Just a few more thoughts:
God preserved the orthography of the Tetragrammaton in His Word in Hebrew, and yet, no one knows how to pronounce it. Why did God allow the pronunciation of His eternal name to be lost, i.e. NOT PRESERVED?
I ask this to make this point:
Just because we see IESOUS in the New Testament writings, doesn't mean we should assume that this is what God intended to preserve forever as it pertains to the name of His Son. Rather, it merely reflects the fact that the authors of the New Testaments, primarily Paul, but others as well, were Greek speaking and so, received inspiration in the language with which they were most familiar.
In the LXX, it was common for the translators to simply transliterate Hebrew names using Greek characters. So, for example, Balaam, or בִּלְעָם becomes Βαλαάμ, and etc. Therefore, the name of Joshua from the OT, or יְהוֹשֻׁעַ becomes in Greek Ἰησοῦς.
Note that the
iota is the character used in Greek to reflect the
yod in Hebrew.
Why does this matter? Because by the time we get to the creation of the letter "J" in English, we need to realize that "J" didn't used to have the sound we currently tend to give it.
"J", phonetically, is the voiced palatal approximant. See here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatal_approximant
Note in the link how it is proven that the English "J" used to be the phonetical equivalent of
iota in Greek, but only came to sound the way it does due to something phoneticists call "
yod-dropping".
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonol...s#Yod-dropping
One example given is the transliterated word "Hallelujah", were the "j" has a distinctly "y" sound. Interestingly, this "y" sound in the last syllable of hallelujah preserves the pronunciation of the first syllable and truncated form in and of the Tetragrammaton, i.e. Yah, thus indicating the correct sound of the first syllable of the name Joshua in Hebrew.
Which brings me to another, main point:
It is undoubtedly true that Alexander Magnus brought Hellenization to Palestine, and that Greek became a featured language. Indeed, by the time of Rome, it became the lingua franca of the empire.
When this happens, languages will of course blend and certain words will be borrowed from one another. This is called calques. English is in fact quite the admixture of borrowed words and phrases.
See:
http://www-tc.pbs.org/moyers/journal.../mcwhorter.pdf
This explains why so many Jews of the era in which Christ lived had Greek names. It's no big secret or conspiracy to prove anything other than the region was conquered by Greek speaking people and many of the Jews acculturated into Hellenism. It doesn't mean that every Jew therefore was Hellenized (Consider Y'hudhah HaMakabi and his rebellion against the Hellenist Antiochus IV Epiphanes).
What's more, take a look at the following:
Alphabet in English is
alpha,
beta in Greek (i.e. the first two letters in Greek).
But
alpha,
beta is really nothing more than
aleph,
bet in Hebrew, or the first two letters of Hebrew.
See the overlap? Greek borrowed from Hebrew and Hebrew borrowed from Greek.
This is why there is no real conflict between Yeshua and Iesous. Thus, the fact we see a Greek New Testament with a Greek name for our Savior, is NO BIG DEAL.
It certainly isn't some way to rack up points against the prefer-to-use-Yeshua crowd.
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