What's in a Name? The Theology of Yahusha and the Question We've Stopped Asking

There is a peculiar moment in the American immigration story that many of us have witnessed. A family arrives, papers in hand, and an official (well-meaning, rushed, impatient with unfamiliar syllables) anglicizes the name. Wojciech becomes Walter. Giuseppe becomes Joseph. The family accepts it. After all, what choice do they have? And yet, something is lost. Not everything, perhaps. The person is still the person. But the name carried history, heritage, the echo of grandparents and the old country. The new name fits more easily into English. It works. But it does not quite mean what the old name meant.

I mention this because we face a similar question when we speak of the one Christians have called Jesus. For most of us, that name is not merely familiar; it is sacred. We have prayed in that name, been baptized in that name, found forgiveness and transformation through that name. And rightly so. God has worked through the name "Jesus" to save countless millions. One does not wish to diminish that. One certainly does not wish to sound as though centuries of faithful witness and martyrdom somehow missed the mark.

But here is the oddity. The name "Jesus" is not the name His mother called Him. It is not the name His disciples used when they followed Him through Galilee. It is not the name proclaimed by the prophets or inscribed in the Hebrew Scriptures. That name (His actual name) was Yahusha (יהושע). And unlike the immigration official's substitution, this was not a neutral adaptation. This was a change that severed the immediate connection between the Messiah's identity and the very name of the God He came to reveal.

The Biblical World and the Weight of Names

In the ancient world (and especially in the world of Israel) names were never merely labels. They were declarations. They carried meaning, mission, destiny. When God changes Abram's name to Abraham, He is not simply preferring one sound over another. He is announcing a vocation: "father of many nations" (Genesis 17:5). When Jacob wrestles with the angel and emerges as Israel, the new name testifies to his struggle and his transformation (Genesis 32:28). Names, in Scripture, are theological statements.

This is especially true when the divine name itself appears in a person's name. Consider Elijah (EliYahu in Hebrew), which means "My God is Yahuah." Or Isaiah (YeshaYahu), meaning "Yahuah is salvation." These were not arbitrary choices. They were confessions of faith, woven into the very identity of the one who bore them. To know someone's name was to know something of their story, their purpose, their God.

And this brings us to the name revealed at the burning bush: YHWH (יהוה, Strong's H3068), the unpronounceable tetragrammaton, the name so sacred that Israel eventually ceased to speak it aloud. "I AM WHO I AM," God tells Moses. "This is my name forever, the name you shall call me from generation to generation" (Exodus 3:15). That name (Yahuah, in its spoken form) is the covenant name, the name of the God who delivers, who keeps promises, who is utterly and eternally Himself.

Now, if you are following the biblical logic here, you begin to see why the name of the Messiah matters. This is not merely about pronunciation. It is about identity. It is about who God is and what He has come to do.

Yahusha: The Name That Declares What God Is Doing

The name Yahusha (יהושע, Strong's H3091) is formed from two Hebrew elements:

• Yahuah (יהוה, H3068) - the divine name

• Yasha (ישע, H3467) - to save, to deliver

The meaning is unmistakable: Yahuah saves. Not "God saves" in some generic sense, but Yahuah (the covenant God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob). This God saves. The name is a proclamation. It announces the mission before the mission begins.

We see this in the Scriptures themselves. In Numbers 13:16, Moses renames Hoshea (הושע, Strong's H1954, meaning "he saves") as Yahusha (יהושע). The text does not explain why, but the meaning is clear enough. The addition of the divine name is not decorative. It locates the source of salvation precisely where it must be located: in the God who made the covenant and who keeps it.

When the angel speaks to Joseph in Matthew's account, the message is the same: "She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins" (Matthew 1:21). Now, the Greek text here uses "Iēsous," but the angel would have spoken Aramaic or Hebrew, and the name given would have been Yahusha. The name and the mission are inseparable. To call Him by that name is to declare that salvation comes from Yahuah, through the one who bears Yahuah's name and does Yahuah's work.

This is not speculation. This is the plain sense of the text, once we attend to the Hebrew behind the Greek translation. The name Yahusha was common in Second Temple Judaism precisely because it testified to what Israel hoped for: that Yahuah Himself would come to save His people.

