Way back when, was it pronounced like Jay-suz or Hay-soose?

[NNN0LHI]

Does anyone know? Thanks in advance.

Don

[charlie]

1. Neither

The name was supposedly Yeshua or some variant, though there's debate over whether that is correct. In any case, Jesus is a KJV translation of whatever the original was.

[Lexingtonian]

2. uh...in which language?

Hebrew/Aramaic...Ye(ho)s(h)ua/Yehs(h)ua (aka Joshua)

Greek doesn't have a 'sh' sound, in the center of words anyway, and made the central sound a simple 's'-
and then added an 's' to the end in some forms to fit Greek noun rules.

Greek...Iesus (Kristos) (Yeh-suhs (Krees-tos))
Latin...Iesus -> Jesus (Yeh-suhs)

In English and French the initial 'j' became pronounced 'dz' rather than 'y'
In Spanish the initial 'j' became pronounced 'h'

:-)

[Proud_Democratt]

10. Jesus wasn't Greek

[Lydia Leftcoast]

12. But the New Testament was written in Greek

which was the international language of the Eastern Mediterranean in those days.

The Jews and Romans and anyone else who didn't have a common native language spoke to one another in Greek, so when the Christian missionaries went out proselytizing, Greek was the obvious choice for writing down their stories.

(It's sort of like a scientist from a non-English-speaking country choosing to publish papers in English to ensure the widest possible readership.)

Therefore, whatever Jesus' name was in Aramaic (it's a variant of Joshua), the Greek version is what came down to the rest of the world.

[Proud_Democratt]

3. Amazingly close to "Zeus"

Maybe when Paul(Saul) went to Greece to convert them, he compared Yeshuah(Jesus) to Zeus somehow as being a god. Paul most likely wasn't a good translator.
But also...Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John aren't exactly Hebrew or Aramaic either!!!!!!!!!

[Lexingtonian]

15. you're dragging us all

toward a discussion of the Indo-European rain god trinity (plus one) of Dumezil. :-)

The Greek 'Zeus' derives from the one whose name reconstructs as 'peter dyeus' (Father of-Heaven).

The rain god trinity might strike you as remarkably familiar, as does the identity of the fourth, evil, fire-associated deity. The Old Religion never quite died. (And today we have the Christian Right still trying to force us all into a version of it.)

[Proud_Democratt]

17. Yeah...I can see where this topic is just zipping along

:sarcasm: are you meditating?

[hlthe2b]

4. Isn't "Hay-soose" the Sanish pronunciation?

Knowing no Hebrew or Arameic, I certainly couldn't offer a guess, but I'd be surprised if it was "Hay-soose."

[stellanoir]

5. to my best comprehension

posts #1 & #2 are correct.

Yahshua ben Joseph was his handle.

[TechBear_Seattle]

6. "Jesus" is a Latin derivative of the Hebrew name, "Joshua"

In Hebrew, he would have been called Joshua (spelled yod, heh, vuv, shin, `ayin), which would have been pronounced something like Yeshu`ah. Aramaic was the day-to-day language of Palestine in those days; in that language, the name Joshua would have been pronounced more like Yeheshu`ah.

From Hebrew (or Aramaic), the name Joshua was transliterated in to Greek as Iesous (spelled iota, eta, sigma, omicron, upsilon, sigma.) The Septuagent (a Greek translation of the Torah) gives the name of Moses' brother as Iesous.

From Greek, it was transliterated in to Latin as Iesus. It was pronounced YEHsoos. The early Latin alphabet did not have the letter J; that letter developed as a way to separate I from other vowels. With that change, Iesus became Jesus.

On the Iberian peninsula, linguistic drift changed Latin in to Spanish Portugese, Catalan and other related languages. As part of that drift, the letter J lost the /y/ sound it had and was replaced with an aspirated sound similar to /h/. With that, Jesus (pronounced YEHsoos) came to be pronounced HEHsoos and, in some dialects, as HAYsoos.

In Britain, language drifted a different way. The Latin letter J came to be pronounced like DSH, and E (usually pronounced in Latin as eh) tended to get pronounced like ee. Also, the letter s, when it occured by itself between two vowels, became voiced. Thus, Latin Jesus (pronounced YEHsoos) came to be pronounced DSHEEzus in English.

