Yeshua is the Hebrew name of the Messiah of Israel. A short form of Yehoshua, Joshua, built from the root ישׁע, yasha, to save, to deliver, to rescue. The name is a sentence in miniature: HaShem saves. When the angel in Matthew 1:21 tells Yosef what to name the child, the reasoning the angel gives is a Hebrew word-play: "call His name Yeshua, for He will save His people from their sins." The pun lives in the Hebrew. It is invisible in Greek and in English.

The path from Yeshua to Jesus runs through two translation layers. The Greek New Testament renders the name as Iesous, fitting Hebrew consonants into Greek morphology and dropping the ayin sound Greek cannot carry. The Latin Vulgate renders Iesous as Iesus, and English inherits that chain via the letter J, a late addition to the Latin alphabet that splits off from I in the sixteenth century. Jesus is a faithful English rendering of the Latin rendering of the Greek rendering of the Hebrew. Each step was faithful to the translators who made it. The chain still put three layers of linguistic distance between the English reader and the name Miriam called her son.

Saying Yeshua is not a gimmick. It is restoring the Hebrew the name was always spoken in. Yeshua was a first-century Jew in Judea and Galilee. His disciples spoke Hebrew and Aramaic. His mother did not call Him Jesus. The Scholar's Table uses Yeshua throughout because the Hebrew name is the historically and textually correct one, and because the Hebrew keeps the sentence the name is in, HaShem saves, audible every time the name is said.