🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 08 May 1998 20:31:06 GMT, jaxx47@hotmail.com wrote:

>  I seem to have recently gotten involved in a debate over the nature of the
>name "Jesus" as it appears in the New Testament.

Such debates tend to be religious rather than scientific, for obvious
reasons.

>My current understanding is
>that the actual spelling in Greek is "IESOUS,"

That's one Latinization used for the Greek spelling. The real spelling
in the NT manuscripts is iota eta sigma omicron ypsilon sigma, to
mention the characters by name, for obvious reasons.

>and that this is a variation of the name "Jason,"

Not according to any theory or hypothesis I've heard of. One might as
well say "Jesus" or "Iesous" is a variant of "Jussi". (Well, it isn't.
"Jussi", a Finnish name, as well as my name "Jukka", actually belongs
to the large family of first names that descend from "Ioannes",
improbable as it may sound.)

That is, any connection between "Jesus" and "Jason" is probably pure
imagination.

> As I understand this, the man history calls Jesus Christ is believed to
>have called himself by the Hebrew name "Yoshua", (Joshua)

Probably Jesus of Nazareth spoke Arameic as his native language. He
might have recognized the name "Yoshua", though. If I'll ever have the
opportunity to meet him, which is highly unlikely, I'd probably try
calling him "Yeshuah".

>So the various names Jesus, Jason, and Joshua, as well as assorted
>variations in spelling are all essentially equivalent.

Sounds like good old principle: when looking for connections between
words, ignore the vowels, and pay no attention to consonants, and
never mind what they call "linguistics" as a science. Well, "Jesus"
and "Joshua" _are_ most probably of the same origin - variants of the
same Semitic name.

>   My problem is that I do not speak nor read Greek.

No problem. Graeca sunt, non leguntur.

> I would like the advice and input of someone who IS an expert
>in Greek language and literature.

It's a matter of linguistics, not language.

> Any informed and
>intelligent guidance on this subject would be greatly appreciated.

You got a mildly educated guess from an M.S. with mathematics as
major. Much better than you could really expect. Welcome to Usenet!
-- 
Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/ or http://yucca.hut.fi/yucca.html