A Name Given as an Instruction
Matthew's Gospel records a second naming scene that mirrors, and consciously echoes, the Old Testament pattern: an angel instructs Joseph to name Mary's son “Jesus” — that is, Yeshua, the contracted form of Yehoshua current in first-century Judea — and gives a reason built directly into the naming: because he will save his people from their sins (Matthew 1:21). Where Joshua's name change in Numbers is narrated without stated rationale, Matthew's naming scene makes the meaning of the name explicit and ties it directly to a stated mission.
This is the strongest textual link in the whole tradition between the name's etymology (“Yahweh saves”) and a specific theological claim: that this particular bearer of the name saves “from sins,” not primarily from military threat or exile, as with the earlier bearers.
From Hebrew to Greek to “Jehoshuah”
The New Testament was written in Greek, and the name appears there as Ἰησοῦς (Iesous) — the standard Greek transliteration of the contracted Hebrew/Aramaic form Yeshua. Latin took the Greek form largely unchanged as Iesus, and English inherited it as Jesus. The older English spelling Jehoshuah, by contrast, transliterates more directly from the fuller Hebrew Yehoshua rather than from the Greek intermediary — which is why it visually preserves the divine-name element (Yeho-) that the contracted Greek/English form obscures.
Both paths lead back to the same underlying Hebrew name and the same root meaning. The spelling difference is a matter of transliteration history, not a difference in the person or claim referred to.
What the Text Claims, and What Tradition Adds
Matthew 1:21 is the clearest example in this whole study of a text stating outright that a name and a mission are the same thing. Later Christian tradition has built substantially on this — in liturgy, hymnody, and doctrine — treating the name itself as an object of devotion and, in some traditions, of specific practices (see Devotional Practice). Those later developments are real and long-standing, but they are downstream of this one narrated naming; they are not restatements of something the Gospel text itself claims about the name's power or proper use.