Does the name Jesus derives from the Greek god Zeus whose name sounds similar? Many people believe that it does. What are the facts?

The Greek name Zeus begins with the Greek letter zeta, while the “soos” in the name Jesus transliterated into English begins with the Greek letter sigma. Zeus and Jesus are two very different words with totally different etymologies.

If one knows even basic Hebrew and Greek, one can easily see how Yeshua translates into Koine Greek as ee-ay-sous (transliterated) and into English as Jesus considering that in the 1600ss the letter J replaced the I in the name of ee-ay-sous to give us Jesus.

What’s more, the Jewish scholars who translated the Septuagint several centuries before the birth of Yeshua translated the name Joshua as Ee-ay-sous. Go get an LXX Bible and look it up. Go to the book of Joshua and you’ll see it for yourself. I highly doubt that these Jewish scholars would have taken the name of Joshua and translated it into the name of the pagan Greek deity Zeus if, in their minds, there had been even the slightest possibility of confusion between the two names.

Some people also have a problem with the name Jesus because of it similarity to the Hebrew word for horse (sus, spelled samech, vav, samech). The similarity between Jesus and sus is simply coincidental. Hebrew and Koine Greek are two different languages and have nothing to do with each other. The Greek word for horse is hippos. As any language student knows — especially those who are multilingual — just because two words in two different languages sound alike doesn’t mean they have related etymologies (linguistic origins).

Now let’s review how the Hebrew name Yeshua (hud, shin, vav, ayin) becomes Ee-ay-sous in Koine Greek and then Jesus in English. It goes like this:

• Yeshua begins with the Hebrew letter yud which, in this case, has the yuh sound. In Greek, there is no  yuh sound. The closest vowel is the letter iota with the long e sound (ee) which is combined with the Greek letter eta. Together, the iota and eta from a combined vowel sound or diphthong, which is the closest the Greek language could come to sounding like the Hebrew letter yud.
• The next Hebrew letter in the name Yeshua is the sh sound made by the Hebrew letter shin. Again, Greek has no sh sound. Instead, they substituted the letter sigma (s) for the sh in Hebrew.
• The next letter in Hebrew is the letter vav giving us, in this case, the oo sound. Greek has this sound when the letters omega and upsilon combine.
• Now what about the final letter s in the Greek language? Where does that come from, since the Hebrew name Yeshua doesn’t end with the letter s. As any beginning biblical Greek student will immediately see, the s ending in Ee-ay-sous is simply the standard nominative case ending (or suffix) for a masculine singular noun and is made by the Greek letter sigma.
• Now let’s go from Greek to English. Since the New Testament (NT) was proliferated in the Greek language, and since the vast majority of ancient NT manuscripts were in Greek, the name pronunciation of the Hebrew name Yeshua became Ee-ay-sous in the common language of the day. This name was simply brought over into Latin and then into English as you can see in your earliest English Bibles when they spell Jesus as Iesus. However when the letter j (a variant of the letter i) came into usage in the 1500s in Europe, the i in Iesus became a j. This is how we ended up with Jesus for the Hebrew name Yeshua. This is an over-simplified explanation of this linguistic development, since language evolution is usually a slow and complex thing, but this is the basics of it.

As you can see, the name Jesus in no way relates to the Greek god Zeus or to the Hebrew word for horse.