Issa is the Muslim form. I do not recall how many Arab christians I have met are named after Jesus - Issa is quite common but maybe more used by Muslims, I am not sure.
Nava is right here.
*What evidence have we seen that “most Christian cultures” have this view? It is clear that the Anglo protestants do very strongly, but I do not think it is a view held among the Arab christians, at least those of the local traditions. Among west africa christians I have seen it used as well.
As an outsider it seems to me that it is not a matter of ignoring, it is like with the strange disconnect in the questions about Muhammed that it is a matter of a different analysis. I still find strange the idea that naming someone after a name otherwise ordinary can be seen as ‘taking in vain’ or blasphemy… It perhaps depends on the meaning you give to the naming.
But if that was the issue, why is it not an issue with Salva, Rey, Pastor, Emmanuel? Is it because the people asking do not realize that those are also names for Christ? Either naming people after Him does not constitute taking the Lord’s name in vain for any versions of the name (the RCC view), or it does for all versions of the name.
Joshua has become very popular in recent years in Spain, mostly among Evangelic Christians or Neocatecumenales who don’t want to use Jesús because “it’s taking the Lord’s name in vain!” but who still want to name their children after Him. Or who consider it the same name but their pastor doesn’t, so they choose it on purpose to put one up on the pastor.
Tom Tildrum says the question is unanswered. To me the question is badly formulated, because it begins from taking as true something which is not (several things actually), but answers pointing out that it is not true are being discarded. Without knowing what the real question should be, it’s difficult to answer it.
See reply #15 to this thread, and there is no possibility that careful reading could mistake my own reply for agreement that “Christopher” is a variant of “Jesus”.
Excuse me, but the USA is not the only country where “Jesus” as a first name is rare to non-existent. There are about 25-30 non-Hispanic Indo-European language countries and I do not recall ever encountering “Jesus” as a first name in any one of them.
There is clearly a widespread aversion to the name among non-Hispanic IE-language countries which isolated exceptions such as that of 1940s-1970s CIA spook James Jesus Angleton (whose mother was Hispanic) do nothing to explain.
I look forward to eventually obtaining a more thoughtful and informed reply to why this is so than Mr. Nava seems capable of offering.
I don’t think the question has been answered, either. In many Indo-European languages, nicknames for Jesus are used as given names (Emmanuel etc.). Names deriving from his title are used (Christian), sometimes at several removes from Jesus himself (Christopher). (“Christ” was the name of one of my great-great-uncles, a German nickname.) Names sharing a common etymon with Jesus are used (Joshua), though again without reference to Jesus.
The name Jesus itself, however, is not given to people as a rule outside of the Hispanophone world as far as I’m aware. It’s not used in Italy as far as I know.
Yes, the initial answer is “it’s customary,” but there ought to be a better example than that. Customs don’t arise out of a vaccuum. I think the best answer so far is that compound names (María de Jesus) were, over time, shortened so that “Jesus” as a name no longer sounded weird in Spanish, but that this didn’t happen elsewhere, even in French where it might well have given the use of similar compound names.
but I have seen no evidence of this, it is not clear this assumption is true. it might be, but it seems to me that there is a collision in the USA between its form of christian analysis of the name and another large scale christian culture analysis and since the name forms are close enough to be recognized… it is noticed.
but if we had not told you Issa is the most prevalent arabic form of Jesus, you would not remark on it at all…
What is clear is that americans notice the hispanic habit, but it is not clear that this is true across the other languages.
I checked for French, Italian, Welsh, and Breton, and I could see no evidence of Jesus (Jésus, Gesù, Iesu, Jezuz) as a traditional given name. (Dr. William Price’s son Iesu Grist [first modern British cremation] notwithstanding.) The French and Italian wikipedia pages on Jesus as a given name list numerous examples of famous Jesuses, all from Spanish-speaking or Muslim countries. I’m not willing to crawl out on a limb for languages I don’t speak, but I would suggest that the Romance languages would have the parallel if anyone does. I couldn’t find a similar list on Portuguese wikipedia, which might also be a good place to look.