The Journey Through Languages and What Got Lost Along the Way

Fair enough. One understands how this happened. The Gospel moved from a Hebrew-speaking world into a Greek-speaking one, then into Latin, and eventually into the languages of Europe. Each step involved translation, adaptation, approximation. The linguistic journey looked something like this:

• Hebrew: יהושע (YHWSHA - Yahusha)

• Aramaic: ישוע (Yeshua) - a shortened form that removes "Yah" (יה)

• Greek: Ἰησοῦς (Iēsous) - Greek lacks the "sh" sound

• Latin: Iesus

• English: Jesus - the "J" sound was introduced in the 1600s

No malice, surely. No conspiracy. Just the ordinary process of linguistic adaptation. And God, one must affirm, has used the name "Jesus" to extraordinary effect. Martyrs have died confessing it. Saints have found peace in it. The name has echoed through cathedrals and whispered in prison cells and proclaimed on hillsides. To claim otherwise would be absurd.

But here is the problem. The Greek rendering, and every step that followed, did something the Hebrew name did not do. It removed "Yah" (יה, the shortened form of the divine name) from the Messiah's name. What had been a theological declaration ("Yahuah saves") became simply a name, albeit a beloved one.

Now, one might say: Does it matter? After all, we know who we mean when we say "Jesus." We know whose name we are invoking. And that is true enough. But if we are serious about the biblical witness (if we genuinely care about recovering what the text actually says and what the first witnesses actually proclaimed) then we must ask whether something was lost in translation. Not everything, certainly.

But something.

That's the Point

I grew up Catholic, in a world of Latin phrases and sacred mystery. Later, I moved into Pentecostal circles, where the name of Jesus was spoken with fervor and power. I have known both traditions to be deeply faithful, deeply transformative. I do not stand here as one outside the fold, pointing fingers. I stand as one within it, asking whether we might press deeper, might recover something that has been quietly set aside.

And here is what strikes me as most remarkable. We have never entirely forgotten. We still sing "Hallelujah" (HalleluYah, הַלְלוּיָהּ in Hebrew), which means "Praise Yah." Every time we sing it, we are invoking the shortened form of the divine name (Yah, יָהּ). We do this without thinking, without controversy, without apology. We know what it means. We know whom we are praising.

So why, then, do we hesitate to recognize that same "Yah" in the name of the Messiah? If we are comfortable praising Yah, should we not also be comfortable acknowledging that the one through whom salvation comes bears that same Yah in His very name?

This is not legalism. This is not a claim that everyone who has ever called on the name of Jesus has somehow failed. God forbid. But it is an invitation (a gentle, persistent invitation) to reconsider what we have inherited and whether we might return to the fullness of what the Scriptures reveal.

The Third Commandment and the Faithfulness We Owe

There is another layer here, and it concerns the commandment: "You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name" (Exodus 20:7, NIV). Most of us, when we hear that, think of cursing or flippant speech. And that is part of it. But the deeper meaning concerns representation. To "take" God's name (or "bear" it, as some translations render it) is to carry it, to claim association with it. To do so "in vain" or "for emptiness" is to misrepresent Him, to distort His character, to treat His name carelessly.

If God Himself placed His name in the Messiah's name (if Yahusha is indeed "Yahuah saves"), then what happens when that name is altered? Consider what we are actually doing. We are not merely translating sounds from one language to another. We are removing the divine name itself from the equation. The "Yah" in Yahusha is not decorative. It is not optional. It is the explicit declaration that this salvation comes from Yahuah. When that element disappears (whether through Greek phonetics or English adaptation), we have not simply changed how we pronounce the name. We have changed what the name says about who is doing the saving.

This may have been unintentional. No one gathered in council and voted to obscure the divine name. But unintentional does not mean inconsequential. The erasure is real, even if partial.

And it matters.

And here is where intellectual honesty comes into play. If we believe that Scripture is authoritative, that God's self-revelation matters, that names carry weight, then we cannot simply shrug and say, "Close enough." We must ask whether the God who insisted on His name being remembered (Exodus 3:15) would be indifferent to His name being removed from the Messiah's identity.

