Iesous. I’m not sure if it matters, but it’s something I’ve known about for a while, because I’ve always wondered where the O came from. It’s not there in the Hebrew/Aramaic it came from or the Latin that came from it. It makes me think that the O wasn’t pronounced in the Greek.
If it were present in Moses’s Greek name, I’d think it was a way of indicating the previous sigma was a shin.
Not exactly. As others have pointed out, the Hebrew “Moishe” lacks the final “-s”, which is what I primarily meant.
But even the Egyptian ending “-muse” or “mose”, meaning “child of–” and attached to a god’s name (thus “Ra-Mose” = “Child of Ra” or “Thut-Mose” = “child of Thoth”)* bears the effects of passage through Greek. Our common namnes for Egyptian gods and Pharaohs are derived from Greek, such as “Rameses” That final “-s” is the result of a Greek ending, and without it I’d write it as “Ramose”, albeit with an English silent “e”.
The Biblical patriarch Moses" lacks the “theo” part of “theophorus”, presumably because either he removed it when expressing a beilief in a single God or, more likely, because later authors of the proto-Old Testament thought it was inappropriate – there are other examples of the authors screwing with foreign names, especially when they involved the names of foreign gods. Look up “Ishbosheth – Ishbaal” sometime. See Sigmund Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism” for more details. Then read Elias Auerbach or someone else more recent.
Yes, but I think C K’s idea still holds – that English speakers eventually started pronouncing the “J” in “Jesus” as in “jet” or “Japan,” because that sound had become the most common one for the letter written “j” in English.
