Could someone here help me to know when was the name Yeshua translated to Jesus in Modern English? Is Jesus mentioned in any literary works?
Jesus is mentioned frequently in Old English and Middle English texts. However, the former has a big caveat to it— in Old English he is called Hæland! That is not to say the name Iesus or variations thereof does not appear in Old English texts—it does. But these examples are few and far between. By one count, in the surviving corpus of texts written in Old English, the Latin form of the name appears only 29 times, and many of these examples appear only in the context of the author explaining the meaning of the name.
Why is Jesus called Hæland in Old English? Hæland is a translation of the Latinized name to Old English based on contemporary understandings of the name’s etymology in Hebrew— ’savior’, which is precisely what hæland means in Modern English— ‘savior’ or ‘healer’.
So why translate the name of Jesus into an Old English equivalent rather than keep the version of the name received through Latin and still used in Latin texts? Damian Fleming argues that writers —for ex. Bede— valued the truth that could be gleaned from reading Scripture in its original language. Not that Bede could read Hebrew, but based instead on the etymologies provided in the texts (for ex. Matthew 1:21), or in the commentaries of early church fathers i.e. Jerome’s Liber interpretationis hebraicorum nominum.
Bede wrote in Latin, but in his homilies and glosses he reflects on the meaning of Jesus as ‘savior’. Ælfric of Eynsham, writing in the late 10th century, undertakes similar reflections, but in Old English:
Iesus is ebreisc nama. þæt is on leden Saluator. and on englisc Hælend. for ðan ðe he gehælð his folc fram heora synnum. and gelæt to ðam ecan earde heofenan rices.
Jesus is a Hebrew name and it is in Latin Saluator and in English Savior, because he saves his people from their sins and leads them to the eternal land of the heavenly kingdom (trans. Fleming)
Ælfric is not the first person to render the name Jesus as Hæland, but his work teases out the logic behind the translation: an effort to understand the etymology of names in Scripture in their original language so as to reveal truths not otherwise apparent when reading in translation. As Fleming notes, the pun on Jesus’s name in Matthew 1:21 —medieval authors assume Matthew was originally written in Hebrew— makes more sense when read with Hæland instead of Jesus. But it also gives medieval authors the license to read deeper into the Old Testament, finding linguistic parallels that might prefigure Jesus (for ex. OT mentions of “savior”, “saving” as a foreshadowed reference to Jesus).
Hæland appears to have fallen into disuse as we cross the blurry boundary from Old English into Middle English. The Ormulum, a late 12th c. work written in Middle English verse uses forms based on the Latinized version of the name. Variations on the form “Jesu” by way of Old French are used in Middle English texts, for ex: Jhesu, Jesew, Jesus, Jhesus, Jhesuc, Jehesus, etc.
According to the OED it begins to appear with the modern letter J in George Herbert's The temple: sacred poems, and private ejaculations (1633), page 105 (online copy). The name appeared in Old English as Iesus at least as far back as the 10th century.
As you may know, the letter J is a modern development, to distinguish I as a consonant from I as a vowel. But in French and English, J came to represent a different sound: French /ʒ/, English /dʒ/. In the case of Jesus, the orthography originated as the first of these -- Iesus with consonantal I was respelled Jesus, and the pronunciation in English changed to match the usual value of English J.
The form Iesus with consonantal I is simply a replication of the Latin form of the name, which was also Iesus. The Latin form was in turn a straightforward transliteration of the Koine Greek form Ἰησοῦς (pronounced Yisus or Yesus).
Koine Ἰησοῦς was used to render both Yeshua and Yehoshua in the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible. The idea of distinguishing between them goes back to Jerome's Latin translation of the Christian Bible (the 'Vulgate'), which renders Greek Ἰησοῦς as Iesus, and Hebrew Yehoshua as both Iosue and Iesus in different contexts. These alternate forms gave rise to the modern English forms Jesus and Joshua.