What name was Jesus originally called?

Dave Partner
2 min readAug 25, 2019

The name Jesus was called when he was alive was ‘Isho’.
The language he spoke is called ‘Aramaic’. More precisely, he spoke a dialect of Aramaic called the Jewish Palestinian Aramaic.
In Aramaic, there is nothing like ‘Joshua’, ‘Yeshua’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Yahoshua’ etc.

His name ‘isho’ became spelt as ‘Yeshu’ (same pronunciation) when the Hebrew language was used to write about him.

Some dialects of Aramaic language is still spoken today by some parts of Syria and ‘Isho’ is still a common name there. The Christian speakers are called Syriac Christians and their gospel went directly to them and didn’t go through the Greek, Roman and English bastardization over the centuries.

Some Bible translations retain the name ‘Isho’ instead of ‘Jesus’ so as to retain the original name. Early bible translations wrote this name as ‘IS’.Check the attached picture.
Ever wondered why some people call him ‘Isa’ today?
Yes, you are right, that name is a variation of the pronunciation of the name ‘Isho’.

The man who was recorded to have taken after Moses, his actual name as recorded was “Joshua”. But the man who said he was the son of God, his actual name was “Isho”. Isho and Joshua mean the same, they are just indifferent but similar languages.

So, in what name do you pray?
Especially now that you know the true name he was recorded to have referred to when he said

“Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.”

John 14:13

Let me ask a rhetorical question here: If you can easily pronounce the original name, why stick to the adulterated one?

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