Iēsous

Reference works agree that Ἰησοῦς transcribes the Second Temple Hebrew name יֵשׁוּעַ, itself a contraction of the older יְהוֹשֻׁעַ, and that the Septuagint renders both forms with the single Greek name, so that Joshua son of Nun, Jeshua the high priest of Zechariah 3, and Jesus of Nazareth are homonymous in Greek. BDB, HALOT, and DCH connect the name to the root ישע and gloss it "YHWH is salvation"; Werner Foerster's TDNT article (3:284-293) gives the same derivation and treats the explanation in Matthew 1:21 as popular etymology, a judgment Raymond Brown's Birth of the Messiah made standard. A philological caveat pressed in Buth and Notley's Language Environment of First Century Judaea is that the second element may descend from שׁוע rather than ישע, so "the LORD saves" is better described as the functional sense than as a demonstrated one. On Matthew 1:21 the commentators divide over the bilingual problem: Luz argues that the wordplay was already current in Greek-speaking Judaism, citing Philo's gloss σωτηρία κυρίου (De mutatione nominum 121), while Davies and Allison, Nolland, Hagner, France, and Keener locate the etymology at the Hebrew level and note that name-punning was a recognized ancient convention; the claim that the verse proves a Hebrew original for Matthew is a fringe position. Nicholas Piotrowski has argued that Ezekiel 36:28-29 and 37:23 rather than LXX Psalm 129:8 supply the background for salvation from sin. On frequency, Tal Ilan's Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity records 103 bearers of the name, sixth among Palestinian Jewish male names, the datum Richard Bauckham builds on in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, though his statistical inferences have been questioned. Ἰησοῦς is also among the words written as contracted nomina sacra in the earliest Christian manuscripts, which Larry Hurtado reads as evidence of early reverence and Christopher Tuckett has questioned as possibly scribal convention. In Philippians 2:9-11 the identity of the bestowed "name above every name" is contested: Hurtado and Bauckham take it as κύριος, the Septuagint's surrogate for the divine name, a minority takes it as "Jesus" itself, and a mediating view takes it as the composite "Lord Jesus Christ." On the accompanying Χριστός, Matthew Novenson argues that it is neither a bare name nor a bare title but a Greek honorific that retains genuine messianic content.