What's up with Yeshua?

[psteichen]

I was about to start reading a Christian author, and was considering reading him with my young teen daughter. I wanted to make sure that he’s not anti-Catholic beforehand, so I’ve been reading some reviews.

A lot of his fans refer to Jesus as Yeshua. That worries me. Sounds odd. I’ve never heard a priest use that name, it’s not in the Catechism, and it comes off as deliberately different, which is often a warning flag for me.

Am I overly suspicious? Is there some movement behind this preference that I should be aware of? I’m not so much interested in the linguistic roots of the name, but in the mindset and philosophy of the people that prefer this form of His name. Yes, I know that sounds like I’m asking for stereotypes, and I understand the limitations, but that’s exactly what I need to help me make a quick decision. Any thoughts or advice appreciated!

 

[Joshuajoseph12]

HiThere is still some debate on this, but I’ll tell you what I have read and you decide. First, His name is Yahshua. It can be spelled and pronounced differently, like Yeshua and Yahoshua and ‘Eshu’ and other variations. It basically means Yah’s (Yahweh, the God of Israel) Salvation.

When the Aramaic-speaking Jews who believed in Yahshua spread this message to speakers of Greek and Latin, there was some difficulty finding an equivalent of this name in their languages. For example, they didn’t have a “Yahweh”. They (the Greeks) had Zeus. So, one of the stories goes, after some mangling of the name a bit in trying to linguistically fit a square peg into a round hole, they came up with Son of Zeus, or, as it ended up, Ieasous. This became “Jesus” over time, after 1520 or so when the letter “J” was invented and Y, I, and J were used rather interchangeably, causing great confusion.
But if you focus on one man thats Jesus or Yeshua the power comes from him so there is power and authority in both the names unless you call upon him the Christ.
God bless you

 

[Bithynian]

Any thoughts or advice appreciated!

Can you specify the author? There can be a variety of reasons that his readership might refer to Jesus as Yeshua, some of them innocuous, some of them bizarre.

On the bizarre side, I have noticed an occasional thread on this forum where someone insists on using the ‘true name’ of Jesus (usually Yeshua or Yehoshua), believing that one can only invoke the name of Christ by whatever pronunciation 1st century Palestinian Jews might’ve used.

On the innocuous side, Yeshua ישׁוע is the name of Jesus in (Modern) Hebrew, and so many Christians of that particular language background are likely to use it also in English.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

“Yeshua” was Jesus’ name in Aramaic, his own native language.
The film The Passion of the Christ used the name Yeshua as it was trying to be true to life.
Catholic priests tend to use whatever name is commonly used for Jesus in their own language and culture. However, if we were all to use the name for Jesus that Mary, Joseph, the Apostles, and his other contemporaries called him, we’d all be calling him Yeshua or something similar (Yahshua, etc).
It’s no big deal.

 

[BartholomewB]

I was about to start reading a Christian author,

What kind of book is it? If it’s a work of fiction, along the lines of Ben Hur or Quo Vadis, it looks as if the author is simply trying to give his work a veneer of authenticity. That’s neither good nor bad in itself. But is it just this one name that he puts in its Hebrew or Aramaic form? If he wants to be consistent, he ought to write Miriam for Mary, Yochanan for John, and so on.

 

[DaveBj]

The Old Testament pronunciation would have been something very close to “y’-SHU-a8,” while when Mary called her Son in for dinner, she would have said something very close to “YE-shu-a8”. “A” as in “father”, “u” to sound like the “oo” in “boot”. The “8” represents “ayin,” a Semitic consonant that doesn’t exist in European languages, and I’m not sure that it survived in Aramaic.

In any case, if we could take a time machine and go back and talk to 1st-century Jewish converts in Jerusalem about DZHEE-zuhs, they wouldn’t have a clue whom we were talking about.

Edit to add: Reading this book to your daughter would be a good opportunity to introduce her to the concept of how names change when they are transliterated from one language to another. Who knows – it might even get her interested in studying other languages

D