The question, then, is not about sincerity. Millions have sincerely called on the name of Jesus. The question is about coherence. Can we claim to honor the Scriptures while simultaneously accepting a name that removes the very element the Scriptures insist is central? One can try, of course. Many do. But it requires a certain cognitive dissonance, a willingness to hold two truths at odds with each other.

What This Means for Faithfulness Today

So what are we to do? Do we abandon the name "Jesus" and insist that everyone immediately adopt "Yahusha"? That would be both unrealistic and uncharitable. God has used the name "Jesus" to save multitudes, and He will continue to do so. But perhaps we can begin to acknowledge what has been lost and gently, patiently recover it.

This is not a rejection of our heritage. It is a deepening of it. It is an invitation to return to the biblical text with fresh eyes, to see what the earliest witnesses saw, to hear what they heard. It is an act of faithfulness to say: Here is the name that was given. Here is what it means. And here is how it has been transmitted to us, with both fidelity and alteration.

For those who are willing to take this step, the path is not difficult. We begin by recognizing that the Father's name is Yahuah (יהוה), not a title or a substitute. We acknowledge that the Messiah's name is Yahusha (יהושע), meaning "Yahuah saves." We see how that name was adapted through Greek, Latin, and English. And we honor both the past and the present (what God has done through the name "Jesus" and what He always intended to reveal through the name Yahusha).

Imagine for a moment a conversation between a Western missionary and a village elder in East Africa. The elder, hearing the Gospel for the first time, asks a simple question: "Why do you call him Jesus when his mother would have called him something else?" It is the kind of question a child might ask, unencumbered by centuries of tradition. And it is precisely the kind of question most of us have never thought to ask. We inherit our traditions, and we assume they are complete, that nothing important was lost along the way.

The Question We Must Ask Ourselves

But what if something was? What if the recovery of this name is not about rejecting what came before but about embracing something fuller, richer, more rooted in the actual biblical witness?

There is a deeper current running beneath all of this. It concerns the God who pursues us through the very words we cannot stop using. We say "Hallelujah" without thinking. We speak of being "saved" without asking what that word originally meant or where it came from. We live in a world that has borrowed the moral vocabulary of Scripture (justice, mercy, love, redemption) and then tried to sever those words from the story that gave them meaning.

But the story does not let go so easily. The name Yahusha is part of that story. It is not a footnote. It is not an optional detail. It is the proclamation, embedded in a name, that the covenant God of Israel has come to save His people. And when we recover that name, we are not merely correcting a translation. We are stepping back into the narrative, allowing it to reframe our worship, our identity, our mission.

The Invitation That Still Stands

Perhaps this is difficult. Perhaps it feels strange, even unsettling, to consider calling the Messiah by a name most of us have never heard spoken in a church. I understand that. I have walked that road myself, from Catholic liturgy to Pentecostal fervor to something quieter, more rooted, more attentive to what the text actually says. It is not easy to reconsider what we have always known. But intellectual honesty requires it. Faithfulness invites it.

Peter stood before the Sanhedrin and declared, "Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). He was speaking of the Messiah. And the name he would have used, in that moment, speaking before the Jewish Sanhedrin, was not the Greek Iēsous. It was Yahusha. The name that declares, from its very structure, that Yahuah is the one who saves.

If that is true (if "no other name" matters this much) then surely the actual name, the one given by the angel and spoken by the disciples, deserves our attention. Not our obsession, perhaps. Not our division. But our attention. Our consideration. Our willingness to ask whether we have settled for less than what the Scriptures actually offer.

And perhaps (just perhaps) in a world that has forgotten the power of names, that treats words as mere sounds rather than revelations, the recovery of Yahusha's true name is not merely an academic exercise. It is an act of resistance. It is a declaration that words matter, that names matter, that the God who revealed His own name at the burning bush cares deeply about how we name His Son.

The invitation stands. Not to abandon what has been, but to embrace what is. Not to condemn those who say "Jesus," but to invite them (and ourselves) into the fullness of what the Scriptures reveal. Yahusha: the name that declares, from the very first syllable, that Yahuah saves.

That is not a small thing.

It is, in fact, the whole point.