of another language or alphabet… {Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, 1981} Transliterate… to represent (a letter or word) by the alphabetic characters of another language… {Funk & Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary, V2, 1984} Here we see that transliteration consists of taking a word in one language and spelling it with the corresponding characters of another language. Nothing is stated in these definitions about the sound of the original word being retained as some would suggest, only the letters as best as possible.
There is nothing in the meaning of the word transliterate showing that the sound is retained from one language to the next. The sounds from one language to the next may remain the same or similar in many instances, but this is not always the case for all languages do not contain the same sounds. Such is the case with the name at hand. How did the name Iesous come from the name Yehoshua? It did so by the process of transliterating the short form of the name Yehoshua – Yeshua – from Hebrew into Greek. The process would go like this: יְ - Ἰη / שׁ – σ / וּ - οῦ Here we see the transliteration into Greek as Iesou but we are missing the final letter of the Greek name. This is known in Greek as the final sigma, and is placed often on the end of male names as it is a Greek ending for masculinity. Thus we get the name Iesous.
Mr. John K. McKee in his article entitled "Is the Name of Jesus Pagan" explains the transliteration process thusly: • y (yod – “ye”) becomes Ih (iota-eta – “ye” or “ee-ay,” Koine or Attic dialect) • v (shin – “sh”) becomes s (sigma – “s” [there is no “sh” sound in Greek] • w (vav – “u”) becomes ou (omicron-upsilon – “oo”) • It is necessary for a final sigma - ς - to be placed at the end of the word to distinguish that the name is masculine • Greek grammar rules require that the (ayin – “ah”) sound be dropped Mr. McKee goes on to write the following: quote: It is important to note that this same name is used for the title of the Book of Joshua in the Septuagint, which serves as definitive proof that Iesous is not of pagan origin, but rather is indeed a Greek transliteration of Yeshua developed by the Jewish translators! For, Iesous is also the Greek transliteration of Yehoshua [יְהוֹשֻׁעַ] as demonstrated by the Septuagint. In Old English, “Iesous” was rendered “Iesus” (pronounced Yesus), which is remarkably close to Yeshua. However, it was spelled with a beginning letter “J,” which at the time had a “Y” sound. Later, when the “J” began to have a harder sound, the name became “Jesus.” Transliteration is not an exact science. However, it does prove that the Greek name Iesous from whence we derive the name “Jesus” is not pagan. Iesous is the Greek transliteration of [Yeshua], and the English transliteration of Iesous is Iesus, which became Jesus.
Another author, Dr. Daniel Botkin, in an article entitled, "The Messiah’s Hebrew Name: “Yeshua” or “Yahshua”" writes the following in association with the issue at hand: quote: The English form Jesus is derived from the New Testament Greek name Iesous, pronounced “Yesous.” According the Strong’s, Yesous (Strong’s #2424) is “of Hebrew origin” and can be traced back to Joshua’s Hebrew name, Yehoshua (#3091, יְהוֹשׁוּעַ. But how do we get the Greek Yesous from the Hebrew Yehoshua? Someone armed with nothing more than a Strong’s Concordance may have difficulty answering that question. Someone who reads the bible in Hebrew, though, knows that the name Joshua sometimes appears in its shortened form, Yeshua (יֵשׁוּעַ. In Neh. 8:17 it is apparent even in English: “Jeshua the son of Nun.” (The letter J was pronounced like a Y in Old English.) Strong’s does not tell the reader that the Greek Yesous is actually transliterated from this shortened Hebrew form, Yeshua, and not directly from the longer form Yehoshua. The process from “Yehoshua” to “Jesus” looks like this: • Hebrew Yehoshua – Hebrew Yeshua • Hebrew Yeshua – Greek Yesous • Greek Yesous – English Jesus There is no “sh” sound in Greek, which accounts for the middle “s” sound in Yesous. The “s” at the end of the Greek name is a grammatical necessity, to make the word declinable.
In Neh. 8:17, Joshua’s name is 100% identical to the name which today’s Messianic Jews use for the Messiah, Yeshua… Strong’s confirms this pronunciation, and tells us that there were ten Israelites in the Bible who bore this name (#3442). Therefore the shortening of Yehoshua to Yeshua predates the Christian era by at least 500 years, and cannot be the result of a Jewish conspiracy to hide the Savior’s true name. To claim that the shortened form Yeshua is the result of a Jewish conspiracy is to ignore the facts of history and the facts of the Hebrew Scriptures. The form Yeshua existed for several hundred years before the Messiah was even born. Even in the pre-Christian Septuagint we see the Greek form… (Yesous) in the title of the Book of Joshua. (This is also proof that Yesous has no connection to the pagan god Zeus." (From:
http://yahushua.net/name_jesus.htm )
Hope this helps your understanding that "Jesus" is not a pagan name. Millions of people around the world over a period of two thousand years, have become believers and overcomers through the name of JESUS!
God be with you,
Ray
