Joshua Ben Joseph

[Samson]

Hi Forum Members,

                          I thought the following might be of interest to some of you, it was interesting to me. Recently, My Wife and I purchased a Book from a Thrift type shop where books usually run $1.00 or less.
The Book is Titled: Civilization In The West, a History Type Book, probably for College courses, anyway the Book covers the Cultural, Religious, Technological and Geographical aspects of the Development of Western Civilization. in Chapter 5(Imperial Rome) under the Sub Heading The Origins of Christianity, page 166, I stumbled upon this: " The already complex landscape of the Jewish religious world became further complicated by the brief career of JOSHUA BEN JOSEPH, known to history as Jesus of Nazareth and to His followers as Jesus the Messiah or Christ." I thought this was interesting, because Ray touches on the fact in the Bible in some verses in Acts it's supposed to be translated Joshua instead of Jesus.   Yet if you translate Yehoshua(Hebrew for Jesus) directly into English, it's Joshua. See Excerpt from Who & What Jesus is and Why(Nashville Conference 2007), Ray excerpt below in Blue.

Joshua and Jesus are the same name, and that's why in the book of Acts you have it talking about Jesus, being back in the OT.  No it's not Jesus, it's Joshua.  That is a blatant error in the KJ, it has Jesus there, when it's suppose to be Joshua. 

[this is a complicated explanation of these Hebrew and Greek sounds and spellings, I did the best I could with the spelling (Kat)]
Yehoshua comes from YWV.  The Y is from the Hebrew 'ye,' but in Greek it becomes 'ih' it's pronounced 'eeay.'  V is the Hebrew is 'shin' which is the sh sound, but in Greek you just make it 's,' they have no sh sound.  So you have 'ihs' and it's ye-sh.  The W is 'vav' it's a u sound and in Greek it becomes 'ou.'  So you have yehowshuwa yeh-ho-shoo-a or yehoshua, it almost the same thing.  The 'ye' is a softer sound, but some say it is pronounced 'ya' with a j sound. 
About 1500 they came out with the j, and they didn't have j before the 1500's, so they used a j for the 'ya' sound and it became stronger 'ja.'  So instead of ye-hoshua, it's j-hoshua - Jesus.   Jesus is not pagan.  It's just the way you transliterate YWV into Greek.  Don't let anybody tell you it is.

Comments and additional input are welcome, please keep it civil and polite, just thought it was interesting coming from a History type book.

                                    Kind Regards, Samson.

[Kat]

Hi Samson,

That is quite interesting. Doing a search on Joshua Ben Joseph seems that this is not unknown information. A couple I found gave an explanation that seemed plausible, so I posted it below.

His name: (translated to English from Aramaic) would have been something like Joshua Ben Joseph, (Son of Joseph). As he came of age, he became known by his nickname', which we translate as "Jesus". As his reputation grew, he would have been known as "Jesus, of Nazareth". And as people came to believe in his divinity, he would have come to be known as "Jesus the Christ", which we now shorten to be simply, Jesus Christ. [(by Paul S. Brown) Christian site, so no link]


"Jesus Ben Joseph" 

"Jesus" is the English for of the Greek "Iesous", which in Hebrew is Jeshua (Joshua), meaning "Jehovah is Salvation".. Many young boys were named Joshua in Bible times. .... Christ is from the Greek word "Christos" meaning "The Anointed One." In Hebrew, Christ is translated "Messiah".

  The full name of Jesus, "The Christ", was "Jesus Ben Joseph", (Jesus, son of Joseph.) As the people began to recognize him as the Messiah, they called him Jesus Ben David, (Jesus, son of David.)

mercy, peace and love
Kat

[Samson]

Thanks for the contribution Kat,

                                           I followed your example with some quotes that I found after viewing Your Post, Read Below.

As you probably know, first century accounts of Jesus were written in Greek using the term Ιησους [Iesous] which in fact does translate back to the Hebrew name Joshua meaning Yahweh is salvation. We get the English name Jesus from the Latin translation of the Greek manuscripts by Jerome in the early 5th century. The typical Jewish naming convention Jesus (Joshua) son of Joseph is used in Luke 4:22 and in John, but the Greek-speaking gentiles preferred titles with theological implications and moved quickly towards Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus. Since Jesus and Joseph were common names in the first century, early Christians sought to differentiate their Jesus by using Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus, son of David, and of course Jesus, Son of God.

First of all, Jews of the first century had only one name, plus "son of (his father)"- ben. So, Christ is not part of Jesus' real name - it simply means 'anointed', indicating the Messiah.

The name Jesus is the Greek translation of the name Joshua, an approximate transliteration of the Hebrew or Aramaic Yehoshua. In the Old Testament, Joshua is always transliterated into English as Joshua, but the New Testament was originally written in Greek, so the Greek form, Jesus, is used in English.

So, Jesus Christ's real name was Joshua ben Joseph, or more correctly, Yehoshua ben Yosef (Hebrew) or Yehoshua bar Yosef (Aramaic).

Jesus' name was Yehoshua in Hebrew and it is speculated that it was Yeshua in Aramaic or Y'shua.

In Hebrew it would be Yehoshua Ben Yosef and in Aramaic it would be Yeshua Bar Yosef.

In the Old Testament, 9 persons and a city have the name Yeshua.

In the Septuagint and the New Testament the name was brought over into Greek as Iesous and thence into English as "Jesus".

It is the masculine for of yeshu'ah.

In modern Hebrew the name is pronounced and written as "Yeshu".

However this version of the name is also an acronym for Yimach sh'mo v'zikhrono which means (May his name and memory be botted out).

There is also another understanding that this version of the name is an acronym for Yigdal sh'mo umalkhuto (May his name and kingdom grow

There never was a person named Jesus Christ! His first name wasn't Jesus and his last name wasn't Christ. Would you believe that Jesus' real name in pre-exilic Hebrew was Yehoshua or in the Second Temple period Yeshua or Joshua? When the English rendered the Latin IESVS from the Greeks who translated the Semitic name Yeshua they came up with Jesus (Yehoshua became Yeshua became Iesous became Jesus), and that name stuck. But his real name in his own language was Yeshua, which was a very good name in the Hebrew tradition. It meant – "Yahweh (God) is savior (helper)".

"Start with Yeshua. That's his name, not 'Jesus.' It's what his father and mother and his brothers and sisters called him and it's how his followers knew him. Probably the name was  pronounced in the rough regional dialectr of Galilee as 'Yeshu'... (Akenson, 2000, p. 57)."

"In pre-exilic times, the name Yehoshua consisted of ... two roots. The first, yeho, is the theophoric referring to God. The second, shua, means "help" and the name meant, "Whose help is YHWH/God." In 2nd temple times, it became a practice NOT to use full theophorics to prevent accidentally voicing the name of God so the theophorics were truncated and Yehoshua became Y'shua. In the Galilee, Aramaic was pronounced differently and Galileans dropped their alefs and ayins like Cockney English drop their H's. Jesus' Galilean friends would have called him Yeshu. Therefore, in Judea and formally, his name was Yeshua, yehSHOO-ah, and in the Galilee his name was pronounced Yeshu, pronounced YEHshoo. Because of strong Hellenistic influence in Palestine at the time, some Jews with the name of Yeshua used a Greek transliteration of the name. Yeshua ben Sirach was one of them who went by the name IHSOUS, pronounced YAYsoos. Hence, Yeshua was rendered IHSOUS." (Jack Kilmon, 2006)

Kat, the above were a couple quotes I found on Jesus Name.

                      Kind Regards, Samson.