The manner of explaining this seems desperate to Maldonatus (on Matthew 1), when he says: “The Septuagint reduced the Hebrew word to a Greek form [either] as they were able, or as they knew how.” But more spirited is he who writes, in these words (ch. 23 of his Quinquagena), Antonius of Nebrija: “The Seventy interpreters, who first dared to turn the sacred letters from Hebrew into Greek, made out of Iehosua Iēsoun — the letter he being erased, [that is,] with the point holem — which they did in very many other places too, especially in those three letters which are altogether unknown to Greeks and Latins (cheth, he, hain), which sometimes, the points being retained, [and] sometimes with their points, they separated [pricked out] — which one may see by running through the sacred names of Scripture. But why the Greeks gave to this particle a termination in the syllable -us, through the diphthong ou, and set upon that same [syllable] a circumflex accent, I could not find anyone to tell me. But since the Greeks never circumflex the last syllables of words, unless they are contracted from synaeresis — and not from just any synaeresis, but only from that which is made out of an acute and a grave — I began to inquire whether there were, in the Hebrew syllable, [accents] of such a kind as could, by synaeresis, be compacted into one syllable. Which was manifestly caught [out]: since, in Iehosua, on the penult there is an acute accent, and on the last a grave, out of which, contracted, the syllable coalesces, in which a circumflex accent is required to be placed. But those two syllables which that learned man makes in Iehosua [I say] to be only one. And therefore we shall say, more truly and more easily, that immediately — not out of Iehosua, but out of Iesua — JESUS was made.
(This one and the same [I say] to be of the same value with those Seventy, as was shown above:) and because, without aspiration at the beginning, it was softer, that most difficult final guttural (of which already treated often) they changed into s; and, so that it might still have some force from the throat, they circumflexed [it]; and so, out of the disyllable Iesua, disyllabic — or, when we utter it in a more Greek manner, trisyllabic — IESUS came forth. This the Syrian Evangelists and Apostles also confirm, among whom it is always written Ieschua. So [in] 1 Esdras ch. 2, v. 2, Iesua; and v. 36, where our [Interpreter] renders Iesue, [and] the Seventy, Iēsou (v. 40, Iēsoun). Nay, it would be permissible to say that formerly an apocope was customary in this name (about which above, question 10, [reply] to the second — Osiander’s reasoning in the third cause); and so, out of the Hebrew and Syrian Iesu, it would be, in Greek and Latin, IESUS. But why, among the Latins…
(col. 34)
…this name is sometimes written thus, IHESVS, I said in the annotation on the epistles of St. Boniface (general [note] 7, from book 5 of Bede’s book On Music). But Wicelius cites, in his Exercises of Piety, manuscript Codices in which is written HIESVS — but, as I at least think, not well. The compendious [abbreviated] writing, however, was this: ΙΗ — which they used for those 318 [servants], with whom, over the five Kings, Abraham triumphed, to be mystically noted, thus: ΙΗ. Whence Prudentius: “If what three hundred, with twice-nine added, can [signify], we may know by the mystic figure.”