“The Name Above Every Name” W. Zeitler [ORGAN]
Canzona D. Buxtehude (1637-1707)
Since there isn’t a consonant ‘J’ sound in Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek, it’s safe to say that ‘Jesus’ wasn’t originally His name. Any decent Bible dictionary will tell you that His name would have been ‘Yeshua’. How we got from ‘Yeshua’ to ‘Jesus’ is an interesting story…
Jesus almost certainly started out with an Aramaic name. (Hebrew and Aramaic are related something like Spanish and Italian.) When Alexander the Great conquered from Greece to Egypt to India in the 4th century BCE, he made Greek the common language of his Empire. So Greek was common in metropolitan areas (useful for commerce with the rest of the world) but folks also used their local language, particularly in rural areas. So Jesus likely started out as ‘Yeshua’. Now, in Greek there isn’t a ‘Y’ sound, so when they transliterated ‘Yeshua into Greek, they replaced ‘Y’ with the two vowels ‘EE-AY’ (iota, eta). Also, there’s no ‘Sh’ in Greek, so they used just ‘S’ instead. Finally, to make it into a normal looking masculine noun (Greek has grammatical gender: masculine, feminine and neuter) they added a final ‘S’. So from ‘Yeshua’ in Aramaic we have ‘IĒSOUS’ in Greek.
Fast forward to the late 4th century. The Roman Catholic Church has been established, and since Latin was the language of Roman government, the Church adopted it as their official language as well. So in 382 the Church commissioned St. Jerome — a leading Biblical languages scholar of the day — to prepare an official Bible (in Latin). The result is the Vulgate, which is still used by the Catholic Church today. In the Vulgate, the Greek ‘IĒSOUS’ becomes Latin ‘IESUS’. At this time in Latin, the letters ‘I’ and ‘J’ were essentially interchangeable and both were the vowel ‘I’. ‘J’ was also used as a fancy ‘I’ to start words. However, towards the end of the first millennium ‘J’ increasingly represented the sound ‘Y’, and eventually became the consonant we use today. The first English translation of the New Testament (Tyndale, 1526) used ‘Iesus’, as did the first edition of the King James (1611). The transition from ‘I’ to ‘J’ wasn’t complete until the latter 17th century.
In a way the name change doesn’t matter — there are no theological doctrines in peril by His name being adapted to new languages down through the ages. But this name change does spoil a rather neat bit of symbolism…
The Septuagint was a translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew to Greek done around 300 BCE in Alexandria. It’s an extremely important book in Bible scholarship because it functions as a kind of linguistic glue between the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament. New Testament authors also used it to quote the Old Testament. We saw that the Greek version of Jesus’ name was IĒSOUS. Does ‘IĒSOUS’ occur in the Septuagint? Why, yes it does.
You’ll recall that Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt into the desert where Moses received the 613 Commandments (the first Ten are the Biggies) and they wandered in the desert for 40 years. Within sight of the promised land, Moses screws up, so God doesn’t permit him to lead the Israelites that last leg of the journey across the Jordan into the promised land. And who takes over? ‘Yeshua’. English Bibles translate his name Joshua. In the Septuagint it’s ‘IĒSOUS’!
Think about it. What’s the story arc here? Moses and his Law are only able to bring the Israelites so far — its Joshua/Jesus who is able to finish the job and lead them into the Promised Land. It’s a recurring theme in the New Testament: in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes statements like “it was said by the ancients (quoting Moses’ Law) ‘You shall not murder,’” but I [Jesus/Joshua] lead you to the next level — “Don’t even be angry.” And it’s a recurring theme in Paul’s writings, particularly in Romans, how Moses and the Law only bring us so far, but can’t finish the job of bringing us to God — it’s Joshua/Jesus who is able to finish what Moses started.
Finally, in Matt 1:21, we have “And she [Mary] shall bring forth a son, and you shall call His name Jesus Joshua, for He shall save His people from their sins.” In Hebrew, the name ‘Joshua’ is etymologically related to their verb ‘to save’. With that and the story of Moses and Joshua in mind, this makes more sense!
P.S. In ancient Greek and Hebrew they used the same letters to spell words and write numbers. Thus you could read a name as a number. Ancient Greeks used the number version of ‘Apollo’ to determine the dimensions of his temples. And late medieval Jewish mystics ran with that idea, developed into a system called ‘Gematria’. The prelude uses ‘musical gematria’ (an invention of mine) of the Greek gematria value of ‘IĒSOUS‘ as its theme. The title is a reference to Phil 2.9: “God has given Jesus a name that is above every name…”