[Proud_Democratt]

7. Don't you find it considerably close to Zeus?

[TechBear_Seattle]

8. An accident of linguistics

The Septuagent was written between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE, long before the time of Jesus. The name of Moses' brother (Joshua in English) was translated from Hebrew to Greek in the Septuagent as Iesous, and I don't recall any claim that Joshua was a deity.

The similarity is purely coincidental, the result of trying to transliterate two very different alphabets from two very different languages (Greek is part of the Indo-European family of languages; Hebrew is part of the Afro-Asiatic family.)

[Proud_Democratt]

9. You've done research...but I somehow feel a connection with

Paul and trip to Greece to Jesus and Zeus. I may be wrong...I may be right someday.

[okasha]

11. There was a connection between Paul and Zeus--

at one of his stops in Asia, if I remember correctly, he and Barnabas were mistaken for Zeus and Hermes, though at the moment I can't recall who was which.

Truly, though, there's no linguistic connection between "Zeus" and "Jesus." It looks, or sounds, that way to a modern American ear because we tend to pronounce "Zeus" as (more or less) "Zooss" and "Iesous" more or less as "Yea-zooss," and so there appears to be a phonological relationship. In Classical/Attic Greek, though, "Zeus" would have sounded more like "Zyouss," with what we linguistics types call a y-glide before the oo-sound, while the pronunciations of "Iesous" would have been pretty much as we say it: "Yea-zooss." In koine, which was the later Greek Paul spoke and wrote, there was a much greater sound shift. "Iesous" remained "Yea-zooss," but the diphtong in "Zeus" (eu) transformed into an "ev/f" sound. (If you're familiar with Latin orthography, you'll know that the same thing happened there with the assimilation of u and v under certain circumstances.) So Paul would be preaching about "Yea-zooss" to Greek speakers who revered Olympian "Zeffs." Phonologically, it's a "you can't get there from here" situation.

And of course, the two names are of completely different derivations, from different language families. "Jesus" is the Semitic/Hebrew Ye(ho)shua ("Yahweh saves," or "Yahweh is salvation"), while "Zeus (pater)" goes back through Sanskrit "Dyaus pitar" to a reconstructed Prot-Indo-European form written as *Tiwaz, and forward into Latin as "Deus pater."

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. Ooh, a historical linguist!

I'm a historical linguist by training, too, although my field was Japanese.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

13. Sorry, no connection

As a couple of posters have said, "Jesus" comes from the Greek form of "Joshua."

The resemblance is in a couple of letters only, certainly not in pronunciation.

[Igel]

16. To finish up some English and Spanish details ...

Say we start with 'yeh-sus for both languages. Makes sense, Latin had lost length, probably, by the time the Anglo-Saxons picked up the word.

English initial y > something like zh > dzh (written in English as j or ge). English found a new source for 'y' later. We can call this fortition, making the consonant 'y' into a "stronger" consonant.

In the 1200s and 1300s English speakers made all vowels ending a stressed syllable long. If the syllable ended in a consonant, the vowel was made short. 'bit' and 'bite' originally both sounded rather like 'beet' and 'beet-uh', with the first 'beet' pronounced quickly and the 'ee' in 'beetuh' dragged out. The same for 'sleep(e)' and 'slept', but 'slept' had a short quick 'eh' while 'sleep' had a longish 'eh'.

At this point, the 'e' in Jesus came to be prounced with the first syllable literally long: you hit the 'eh' sound in 'sleep' and hold it a fraction of a second longer than you would for the 'eh' sound in 'bet'.

Then the great orthography-scrambler called the Great Vowel Shift came along. All long vowels shifted. The long eh-vowel > ee, long ee > y (giving the modern 'sleep' and 'bite', and making 'slept' and 'bit' somewhat irregular past tenses). Vowels shift all the time in language; even in Greek within a few hundred year's of Jesus' death the Greeks had moved the vowel in his name from 'eh' to 'ee'.

Spanish (and French) also made the same y > zh change. In the 1400s (and a bit before) Spanish had 'sh' (which I'll write S). 'Mexico was pronounced Meshiko; and a zh as in Jerez. The zh merged with 'S'. Not long after the New World was being settled, all those 'S' > Spanish j (~ English h). So Latin iesus = 'yeh-sus' > Spanish yesus > zhesus > 'Sesus' > jesus. But extremist Mexican nationalists still like the old pronounciation for the Mexica, "meh-Si-ka"), and we borrowed the word for the kind of aged wine they make in Jerez before 'S' went to 'h' ... sherry.