A Rose by Any Other Name
One of the most famous lines from the pen of Shakespeare comes in Romeo and Juliet when Juliet asks from her balcony perch,
Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name…
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet…
Juliet laments that Romeo is from the Montague family while she herself is from the Capulet family. Their names and the bitter feud between their families are what keep them apart. Perhaps if Romeo had another name, their love wouldn’t be doomed to tragedy.
While we might sympathize with Juliet that artificial distinctions and ridiculous feuds shouldn’t prevent the commitment of true love, we would be remiss to think that names are merely arbitrary. Instead, names are often what form our conception of the nature of things. Perhaps this is nowhere truer than with the person and ministry of Jesus Christ our Lord. In fact, the Bible places massive significance on Jesus’ name with the visitations of the angels to both Mary and Joseph instructing them to name Him precisely according to God’s redemptive purposes.
Jesus, Joshua, and the Practice of Transliteration
But did you know that Jesus’ name is not actually “Jesus”—at least not technically? Jesus’ name is actually Joshua, as we are clued into in Matthew 1:21. In this verse, the angel informs Joseph that Jesus’ name is connected to His mission of “saving his people from their sins,” which is what the Hebrew name “Joshua” (or “Jeshua”) means. Let me give you a little background to this phenomenon and bring you back to some important encouragements from our Savior’s name as we remember His birth at Christmastime.
To understand how Jesus’ name came to be “Jesus” instead of “Joshua” in our Bibles, we need to know a bit about transliteration. Transliteration is the practice of spelling a word (usually the name of a place or person) from an initial language into a target language using the most closely associated letters and sounds between the languages. For instance, in Galatians 4:6, biblical translators have chosen not to translate the original Aramaic word “Abba” into the equivalent English word “father.” Instead, we have retained the Aramaic pronunciation as closely as possible and essentially coined a new English word via transliteration rather than direct translation. The practice of transliteration is the key that unlocks why “Jesus” became the spelling and pronunciation we associate with Christ rather than “Joshua.”
In fact, “Jesus” is a transliteration of a transliteration. The New Testament authors chose to transliterate the original Hebrew name “Joshua/Jeshua” into equivalent Greek letters. These Greek letters were then transliterated into Latin letters and eventually flowed into our English language with slight spelling shifts reflective of language development. Visually, we might track the shift like this: Jeshua → Iesous → Iesus → Jesus. “Jesus” essentially became the standardized spelling with the arrival of the King James Version and its long usage in the English-speaking world.
Why Names Matter
Does it matter that through transliteration and language development “Joshua/Jeshua” became “Jesus”? In some ways the answer is “no.” Matthew makes clear that Jesus’ name (no matter how we spell it) describes and defines His ministry and salvific work. But in some ways the answer is also “yes.” Consider what has been obscured. By losing the connection to Joshua in the Old Testament, we can easily miss the typological connection between Joshua, the conqueror of Canaan, and the greater Joshua, the conqueror of sin, death, and the devil (Heb. 2:14-15). Benjamin Gladd explains it this way: “Joshua’s entrance into the land and his partial victory over the Canaanites prophetically foreshadow Jesus’s entrance into the new creational promised land and complete victory over the spiritual Canaanites. In bearing the name Jesus/Joshua, Jesus of Nazareth will exterminate Israel’s longtime foes—sin, death, and Satan—and bring about an unparalleled act of redemption: the salvation of individuals from sin’s bondage.”
The Sweetest Name I Know
None of this is designed to make you start calling Jesus by another name or to make you question your Bible translation. Instead, I wanted to give you a peek beneath the surface of the words on the page and show you that Jesus’ work of saving us from our sins is something long foretold, even in the life and work of Joshua, and tied to the name that Jesus bears. Jesus is the name that is above every name. It is at the name of Jesus that we as Christians bow in awe and adoration. Indeed, it is at that Name that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. What better name to sing at Christmastime than…
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus—
sweetest name I know,
fills my every longing,
keeps me singing as I go.
