I’m not even sure if He was a Yeshua (although that I could look up), whatever. But definitely not ending with a Hebrew letter shin/sin or samech. (Heh, “sin.”)
Offhand I can’t think of a Biblical name ending with one (Yoash?), but not any of the names of Jesus.
Same question for “Judas,” now that I think of it.
It derives from the Hellenicized version of his name.
Same thing happened to Moses. Not to mention Jesus son of Sirach in Ecclesiasticus. And a lot of other Hellenized biblical characters.
Amos.
And Judas is just the Greek version of Yehuda.
Also Hadassah (Ok, not Hadassah. But the modern variant Hadas).
I always thought the “s” came from classical Latin, in which it is a nominative singular ending found in many (but not all) masculine names. From what I know of Latin in the Imperial era, the final “s” probably wasn’t pronounced but scribes and scholars still generally adhered to classical spelling norms, and that’s the way the earliest copies of the NT in Western Europe were written down.
FTR, Jesus was Yeshua Ben Yosef ( aka Joshua son of Joseph). Nowadays, he could be Joshua Josephson or Josh Carpenter.
But he’d call himself “Ben” because it annoyed his mom.
Yehoshua (or Yeshua) ben Nun, an Old Testament character (of Battle of Jericho fame), has come to be known in English as Joshua. Yehoshua ben Yosef, a New Testament character, has come to be known in English as Jesus.
I don’t know the details, but I’ve read that the difference arises because the Old and New Testaments came to be known in English through a different sequence of translations, involving variously Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and/or Latin.
The wiki article on Joshua (of Jericho fame) begins with a bit of the history of this.
Um… Moses?
Ending with a hebrew ‘s/sh’, which Moshe doesn’t.
Isn’t that the point of the thread?
(and I can’t believe I didn’t notice post #3)
The point of the thread is why the extra ‘s’, which has been explained. The sentence you quoted is about Leo not recalling any names ending in “shin/sin or samech”. Moses would be a bad example of that. Which probably wasn’t your intention, but your choice of quote from the OP confused me.
So our answer seems to be that it’s the translation into Greek or Latin, it’s certainly NOT Hebrew or Aramaic.
On the ending -s: Translating into Latin, I can understand, many Latin names and nouns end in -us, only feminine nouns/names end in -a. So it’s plausible that the translation into Latin required the name change, to make it possible to use phrases like “to Jesus” (presumably ad Jesum?) However, I’m far from a Latin scholar, does anyone have expertise?
I don’t know Greek well enough (well, hardly at all beyond the alphabet and a few phrases) to know whether there is reason for changing the end of the name in Greek? Is there anyone here who knows ancient Greek who might comment? [EDIT: I’ve asked a friend who knows both Latin and Greek, I’ll await response and get back to y’all.]
On the leading Y to J: My understanding is that the initial letter was Y or I (same pronunciation), but the translation into German (many centuries later) used J as the lead letter (pronounced “Y” in German), for many biblical names: Yosef to Josef, Yakov to Jacob, etc. When moved to English from German, the spelling stayed the same, but the pronunciation became Englicized as “J”.
I don’t think it has anything to do with German. My understanding is that “I” was used in Latin orthography for these [j] sounds — Iesus, Iehovah, etc.
In Latin, “J” was simply an alternative form of “I” that was often used word initially. This was true for a long time, even in English as late as the 18th century. Washington, D.C., has no “J Street” because in writing “I” and “J” were still somewhat interchangeable.
Eventually, a convention was adopted for using “J” in consonental positions and “I” in vowel positions.
Ah, thanks.
My friend says that the additional -s was from Greek: Ieosus. (I still don’t have the Greek grammar to know if this was for noun declension, pronunciation, or what.)
Looks like this word got thrown in with the Greek second declension, then, about which I knew nothing much five minutes ago, but eh, close enough to Latin that the internet can bridge the gap I think. I did know that “Jesus” does end in an s in Greek as I learned a couple or three years ago what the Greek words are that are responsible for the “icthys” acronym.
Explain, please. I was under the impression that Mses is an Egyptian royal name and always had the final S
According to Isaac Asimov (in Asimov’s Guide To The Bible), “mose” (and similar variants) was just a suffix meaning “son” or “son of”. He gives two examples: Thutmose (son of Thut, or Thoth), and Rameses (son of Ra).