In my massive article The Bible is Rife With Contradictions and Changes, I introduced the fact that bible stories and verses have been changed over the centuries, at times significantly, with the following:
Christians don’t want to believe that biblical translations over time altered original stories, but one small way they obviously did was by giving characters altered names. Jesus did not consort with John and James. They were in the Middle East, not an English pub. Instead, Yeshua (ישוע) consorted with Yohhanan (יוחנן) and Ya’akov (יעקב). Hebrew and Aramaic names were translated into Greek and later into English (and other tongues), resulting in names of different pronunciation than were actually used. Mattityahu became Matthaios and finally Matthew. (No, English speakers did not independently have a name like “John” and then “translated” Yohhanan [Hebrew] or Ioannes [Greek] to the pre-existing John, as if there was some magical lingual match or a “Hey, this name sounds a bit like one of ours” situation! Study the etymology of these names. The only reason John existed in English is because over centuries the name Yohhanan, thanks to the bible, spread beyond Palestine, through other parts of Europe, and finally to the English-speaking world, changing along the way.) If something as simple as names and their pronunciations could change from actual people to written text, and then translation to translation, could other things have changed, too?
This is one of those things that is right in front of your face as a devout Christian, which I was until about 12 years ago, but you somehow never notice. Of course the bible has changed over time! To me, all this speaks to how blindly, how absolutely, we believe the bible to be true — if it says his name was John, his name was John — and how little the gears of critical thinking will turn under the stunting influence of religion.
But when exactly did “Yeshua” evolve into “Jesus”? The authors of the New Testament, written in Greek in the later half of the first century A.D., took the Hebrew Yeshua (ישוע) and made it Iesous (Ἰησοῦς), pronounced EE-ay-soos. A change was necessary because the Greek alphabet lacked the “sh” sound; further, Greek male names ended with an “s” sound, so “ς” was added. A few hundred years later, in the fourth century, Latin translations were authored. The Latin Iesus (IESVS) was pronounced similarly to the Greek name. Overall, the Greco-Roman pronunciation ruled for some 1,500 years, a much longer life than the modern version (for now at least). However, one should note that by the 12th century, the spelling “Jesus” was used alongside “Iesus,” but they were both pronounced like the latter. See, the letter “J” began as a fancy, elongated “I” in the Middle Ages, and was applied to all kinds of words and names. Not until the 1500s did J more and more come to sound like the letter we know and love. The modern pronunciation of Jesus began and grew from there, though it took a century or two to become standard. The letter J made the jump from Latin to English in the 1600s. Some readers will recall that Shakespeare did not use the letter J (sorry, Juliet), since it was not part of the English alphabet in his day, and the 1611 King James Bible spoke of Iesus — the 1629 revision spoke of Jesus.
This is not intended to be framed as breaking news. Many know that Yeshua was this figure’s actual name, that it was a common name at the time, that “Christ” isn’t Jesus’ last name, and so on. Plenty of Christian sites will walk you through the transformation of Yeshua. Further, the evolution of a character’s name across time and languages doesn’t automatically make stories about him untrue (we know the gospels are probably fictional for many other reasons). But it is suggestive. Again, if character names can be altered by later human beings, why not the stories the characters are in? Why not whole verses? See the article cited in the first sentence of this piece for examples.
Overall, I find it quite striking to examine the etymology of “Jesus.” More tongue in cheek, there’s thoughts of Darwin, with this slow evolution and a common ancestor of splintered descendants — Yeshua became both Jesus and Joshua. It’s interesting to me, for some reason, that before 500 years ago, no one had ever said the name Jesus, not how we say it; were you to time travel, English-speaking Christians wouldn’t be fully sure who you were talking about. Most importantly, there’s the human fingerprints all over Jesus’ name, in the same way they are all over the tales about him. What human beings believe in, who they worship, the name they cry out to — these things can easily be man-made constructions. Why do we call him Jesus? Because of a limiting Greek alphabet, a Greek tradition regarding masculine names, and a bunch of medieval scribes who wanted to write fancy.
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