A little linguistics lesson

It's happened to everyone, you bash your finger or something scares you, you say "Jesus Christ!" or words to that effect, and somebody tells you not to take the Lord's name in vain. Or maybe you're the person telling people that. Either way, you get the point. Well, the Curious Snowflake is here today to let you in on a little secret....

His name wasn't Jesus Christ.

Those of you who saw Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" may have caught this. Throughout the movie, they refer to him as something like Yehoshua, not as Jesus. Well, let me just tell you that Mr. Gibson did his homework. He's right, that was His name. Let me explain.

Some linguist, I don't remember who, once described English as the slut of the linguistic world: it doesn't care where it gets it's words from, it just takes it all. English itself is actually an amalgam of 3 different languages: the original British Isles Gaelic, Latin from Roman occupation, and Germanic from the Saxon invaders during the Dark Ages. This makes English very open to addition. Don't believe me? Then what does the word "amigo" mean?

In any case, one tendency of English is to mangle the pronunciation of the words it absorbs. The name Jesus is a prime example. The first monks to come to the British Isles during the 3rd and 4th Century were from what is now Spain, and they called him Jesus (hey-soos), which we Anglos just turned into Jesus (gee-zus) phonetically.

So where did Hey-soos come from? From German, actually. Remember, Germany and Spain were once part of the Roman Empire, and thus absorbed a lot from each other. In German, Gee-zus is called Jesu (yay-zoo). Some of you may remember a hymn by Bach called "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", for example. And German got it, logically enough, from Latin, the language of the Romans, also spelled Jesu (or Iesu, since I and J are interchangeable in Latin), and pronounce ee-EH-soo.

Now, a little Biblical history. While Latin was the language of the church for over 1500 years, it was not the original Biblical language. The earliest Bibles are not written in Latin, but in Greek. This makes sense, since all those churches St. Paul founded and wrote all those Epistles too are Greek cities: Galacia, Thessaly, Ephasia, and so on. In Greek, His name is Ieshu (ee-EH-shu). The reason for this change from SH to S is simple: Latin has no SH sound, so they had to make do.

So where did Ieshu come from? While Jesus may well have known Greek, his native language was Hebrew. Ieshu is a Greek modification of the Hebrew name Yeshua (ee-Eh-shu-ah), or Yehoshua (ee-EH-ho-SHU-ah), meaning God is salvation, and is the source of our name Joshua. The reason the A at the end was dropped in Greek is because Greek names that end in A are usually female. We want to make sure our God is male, thanks much :-P

As for Christ, that deriviation is a lot less convoluted. Christ comes almost directly from the Greek work krystos, which is the word St. Paul chose to use in his Epistles. It is a literal translation into Greek of the Hebrew word messhiah, both of which mean "Chosen One" or, more literally, "Annointed One", and is the source of the word Messiah.

So next time you smash your thumb, try saying "oh Josh the Chosen One!" and see how silly you feel. And if you are the person who reminds people not to break the Third Commandment, remember, they are just saying a mistranslation of a mistranslation of a mistranslation of a mistranslation of a mistranslation of the Hebrew version of the third most popular baby name right now.

Peace and Joy to all, no exceptions

CS