Is Jesus the Christ?

Jesus word cloud, grunge background

There are some Christians who imply that referring to Christ as Jesus instead of his Hebrew name Yeshua (יֵשׁוּעַ) are worshiping the wrong savior. These believe that saying the name Jesus is saying, “Hail, Zeus,” especially when pronounced in Spanish and thereby are praising a pagan Greek god rather than God himself. Yet this belief comes from both a modern way of thinking and from how a word sounds rather than in how that word is derived.

So, this does beg the question: Is Jesus the correct name for the Christ? And what does that mean and imply? How did we get to calling the Jewish messiah Jesus? To understand how we arrived at the name Jesus Christ, we first need to understand that Jesus is the name of a person while Christ is the title of that person—not a name. And names are transliterated, meaning letters of one language to another are substituted based upon phonetic sounds, while words are translated, meaning words of one language to another are substituted based upon their meaning.

The name Jesus is derived from the original Hebrew name Yahoshua. This is the same as the name of the Old Testament character Joshua. Therefore, the name Jesus would not be expected to be a unique Biblical name. The name means Yahweh (or the Lord) is Salvation. Over time, at least by the first century, the shortened form, Yeshua was used and this is also the same in Aramaic. This is likely the name Jesus went by during the time of his first coming. It’s meaning is very similar: Yahweh saves.

When the Septuagint was written between the 3rd and 1st century BCE, to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, the name Yeshua was transliterated to Iesous (Ἰησοῦς). So, the first syllable (Iota eta) sounds like how we would say “yay” and how we would admire, or affirm, someone. And the ending syllable (sigma, omicron, upsilon sigma), sounds very similar to the pronunciation of Zeus (Ζηύς). Yet there is a phonetic difference between the pronunciation of zeta (or z) in Zeus and sigma (or s) in sous. Also, the vowel is different: the Greek letter upsilon in Zeus and omicron upsilon in sous. It ends with the Greek letter sigma because sigma is typically used as the ending of most masculine names in Greek due to Greek grammar rules. So, although the pronunciation of the two may sound similar, they have no connection to each other in either morphology or derivation.

As stated earlier, names are typically transliterated while words are translated. To better understand how we go from the Hebrew name Yeshua (יֵשׁוּעַ: yod, sheen, vav, ayin) to the Greek name Iesous (Ἰησοῦς: iota, eta, sigma, omicron, upsilon, sigma) we need to understand that Greek does not have a letter for the Hebrew yod sound, so the Greek letter Iota was used as the closest Greek letter for this phonetic sound. There is also no Greek letter for the ‘sh’ sound for the Hebrew letter sheen, so the Greek letter sigma was the closest Greek letter for this phonetic sound. As stated, a sigma was added to the ending of the name as it is a masculine-derived name.

In the 4th century when transliterated into Latin, Iesous was transliterated to Iesus. Then in the 15th century, the Latin “J” was added with the Latin “I”: J to represent its use as a consonant and I for a vowel. Therefore, Iesus changed to our spelling today, J-e-s-u-s, but it was still pronounced as previously. Then, at the turn of the 16th century, the letter J took on its current “j” phonetic sound and J-e-s-u-s was pronounced the way we pronounce it today.

Now, let’s go over how we got to the name Christ. In Hebrew, it is called HaMashiach (הַמָּשִׁיחַ), meaning “the Anointed One.” In Aramaic Mashiach was translated to Messiah, which means ‘anointed’. In the Greek Septuagint, it was translated to Christos (Χριστός) because that Greek word means “anointed one.” Then when it was translated into Latin it became Christ. So, today, we use the Latin transliterated/translated form of the Hebrew version of the term for Messiah.

So, the name Jesus Christ means Yahweh saves through the Anointed One. The name and title go from Yehoshua HaMashiach (Hebrew) to Yeshua Messiah (Aramaic), to Iesous Christos (Greek), to Jesus Christ (Latin) or as is sometimes stated in Scripture, Jesus the Christ.

So, our usage of the name Jesus Christ is from the Latin form of His name. We can feel confident that we are calling Jesus Christ by his correct name in our language. He desires our praise (Is 43:21) and he is worthy of it because of who he is and because of all he has done (Rv 4:11). Let’s never cease to do so!

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Visit Books & Words to Inspire by Randy C. Dockens