DID YOU KNOW?
All throughout history in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin languages - there was no J sound! NO JAY SOUND.
Why did Christians start using a non-Hebrew name for the Son of God?
BLAME THE PAGANS!
A name that can't even be pronounced in Greek or Hebrew because neither alphabet has the J sound changed everything!
BLAME THE PAGANS!
A name that can't even be pronounced in Greek or Hebrew because neither alphabet has the J sound changed everything!
In fact, (brace yourself) THERE WAS NO SUCH NAME as Jesus.
The actual Hebrew name was:
יהושע (yehoshu'a, and we think of that as JOSHUA.
A related Old Testament language is Aramaic and so:
ישוע (yeshu
Are you still with me?
I can keep going if you keep on reading...
Alexander the Great conquered the ancient world country by country and when he died all those conquered lands were split up into kingdoms by Alexander's generals.
So what?
So this had an EXTRAORDINARY IMPACT on language, culture, philosophy, and religion. GREEK was Sort of like a giant meteor impact.
Most ancient JEWS (ha! see the letter J?) started speaking GREEK and eventually lost the ability to read or to talk in HEBREW or ARAMAIC. Greek became the international common language.
Jesus is very rarely DIRECTLY quoted in the NT in Aramaic. He was not speaking Greek but the NT is (thanks to the 70 translators) written in Greek.
Jesus is very rarely DIRECTLY quoted in the NT in Aramaic. He was not speaking Greek but the NT is (thanks to the 70 translators) written in Greek.
What good were the ancient writings (Old Testament) to Jews if they couldn't read them?
None. 200 years before B.C. became A.D. a body of 70 translators set to work and out comes a NEW version of the Hebrew and Aramaic into GREEK (it was called Septuagint which means the 70).
(Hebrew scholars always and still do learn Hebrew and can read it and write it) but ordinary folks did not/could not.
If I haven't lost you yet - let's go one level deeper, shall we?
When copyists (scribes) started copying the Bible and they came to the letter I (pronounced yuh) they put a flourish in the script - a sort of tail (called a swash) and it looks like this: J.
Aha! It was pretty but now it became pretty confusing.
YESHUA became JOSHUA and I Ἰησοῦς (iesous) became JESUS.Aha! It was pretty but now it became pretty confusing.
Christ or Christos is PAGAN Greek. Jesus is pagan Greek.
Jehovah is Catholic Spanish derived from pagan Latin and mispronounced with J sound.
So you get - in the Restoration/Lutheran Middle Ages - Bibles that had ‘Jacob’ and ‘Joseph’ and ‘Joshua’ and ‘Jesus’ and ‘Judah’ - all spelled with J BUT PRONOUNCED AS Y (would be in English).
The German ‘Jude’ is pronounced ‘Y’hudah’. It means ‘Jew’, which is an English word derived from - guess where - ‘Jude’.
Except English DOES have a ‘J’ sound.
This also means there was no such name as JEHOVAH either!
Four Hebrew letter (yod he vav he) was not pronounced for fear of "taking God's name in vain." יְהֹוָה Yəhōwā, Remove the vowels - they were never written down...
Years later, some cultures began using the "I" for the vowel sound and "J" for a "Y" sound. It was not until around 1500 AD that the letter J took on the "dg" sound we are familiar with today.
The name JEHOVAH was invented by Catholic scholar (and anti-Semite) Raymundus Martini in 1270 A.D.
English translator William Tyndale selected Martini's Jehovah for God's name and introduced it to English speakers in 1522. English speakers mistakenly used the J (sound juh) instead of Y sound (yuh).
SUMMING UP in CONCLUSION
Nobody used the names Jehovah or Jesus historically until the sixteenth century A.D. or Common Era.
Pagan names were used employing Greek and Latin and later mispronounced in English as variants.)
Pagan names were used employing Greek and Latin and later mispronounced in English as variants.)
If you are sensitive about saying American INDIANS instead of "Native Americans" - then be consistent about Yeshua too.
Or - if you are a Jehovah's Witness and so pedantic about everything else - why not be accurate as possible when it comes to the Name of God and His son?
Biblical scholars around the world use YAHWEH because it is as close as possible as we can get but JW's are pig-headed, obstinate, and - duh - contrarian in every detail.
Jesus spoke in Aramaic but is rarely EXACTLY quoted in our Pagan New Testament.
"And these leftovers from Aramaic caused most scholars to say he probably spoke most of the time in Aramaic, which was a Semitic language — it was related to Hebrew, and very much like Hebrew in Judea and Galilee at that time. This means we probably don’t have the very words of Jesus all the time because he didn’t speak in Greek, and what we have is Greek. The New Testament was written in Greek originally, and we read it in our translations. And so, even if he sometimes taught in Greek, which he may well have, readers of English today don’t have the very words because they’re reading English."
Biblical scholars around the world use YAHWEH because it is as close as possible as we can get but JW's are pig-headed, obstinate, and - duh - contrarian in every detail.
Jesus spoke in Aramaic but is rarely EXACTLY quoted in our Pagan New Testament.
"And these leftovers from Aramaic caused most scholars to say he probably spoke most of the time in Aramaic, which was a Semitic language — it was related to Hebrew, and very much like Hebrew in Judea and Galilee at that time. This means we probably don’t have the very words of Jesus all the time because he didn’t speak in Greek, and what we have is Greek. The New Testament was written in Greek originally, and we read it in our translations. And so, even if he sometimes taught in Greek, which he may well have, readers of English today don’t have the very words because they’re reading English."
- “Talitha cumi” in Mark 5:41
- “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” in Mark 15:34
- “Ephphatha”in Mark 7:34
- “Abba” in Mark 14:36