That’s not much of an answer. There are entire fields, like anthropology and folklore, that go beyond simple observation of different cultures, and and ask why different cultures do things differently.
And, I’m not an American but I’m interested in the answer, as is our resident professional folklorist, Dr Drake so that’s at least two countries represented in the inquiry.
Nelson Pike was only commenting on his experience with Indo-European languages. Arabic is not Indo-European, so this is not a valid criticism of his point, which he appears to have limited to his own personal experience.
Yes, I know this. It was an example of a form that is not obvious. Not every indo-european language may have a form of Jesus that is very obvious to Anglophones. Already I think the greek form is not obvious.
The valid criticism is that Americans and anglophones have a specific experience and there is not evidence presented either way for “indo european languages”
One thing I’m seeing but don’t know if it’s relevant or not is the whole definition of “equivalent name”. To me, Jesús, Manuel, Salva… are “the same” like George, Jorge, Jordi and Gorka are the same - not identical, but equivalent. So when you guys ask “why do you people call your children Jesus” (or the lovely “how can you call your children Jesus”), one of our first reactions is to point out that Emmanuel is common in many cultures and you proceed to say “it’s not the same”.
Ah, but that answer has been declared insufficient. And when I turn the question back (“why don’t you, when you have no problem with other names of Jesus”), I don’t get an answer.
Well, they’re not equivalent. You’ve had your answer: epithets of Jesus are considered to be in a different category from the given name Jesus. This is supported etymologically (they’re unrelated, unlike “George” and “Jorge”) and liturgically (the word “Jesus” is used differently than the epithets in religious worship). It’s an interesting data point that you consider these names equivalent, because their central referent is the same, but that’s a way of looking at it that isn’t universally shared. That itself might be part of the answer to the original question.
You seem to be reacting to a value judgement in the question, as if people were asking “what’s wrong with you that you call your kids Jesus?” As far as I can tell, nobody here has that attitude. It’s an interesting point of cultural divergence, and how it came about is an interesting question. Neither tradition is right or wrong; nobody is being harmed by these naming patterns.
I know that one form of ethnocentric aggression is picking on people’s names (to the point where ethnic minority names are actively suppressed, as in France until fairly recently), or just making fun of the “different.” That’s not what’s happening here.
I take it as a compliment that uninformative answers are unacceptable to us. We prefer better quality information than certain other people are apparently happy to settle for.
Or rather, I would hold it as a compliment if it were true: I would be surprised if proportionally the same number of people from all the other IE cultures would not be interested in an answer to the same question. An answer, that is, consisting of more than a banal “cultural difference.”
Now, I am not interested in continuing this diversion. And since the banal “cultural difference” seems to be all you have to contribute to the questions posed in this thread, you would do well to look elsewhere in the forum for another question, one to which you might be able to provide information of quality, if indeed any such question exists.
The only reason I am continuing in this line of discussion is that I have been personally addressed. I hope I can drop out after this reply, or soon after it.
Minimal googling reveals that all other IE forms of “Jesus” are recognizably cognate, including Greek: Iisous (transliteration). It is an identical “Jesus” in English, French and German.
Jesus is the 68th most popular Hispanic boys name. It is not in the top 495 French. It is not included in a list of 1583 German male and female names.
This thread is the first I have ever seen of any suggestion of any kind of “collision” over the name, and yours is the first where the actual word was used.
There have been several Hispanic baseball players in the US going back at least to Jesus Alou in the 1960s, and I never heard a peep about it.
I forget the source, but I knew Issa was Arabic for Jesus. I am not sure what your point is, though.
Other IE speakers could not avoid noticing it, although not necessarily for religious reasons, but just because of the name’s absence from their own languages.
And it’s nice to get someone to answer that, rather than continuing saying “but it’s not!”. But I still don’t know why don’t you guys use Jesus when you do use Emmanuel, and I’ve been asking that for years.
