{"id":5114,"date":"2014-08-09T09:58:35","date_gmt":"2014-08-09T16:58:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hoshanarabbah.org\/blog\/?p=5114"},"modified":"2014-08-09T09:58:35","modified_gmt":"2014-08-09T16:58:35","slug":"jesus-come-from-zeus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoshanarabbah.org\/blog\/2014\/08\/09\/jesus-come-from-zeus\/","title":{"rendered":"Does the Name Jesus Come from Zeus?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Does the name Jesus derives from the Greek god Zeus whose name sounds similar? Many people believe that it does. What are the facts?<\/p>\n

The Greek name Zeus\u00a0begins with the Greek letter zeta, while the \u201csoos\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n

Some people also have a problem with the name Jesus<\/i> because of it similarity to the Hebrew word for horse (sus, <\/i>spelled samech, vav, samech). The similarity between\u00a0Jesus <\/i>and sus <\/i>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<\/i>. As any language student knows \u2014 especially those who are multilingual \u2014 just because two words in two different languages sound alike doesn\u2019t mean they have related etymologies (linguistic origins).<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n