“His name would probably have been in Aramaic: Yeshua.” In this single statement, Professor Dineke Houtman returns a familiar character to an alien environment, one in which “Jesus” was not yet a word, in which a Galilean village might well have been home to more than one language.
In first-century Galilee, the language was Aramaic, a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew that was in common usage in the area. The first communities, in and around Nazareth and Capernaum, were Aramaic-speaking, and these communities are reflected in the Gospels in tiny, glancing moments: prayers, nicknames, and imperative verbs written in Greek but reflecting an earlier pronunciation. Candida Moss supplies a further, subversive, fact: “Most scholars also accept that his name was Yeshua or perhaps Yeshu, which was a very common name in first-century Galilee.” The word common is the pivot. The historical Jesus did not have a proper, trademark-style name; he shared one with his contemporaries.
It is its very ordinariness, its rootedness in the everyday, which helps explain the importance of the linguistic change. With the movement expanding beyond the Aramaic-speaking community, the name Jesus necessarily entered Greek, the alphabet of the eastern Mediterranean and the language of the New Testament itself. Greek offered its own set of restrictions. There is no “sh” sound, and the language doesn’t favor the masculine name suffix “-ah.” This is not translation but adaptation, and Yeshua became Iesous, the spelling which fit Greek hearing and syntax. Later, Latin reduced the spelling of Iesous to Iesus, and the English version of the name eventually changed the first letter from “I,” which didn’t exist in ancient times and entered the alphabet late, to “J,” which is the letter it is today.
Names, after all, rarely travel alone. The second half of “Jesus Christ” carried a different kind of freight.
“Christ” is not a surname but a title, taken from the Greek christos, or “anointed one.” In Jewish tradition, anointing denoted kings and prieststhe mark of their position was oil. “Christ” was a way of indicating that Jesus was the anticipated messiah, and in some of the oldest texts of the New Testament, such as the letters of Paul, the title is simply assumed to be known, and “Christ” is used as if it were a name that did not belong to another person. In such a linguistic gesture, a claim resides quietly within the grammar: a title becomes a name because of the way a community repeats it as if it could not possibly belong to another person.
However, this combination of title and given name also accounts for what confuses us today. “Jesus” has a unitary, specific ring to it, while “Christ” has an last-name finality to it, though it was really an announcementYeshua, the anointed one. The longer, more regional versions of it, “Yeshua” or “Yeshu,” can have a jarring quality to them not because they represent a different person but because they remind us of proportions man to place to origins, not last names.
There is also a second, less comfortable form of afterlife in those earlier traditions as well. In later Jewish literature, “Yeshu” is found as a name associated with discourses about identity and demarcation, and even who or what “Yeshu” is is in question. The use of “Yeshu” in rabbinic literature, and any connection of Jesus with people named Yeshu, has been characterized as being quite complex in historical terms, with more than one figure and timeline at work. This is only true in general, however, insofar as names in antiquity are tools of society before they are symbols of theology.
Rather than a pure sound that is passed down through each alphabetic handoff, it is a striving to declare the same person in different rooms. The transition from Yeshua through Iesous to Iesus and finally Jesus illustrates how a religion that reached out also had to be able to be pronounced that is, without relinquishing the claim implicit within its name.