Very often when people ask about other languages, legal systems, cultures… the first thing that causes communication problems is one of definitions. Some people look at my ID and see multiple names, I look at it and see only one; some governments view multiple abbreviations as one name with multiple aliases, others as one name. This has to do with how our cultures define “name”: do we have a concept of “compound names” or not, do we have a concept of “evident abbreviation” as being different from an “alias” or not. But those of us who aren’t specifically trained to avoid it assume that other people use the same definitions (it’s a basic assumption of communication); this can already be untrue when we’re talking with people of the same culture, but as soon as we’re cross-culture it’s more likely that it won’t hold.
A language about which we didn’t have information and which I thought needed to be added, specially given Ramira’s proposal of influence from Arabic naming customs, is Portugues.
My vague recall was that while Manuel is enormously common both by itself and in combinations, Jesus does exist. But that’s a vague recall, it’s not data.
I haven’t been able to find an organism of Portuguese-speaking governments keeping track of naming stats (doesn’t mean there aren’t, only that I haven’t found their webpages) and the Brazilian yellow pages’ site appears to be companies only, but the Portuguese yellow pages brings up Jesus as a lastname and as a firstname. I searched four areas, to avoid something like “local influence from the Spanish neighbors”, and got multiple hits for Jesus as a firstname in all of them.
So while compound names may have been part of how it came to be, the “three cultures” (three religions, multiple languages) situation of Hispania in the Middle Ages could also be a factor. Some of it may have had to do with conversions or migrations (I don’t know how old that custom of translating your name if that makes communication easier is): we’re currently getting Yeshuas who are Jesuses converted to Islam, we may at some point have had Isas who became Jesuses.
Yes, I certainly didn’t intend any normative content to the question. I didn’t mean to imply anything derogatory about Hispanic naming practices, and I apologize if it came across that way.
I guess I would differentiate “Jesus” as being (the Anglophone transliteration of) the actual name that Mary gave to her son. I absolutely agree with Nava that Anglophone culture treats that name differently from all of the other epithets and titles that Jesus accumulated (“Emmanuel”, etc.). (I would note too that Anglophone cultures have no taboo against naming daughters, “Mary”). To me, that makes the question more interesting, not less. Why do we Anglophones single out this particular name to be treated differently, while Spanish-speaking cultures do not?
Among primarily Anglophone cultures, the US probably has the most interaction with Hispanic, or at least Latin American, culture. Hence there may be more opportunity for Americans (as opposed to other Anglophones) to notice the use of “Jesus” as a given name in Hispanic cultures.
If Arabic Christians do name their sons with the same given name used in Arabic for the man whom Christians consider the son of God, that would be another interesting data point for the question. The Arabic Christian population in the US just is not nearly as large as the Latin American population, so the opportunity for that sort of awareness just does not arise as much. (Arabic Muslims using “Issa” as a given name seems to me to be a slightly different matter, since the name would not have the same religious significance to them).
It’s much more common in the US. The US Social Security Administration reports that “Jesus” was the 106th most popular baby boy’s name in the US in 2013.
Apologies again; I’d forgotten about that suggestion when I wrote earlier. Perhaps that is the answer. Does the “dedicated to Jesus” naming formula arise in any other cultures? And I now see on preview that Nava has added more information on this point.
The Irish and Brits have a lot of direct interaction with Spain. My Vitoria flatmate, a Jesús Mari, had worked in London for eleven years.
But for some reason it’s one of those questions which Americans ask and other people don’t; not just Anglophones, anythingelsephones. Other people may verify that their pronunciation is acceptable or remark that it’s an unusual name in their culture, that’s it. The more I understand where the question comes from, the more capable I’ll be to answer it to your satisfaction. I expect that the “how can you” people will consider any answer unacceptable (they’ve already decided we’re all going to Hell, whether our specific children are specifically named Jesús or Nabucodonosor), but for the reasonable ones, I need to understand the background of the question.
