The Etymology of the Name "Jesus"
Edip Yaramis
The Aramaic ישוע (‘Yeshue’), is the same name as the biblical Prophet Joshua עשוי from the Book of Numbers, and means literally “YAH SAVES”. YAH is the literal name of God, or Tetragrammaton in Aramaic.
But there is a problem with such a straightforward transmission,
mainly that our English language version of Jesus’s name doesn’t come
from Hebrew or Aramaic, but rather a convoluted route of European
languages which altered it over time into something which would be
unrecognizable to Aramaic
speakers of Jesus’ day. 19th and 20th Century scholars for the most
part believed that the Bible was originally written in Greek. And their
theology was dependent in a large part on a purely European
interpretation of the Scriptures.
First of all the Aramaic "YAH" sound is transliterated as "IE" in Greek. And , since there is no Greek letter corresponding to the Aramaic letter Shin, they also dropped the SH. The final A was also dropped because there is no Greek equivalent for writing the letter Ayin; and added the "S" as a casus nominativus, thus making this otherwise foreign word into a masculine Greek personal name. So the [AramaicAramaic] Yeshue became ιησου (Iesous) in Greek. This new Greek name was then transliterated into Latin as “Iesous”.
In German the written letter “J” is how one best denotes the English “Y” sound, and Martin Luther’s Bible, first published in 1545 used “Jesu”
as the name of the Messiah. Luther, dropped the Greek omicron ("O") and
removed the “mistaken” Greek ‘S’ at the end of the Latin word, in order
to shorten the name for printing, thus the modern German "JESU" was
created.
In the early 16th Century, when William Tyndale began translating the Greek Bible into English, he ran across the problem that the Latin “IESOUS”
could not easily be pronounced by English speakers, since in English
the letter “I” makes a different sound than it does in Latin. So
instead, he used an amalgamation of both the Latin (i.e. Catholic) and
the German (i.e. Reform) vernaculars and changed the first letter to "J"
and dropped the “O” as it was had been used in German.
It is by this long route and that the name of "Jesus" finally came into being in our language independently of the Aramaic name Joshua. It should be noted, that although the route of transmission is convoluted, confusing and unsurprisingly Eurocentric, the name “Jesus” is in fact the correct proper name of “Yeshue” in English and there is no spiritual benefit to be gained by insisting on a different usage.