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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture As a brief addendum to Patrick Nugent's message: The transliterations that Patrick speaks of occurred before the New Testament was even written: by the 2nd century BCE at the *latest*, and probably as early as the Jews came into contact with the Greek culture in any significant way. We know this because the Septuagint uses the Greek names "Jesous" and "Mariam" (later, I imagine made a regular feminine noun by dropping the final 'm') in referring to Joshua and Miriam, the successor and the sister of Moses. Thus, there was no anti-Jewish agenda at all in the authors of the New Testament. Rather, they used the common Hellenistic Jewish versions of these common Jewish names. (In general, an understanding of Hellenistic Judaism really underlines the Jewishness of the New Testament...) Donald Jacob Uitvlugt At 08:59 AM 5/23/01 -0500, Patrick Nugent wrote: >"Jesus" is the English rendering of Iesus, which is the Latin rendering of >Iesous, which is the Greek rendering of the Aramaic Yeshua, more or less >equivalent to the Hebrew Joshua. There's no "sh" sound in Greek hence the >switch to s. Gk habitually uses a grammatical form ending in -s to render >Hebrew and Aramaic masculine names that end in -a or -ah. > >The NT was written in Greek, not Aramaic or Hebrew. Nothing more or less >interesting than that. Nobody "changed" Jesus' name; they just tried >pronouncing it in their own language, and altered it in the >process--precisely as we do when we harden the "J" and change the long "u" >vowel to an English schwa. > > >Patrick Nugent. > > >At 09:27 AM 5/23/2001 -0400, you wrote: >>medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture >> >>Hello, >>What I meant to ask was who decided (and why) to call Joshua (Yoshua), >>Jesus. After all at that time Joshua must have been a common name in the >>Roman Empire and the mother of Joshua was Miriam (not Mary) again a >>common name. John is I suppose Jonathan. The question I am asking is why >>were these Hebrew/Jewish names change? Was anything behind it? Was it an >>attempted to make them seem less Jewish? >>William >>PS I am still interested in Elizabeth because as far as I know its not a >>popular Jewish name. Is it Hebrew? >> ============================================== Donald Jacob Uitvlugt PhD candidate in Theology University of Notre Dame [log in to unmask] ********************************************************************** To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME to: [log in to unmask] To send a message to the list, address it to: [log in to unmask] To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion to: [log in to unmask] In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to: [log in to unmask] For further information, visit our web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html