Where the authors of the Gospels known by the same names we use?
If so were they pronounced the same as we would?
No. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are Anglicized versions of the original names. Matthew’s original name is pronounced something like Mat-Ay, Mark Mahr-Koss, Luke Lo-Kah and John Yo-Chah-Nan.
Were
“Where” is used to refer to location.
By the way, virtually everybody in the Bible has an Anglicized name in the English translation. No-one was called that.
Jesus was Yehoshua or Yeshua, for instance.
It’s also woth notung that the Gospels aren’t self-labeled (i.e. – “This is the Gospel of John”), and that the names are traditional. You can see how the sources could be logically deduced from internal evidence (As G.A. Wells shows in his books. Wells is one of those guys who doesn’t believe in the historicity of Jesus, but, regardless of how you may feel about it, it doesn’t detract from his reasoning about deducing the origins of the names of the Gospel authors. Or even disprove their authorship, for that matter.)
Are there any exceptions?
There are several that are pretty close – we just pronounce them differently. For example, Eli would have been pronounced Eh-lee. Elizabeth would have been pronounced Eh-lee-zah-bet (not sure of the correct accent).
Disclaimer: this is from my poorly remembered Hebrew classes. I can’t claim to know how the names were *really * pronounced at the time.
Depends on definitions, really. None of them are spelt the same (different alphabets) and none of them are pronounced exactly the same (different languages, dontchaknow, and in many cases we don’t know exactly how the person would have pronounced their own name), but there are some that are a hell of a lot closer than Matthew. Orpah from the book of Ruth, for example. About as close as you are going to get with two languages as far apart as modern English and ancient Hebrew.
My guess is that Mahershalalhashbaz is not an Anglicised name.
Grammer Nazi!
It was a very rushed post at work. I apologise.
You know, you might be surprised.
That’d be “grammar”.
Were do you work?
Yes, we don’t know who wrote the gospels (see the Staff Report: Who wrote the Bible? (Part 4)).
There are people named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John who appear in the New Testament (though there’s significant doubt over whether they’re the same people who wrote the gospels). Since the New Testament was written in Greek, was it the Greek forms that were used of these names? Or were they given in Hebrew form?
Well, Luke is most likely Greek, so his name was Λουκάς - Loukas - and not originally Hebrew or Aramaic.
Yup.
Sort of a side point, but my Latin teacher liked to point out surprise similarities. Romans would’ve pronounced “Jove” (Jupiter) as “Yahweh,” he claimed, similar to the Hebrew pronunciation of Jehovah. Going the other way, he said the Roman pronunciation of “Caesar” would have sounded similar to the German “Kaiser,” which in fact is a direct derivation.
I’m pretty sure he was making up the first one. Every Latin teacher I’ve ever had gave the pronunciation as “yoo-pi-tare”, including a couple of ex-Oxford dons. I have heard the Caesar ~ Kaiser thing, though.
He’s clearly saying that Jove, in Classical Latin, is pronounced “Yo-way” (something I noticed decades ago), not that Jupiter is.