In a time when right is being made wrong and wrong is made right, light is called darkness and darkness light, truth becomes lies and the lie is promoted as truth, we need to be sure of what we believe, on whom we believe and whom we worship.
How did the Jewish person, born in a Hebrew community of Jewish parents and who stated in John 4:22 "Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews." come to be known as Jesus? After all, 'Jesus' is an English transliteration of a Greek word 'Iesous', translated from Hebrew Yehoshua.
Understanding the two words, 'Translate' and 'Transliterate' will help clear up some issues:Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text.
Transliteration is a process in which words in one alphabet are represented in another alphabet.
It is so that the Greek alphabet did not have a letter for the sound of the Hebrew 'yod', the 'y' sound of the word young or Yeshua and also the 'sh' sound as in shout or Yeshua. Both sounds are represented with one Hebrew letter each. That did not inhibit the Aramaic speaking people nor the Greek speaking people to pronounce His name correctly. Making a sound is easy but having an alphabet letter representing it might proof difficult if it does not exist in your language. So the Greeks used the closest letters to what they have when writing the name.
These letters from the Greek alphabet is 'I' Istanbul, and 's' summer. When translating you have the danger of putting your own idea into the translation in stead of just conveying the words in another language when transliteration is used. This is where the problem came in. In stead of transliterating the name Yeshua to Iesua, it got translated to Iesous.
Firstly there did not exist a word like Iesous in Greek at the time, and secondly it sounds like Isis, a Greek god. Could it have been done like that on purpose? When eventually it wat translated into English from the Greek, the English plainly copied the letter 'I' and later, in the 14th century, it became 'J'. But the damage has been done.
Iesous in Greek had no meaning, but Yeshua in Hebrew meant salvation for humanity.
Ex 20:7 Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
The meaning of the word 'vain' in English does not closely give you the proper meaning from the Hebrew. The Hebrew word translated vain actually means: shav' shawv or shav {shav}; in the sense of desolating; evil (as destructive), literally (ruin) or morally (especially guile); figuratively idolatry (as false, subjective), uselessness (as deceptive, objective; also adverbially, in vain):--false(-ly), lie, lying, vain, vanity. see HEBREW for 07722
Notice, it also says uselessness, as deceptive... Changing the name of the Messiah to something that is meaningless(useless) and making it deceptively sound like a Greek god is in my opinion transgressing the 3rd commandment.
So you have come to repentance under the name of Jesus, and you say: 'God knows whom I'm talking to when I say Jesus'. It might be so that you have learned about a savior and that his name is Jesus, but have you ever studied the scriptures as the people in Acts17:11 to make sure everything you are told is truth?
Why did the translators of the Bible translate the name of Joshua(English translation) of the OT, to Joshua in Heb 4:8 and Acts 7:45, but the name of the Messiah, which is exactly like the name of Joshua, is translated Jesus? Does Yeshua and Joshua not sound familiar? Looking at the KJV Bible you'll see that they mistranslated Joshua to Jesus in Acts7:45 and corrected it in the NKJV to Joshua. That goes to show that the translators knew that the Messiah's name was Yeshua(Hebrew) and Joshua(English) but that they purposefully mistranslated the name. The name Jesus resembles that of a Greek god Isis and according to the commandments of Yahweh, it is wrong to take His name in vain.
When dealing with people that does not know the true name, it is advisable to make yourself clear by saying something ilike "I call the Messiah, Yeshua, as that is his given name, but understand that you have learned it to be Jesus. Because I honor Him and want to be obedient, I will not call him by a name that was not given to him to begin with, but by His true Name that got lost during translation" Always talk to others that don't know the name, in love and respect, and by your actions they might see the truth.
Dr. Wouter van den Heever
D.D Ph.D M.Th.
