My friends and family have, for years, listened to me refer to our Messiah as “Yahshua Anointed”, rather than the commonplace “Jesus Christ”.  When asking the reason why, my answer is both simple and complex.  I’ll describe the simple answer in this post.

The actual name that the angel of Yahweh spoke to Mary has not been lost to history.  It is well known in theological circles that in Matt. 1:21, he said “And she shall bring forth a son, and you shall call his name Yahshua, for he shall save his people from their sins.”  Of course, in our modern Bibles, we read the name “Jesus”.  I’ll assert here that the name Yahshua is extremely important to recognize, thus my use of that proper name each time I refer to our Messiah.  But for now, I’m just going to describe the etymology of how that name eventually morphed over the years to bring us our modern day name of “Jesus”.

To fully understand what the angel just told Mary, we have to dissect this verse in the original Greek text, then further back to the prior Hebrew text.  In Greek, the name which says “Jesus” is Ιησού, rendered “iEsoun”.  All of the original texts of the scrolls which comprise our New Testament were written in Hebrew, then later transliterated into Greek in order to leave the Temple in Jerusalem prior to its destruction in 70 A.D.  When the scribes did this, they did their best to make the Greek word sound as close to the Hebrew word as possible.  However, this was impossible for two reasons.  One, there was no letter “y” in the Greek alphabet, which made the scribes have to use a combination of letters that would “form” the sound of the letter “y” instead.  Two, the actual Hebrew name of Yahshua had become illegal to either say or write shortly after his death and resurrection.  Any violation of this new law would result in your death.  Therefore, the spelling was deliberately changed to comply with this new law, but the reader could silently “hear” in his mind what the actual name is/was.  This is why the Greek word we see is Ιησού, or “iEsoun”, and you can hear the name Yasuah(n) in its spelling.

Why did the angel tell Mary that his name will be “Yahshua?”  He explained, in his very next thought, the exact reason why–“…for he shall save his people from their sins….”  In fact, the angel conveyed more than that.  The word “for” in this sentence can be rendered “because”.  If you break down the Hebrew name “Yah-shua” into its components, it literally means “Yahweh salvation” or “Yahweh saves”.  The angel told Mary that she will name the child Yahshua BECAUSE he will save us.  He was not expressing the thought “You shall name him Yahshua.  And, oh by the way, he’ll also save us from our sins.”…as if that’s his job description.  No–the true name carries great weight with both his prophesied role as well as who he’s directly related to.

The margin of the KJV Bibles defines “Jesus” as “Saviour”, but this only recognizes half of his full identity.  Yes, he’s our saviour, but to omit the connection to our Father, Yahweh, as a part of his name’s true meaning leaves out the most significant reason for the name Yah shua.

In fact, over 500 years prior to his birth, the prophet Zechariah told us about Yahshua BY NAME, but hardly anyone has ever understood it.  Don’t believe it?  Setting the scene–The prophet Zechariah is telling us about the 2nd coming of Yahshua Anointed, not his first arrival.  When he arrives, Satan is about to be locked up for 1,000 years and he knows he must try to prevent Yahshua from succeeding.  With this in mind, read:  Zech. 3:1–“And he showed me YAHSHUA  the high priest standing before the angel of Yahweh and Satan standing at his right hand to resist him.”

If you doubt that this is the person that Zechariah is referring to, keep reading in v. 5–“And I said, let them set a fair mitre upon his head.  So, they set a fair mitre upon his hear, and clothed him with garments….  v. 7–…then you shall also judge my house [Temple], and you shall keep my courts…  v. 8–…Hear now, O Yahshua the high priest, you and your fellows that sit before you….”  The person identified as Yahshua, is clearly our Messiah which Zechariah is describing.

The book of Zechariah was written in Jerusalem in 520 to 518 B.C.E and he just identified, by name, our Messiah as “Yahshua”.  Of course, our Bibles read “Joshua”, but keep in mind, there was no letter “j” in the Hebrew alphabet.  The actual Hebrew word that has become “Joshua” is “ieusho”.  Once again, when you say that word out loud, you can hear the “Y” sound from the letters i-e pronounced together.

Our Messiah’s name, “Yahshua”, eventually went through several transformations before it ever came to us in modern times, as “Jesus”.  I already mentioned that his actual name became illegal to say–which I’ll describe in more detail in Part 2 of this topic–but to obey the new law, his name, still in Hebrew, was abbreviated to “Yeshu”.  It was THIS word that the scribes saw as they were busy transliterating the Hebrew text into Greek.  Since there was no letter “Y” in Greek, to create the sound that was closest to it, the name was written “iesou”.  The “sh” sound was lost, as there are no letters in the Greek alphabet to make this sound.

The letter combination “ou” is a dipthong, arising from the Greek  attempt to transliterate the sound “oo”, as in “woof!”.  Our modern letter “u” does  this easily.  After a while, readers of the Greek text were confused because all masculine names ended with the letter “s”, so they added the letter “s”, forming the name “iesous”.

The next translation was into Latin.  The dipthong “ou” was no longer necessary, so the name became “iesus”.  Finally, sometime in the early 1530’s, Latin names–which were proper nouns–placed a “tail” on the letter “i”, creating the letter “J”.  Thus, for the first time in history, we are introduced to the newly minted name “Jesus”.  This is easily discovered on Wikipedia, here:

One important point to ponder, which I’ll get into greater detail on Part 2 of this post, when it became illegal to say or write the name Yahshua, it was because the high priest incorrectly believed that Yahshua had committed the crime of blasphemy.  Even though he did not do that, THIS was the catalyst of his execution order.

In the Old Testament, whenever a person committed the crime of blasphemy, in addition to putting them to death, ALL items that contained that person’s name had to be destroyed or the name erased from them.  This included scrolls, monuments, buildings, everything.  The “sin” of blasphemy brought with it a secondary curse, that your NAME be forever erased and forgotten.

This law was obeyed perfectly.  This is why there are zero documents or any historical references to Yahshua Anointed today.  Even the historian Josephus, who was born about 5 years after Yahshua’s death and resurrection, could find no written materials that contained that name.

Today, whenever people say the name “Jesus”, they are unwittingly reinforcing the curse that had begun around 30 A.D.  And nobody knows it.