To those who claim YAHWEH and Yahshua yet teach people “Jesus” means “hail zeus”…
You are correct to say YAHWEH is our Heavenly Father’s NAME and correct to say Yahshua is the Name of His ‘Son’. And it is correct that ‘Jesus’ was never the name we were to call upon or treat as holy in any way.
And you are right that the world has been deceived for many years and we do indeed have a great responsibility to tell the truth, to move out of the ignorance of the past, and move forward.
So let us actually think on how to tell the world about the truth.
The very first step would be to make sure we have the truth about the lie we were given before.
There’s a very shoddy mythology being spread in the Messianic Movement surrounding the false name “Jesus” and it is precisely that one shared in memes like these.
Yes “Jesus” is a false name, but no it doesn’t mean “Hail zeus”, not in English not in Greek. It’s simply the watered down English version of a meaningless Greek transliteration of Yeshua, an Aramaic variant of Yahshua. Itself a contraction of Yahoshua, meaning “YAH is Salvation”.
The inventor of the “hail zeus” theory clearly didn’t know any Greek and relied on his audience to lack any knowledge of Greek either.
“Jesus” is quite simply the result of each culture adapting the previous version of the Messiah’s actual Name instead of adopting His actual Name.
Starting with the Yeshua variant form made through transliteration, it was then transliterated into Greek as iesous. Which again has no actual meaning at all. “ie” does not mean hail. And “sous” does not mean zeus.
Transliteration is sound for sound transference from one language to another. Taking into consideration also the grammatical rules of the receiving language. No meaning is carried over whatsoever. And the word that is manufactured as a result has no meaning whatsoever.
In transliteration “y” becomes “i”, “e” stays “e”. The Greek language has no “sh” sound so the nearest means of replicating the same sound is “s”. “u” in Greek is a short sound as in “cup”. It only becomes the “oo” sound by becoming a diphthong “ou”. And in Greek “a” names are considered feminine and “s” names considered masculine so, “s” became the ending.
Yahshua became Yeshua, and Yeshua became iesous. Then when the church made Latin their official language they transliterated the Greek “iesous” into Latin as “iesus”, which remained the fake name for about 1200 years until the French conquered England in the Norman invasion. As the english adapted to French influence they began to pronounce “iesus” in a Frenchified way but couldn’t replicate the French phonetically the same way. Resulting in further bastardization and the name everyone knows now “Jesus”.
There was no hail zeus. No direct replacement. No overt change. Just a slow gradual deception of the devil to dilute and dilute and dilute the Name of the Messiah, from Hebrew to Aramaic, from Aramaic to Greek, from Greek to Latin, and from Latin to English by way of French influence.
We indeed have a great responsibility to share the truth in all its fullness, and so we must be most cautious not to repeat traditional tropes easily dismantled by anyone with even a minor knowledge of philology.
Even if we end up with people believing in YAHWEH and Yahshua because of our testimony against the fake name “Jesus”, when they learn better later that “iesous” never did mean “hail zeus” or anything else for that matter, they will begin to doubt (as they always do) the True Names aswell. As they should when finding falsehood in our truth claims.
We should indeed be rid of that fake name “Jesus” and the “lord” and “god” lies aswell, but we must know why and help others know why aswell. Otherwise we are only establishing doubt in hearts and minds further down the road.
Question Everything
templecrier.com/articles