Jerome’s Vulgate. That’s where the split happened. He kept Jesus as Iesus but rendered Joshua as Iosue.
Later translators updated Joshua to match the Hebrew, but Jesus stayed put since it was central to the faith.
The Pentecost detail stands out. When the disciples spoke in tongues, the listeners didn’t suddenly understand some foreign language, they heard the message in their own native tongue.
Next time you’re praying and that worry about saying the right name creeps in, remember God was already meeting people in their own languages back then, no translator required.
The name traveled with the message.
Philippians 2:9 says God gave him the name above every name, and when the apostles wrote the New Testament they used the Greek form Iesous because that’s how the scriptures were already being read in synagogues across the empire.
In Acts 7, Stephen speaks to the crowd and quotes the Old Testament story of Joshua but calls him by that same Greek name. So people who didn’t speak Hebrew could still call on the one who saves.
The name came to us through God’s own people.
A coworker once told me ‘Jesus’ was derived from ‘Hey-Zeus.’ Long before Christ was born, Jewish scholars translating the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek (the Septuagint) were rendering Joshua’s name as Iesous.
Even the Hebrew was already shortened. The apostles were comfortable using the Greek form.