What is the origin of the words “Jesus” and “Christ”?
Question: What is the origin of the words “Jesus” and “Christ”?
Answer: For the English-speaking Christians Jesus Christ is the person who lived in the first century Judea, the Messiah of God of Israel, who died through crucifixion in 28 A.D. and was resurrected on the third day. But do the Christians know the real Jesus Christ and how many of them of them know His true name?
However, few of them know His true name: Yeshua. When the gospels were translated into Greek and Latin for the gentile believers, the name Yeshua had to go through a difficult transliteration into Greek, since there was no sh-sound in the language: Ἰησοῦς, Iesus (eeh-soos). From Greek to Latin the name became Iesus (yeh-zus) and from Latin into English: Jesus, as letter “j” replaced “i” to depicts the new y-sound in Latin. What may be interesting for the reader is that the Hebrew name for Joshua and Jesus is one and the same: Yehoshua or the short form Yeshua. One name appears in the Greek translations of the Hebrew and Apostolic scriptures: Iesus, but for well-known doctrinal reasons the translators chose two different foreign names for the Hebrew name Yehoshua: Joshua and Jesus.
With the word “Christ”, the things went quite a bit different. The Hebrew word mashiach, which means “anointed”, was translated into Greek as Χριστός hristos. That was not a new word for the Greeks, since in the Greek mythology all deities were “hristos” as they were anointed by the chief deity Zevs (Latin Zeus). In Latin “hristos” became “christos” (kristos) since letter “c” or “k” needed to be added to the beginning of a foreign word starting with “h”; otherwise, the letter “h” would be silent. Into English the Latin word “christos” was shortened to “Christ”. The Hebrew word mashiach was also transliterated into English through Greek as “messiah”. What may also be interesting for the reader is that in the Bible all high priests and kings of Israel were “mashiach” or anointed ones, but as it was the case with the name Yehoshua, this word was also a subject of a selective translation, since we see it rendered as “anointed” in the Hebrew scripture but “Christ” in the Apostolic writings.
Hence, through distant and loose transliterations and translations the name of Yeshua HaMashiach, the Anointed of YHVH, became “Jesus Christ”. (Read more)
That “transformation” of Yeshua the Anointed to “Jesus Christ” would not have been a big issue, if the name was the only thing the gentiles changed. The worst thing is that they changed almost everything that could have been changed about the Anointed of YHVH.
Through poor and sometimes intentional mistranslations and misinterpretations of His teachings, and especially the teachings of His disciple Shaul (Paul), the Hebrew Yeshua was taken out of His Hebrew roots and turned into a gentile, so that today we have a Jesus Christ who came to abolish the Law of His Father, reject His own people, and create a new religion called Christianity and a new religious entity called the Church apart from Israel, and even the perception of His physical appearance was changed from being a middle easterner (a son of Shem) to a westerner (a son of Yaphet) to fit the replacement theology of the Roman church. (Read more)