Judaism, Christianity and Islam share a significant common tradition. Variations on the name ‘Gabriel’ & etc are commonplace in each and there is a similar spread across of old testament names. In fact currently it’s hip, as per Elijah Wood, to bear such a name.
Nonetheless, it seems to me that particular names do still connect to religions. Leaving aside Muhammed which is a special case, Some names do signify Jewish, Christian or Islamic.
Let’s take Mary & Miriam. The former in all its variations has always tended to signify not only Christian but frequently Roman Catholic. By contrast Miriam seemed a Jewish variant albeit of earlier provencance. But Maryam? Where does that fit in?
Or is it the thing these days that names no longer connote religion?
Yep, Maryam is indeed the Islamic/Arabic version of Mary/Miriam/Maria.
Islam, together with Judaism and Christianity are Abrahamic religions, which do more or less to Old Testament share a common history. The Muslims differ from the Christians though in that they do not believe that Jesus was the Messiah, nor that he was resurrected.
It is probably worth noting that the Hebrew/Jewish “Miriam” is a different person than the Christian “Mary” – she was Moses’ sister. Jews don’t really believe in Virgin Mary… Of course, Jesus’ mother, herself, would have been named “Miriam,” as a namesake of the original one.
Not sure whether the Muslim “Maryam”-s are always the namesakes of Jesus’ mother, or some of both.
Similar to what Noone Special posted, the original Hebrew name of Moses’ sister was Miriam, and it seems likely that that’s what Jesus’ mother’s name was also.
That would make Mary the variant, and I’m curious at which point it occurred, i.e., when the Bible was translated into Greek, or into Latin, or when?
Well, from doing a quick search of various translations of the Koran, the only Maryam/Marium mentioned in the Koran is the mother of Jesus; thus I would imagine that a Muslim Maryam would be named after the mother of Jesus (whom of course may well have been named after the Hebrew/Jewish Miriam).
More seriously, “Mary” is a natural evolution of Maria (latin) and this of Miriam… nobody woke up one day and said “oh, let’s change how we say it!”
There’s a genre of legends in Spain called “beautiful Rebecca”, where the girl in question is usually named either Rebeca or Miriam: both are names that no Christian girl would have had, in the Spanish middle ages. A girl from the same period, called María, is as evidently a Christian as the Miriam is a Jew (very few Marías, though: it’s a name that usually gets extra bits; I only know two women called “only María”).
Maryam is a common name among the Mandeans. They were an offshoot of early Christendom, believing John the Baptist to have held the role that Christians were assigning to Jesus. Part of their reasoning was that for one to baptize the other, that one would need the higher authority. They are considered to be Gnostic and have about 20,000 adherents today, mostly centered around Nasiriyah (southern Iraq and southwestern Iran).
In England, too, I think. At least, there was a beautiful Rebecca (Jewish, of course) in Ivanhoe. That was written after the Middle Ages, of course, but it draws from medieval stories, so the antecedant for that might have been medieval.
An understandable enough error, considering that in Christian dogma “Messiah” and “Son of God” are made synonyms, but in fact the Qur’an explicitly calls Jesus al-masîh ‘the Messiah’. The Arabic word masîh is lifted directly from the Hebrew term, easy to do since they’re fairly closely related languages.
Maybe that would explain why guys like Rilke used the name Maria, to remove ambiguity?
It is possibly worth noting that I know a Catholic woman who is a native of Israel who named her daughter Maryam! The little girl is in my son’s fourth grade class in parochial school.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that at the time of Jesus, Miriam/Mary was the most popular female name among the Israelites.
Thus, we have at least 5 different Mary’s referred to in the NT, including [ul]
[li]Mary the mother of Jesus[]Mary Magdalene []Mary the sister of Lazarus & Martha[] Mary the mother of James and Joses (also the wife of Cleophas) who was referred to as “the other Mary” at the cross[]Mary the mother of Mark.[/li][/ul]
