Latest / Abide Meditation App / What was the REAL Name of Jesus_ (feat. Dr. Benjamin Suchard

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What was the REAL Name of Jesus_ (feat. Dr. Benjamin Suchard · Abide Meditation App

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  Speaker 1: Brought to you by incogny Jesus. Pick up any English
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: translation of the New Testament, and that's the name of
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: the miracle working apocalyptic preacher from Nazareth who walks around
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: the Sea of Galilee talking about the coming kingdom of
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: God j e s Us Jesus. But that wasn't really
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  Speaker 1: his name, right, I said, English translation of the New Testament.
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  Speaker 1: If you were to take a time machine back to
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  Speaker 1: the Galilee and walk up and say, hey, Jesus, you'd
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: get a confused look. So what was the actual name
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  Speaker 1: of Jesus. To help us answer this question, I've enlisted
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  Speaker 1: the help of doctor Benjamin Suschard, a historical linguist with
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  Speaker 1: a specialization in Biblical Hebrew, so he'll pop in from
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  Speaker 1: time to time. Let's start with the source material, the
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  Speaker 1: New Testament. See the books of the New Testament were
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  Speaker 1: composed in coign A Greek, which was widely spoken in
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  Speaker 1: the Eastern Mediterranean world in the centuries after Alexander the Great.
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  Speaker 1: Since the Gospel writers and the apostle Paul were writing
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  Speaker 1: in Greek, they wrote the name of Jesus like this Jesus, which,
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  Speaker 1: as we'll see later, is the name that was a
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  Speaker 1: vne transliterated into English. But Jesus was in Greek, and
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  Speaker 1: his name wasn't a Greek name. He was a Galileean
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  Speaker 1: Jewish Man living in a predominantly Arabic speaking region, a
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  Speaker 1: Semitic language closely related to Hebrew. So Jesus is a
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  Speaker 1: transliteration of a transliteration of a Hebrew and Aramic name,
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  Speaker 1: specifically a name for Joshua. So how does that work well?
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  Speaker 1: In the Hebrew Bible, there are two prominent characters named Joshua. First,
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  Speaker 1: we have Joshua, son of Noon, the Israelite military commander
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  Speaker 1: and right hand man to Moses, who, according to the
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  Speaker 1: Bible's version of history, led the Israelite conquest of the
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  Speaker 1: land of Canaan. Then there's a less famous Joshua, the
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  Speaker 1: High priest, who appears in some of the latest books
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  Speaker 1: in the Hebrew Bible as the first high priest after
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  Speaker 1: the people of Judah returned home from the Babylonian exile.
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  Speaker 1: Even though we use the same English name Joshua to
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  Speaker 1: refer to these two guys in Hebrew Bible manuscripts, there
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  Speaker 1: are two versions of this name. The older version for
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  Speaker 1: Joshua is Yehoshua which is most often used for Joshua,
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  Speaker 1: the son of Noon. But there's another shorter variation of
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  Speaker 1: this name generally used for Joshua, the high priest, Yeshua.
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  Speaker 1: Think of it like the name James becoming the name Jim.
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  Speaker 1: It's not really a nickname, but rather a shorter, more
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  Speaker 1: colloquial version. Yeshua was the more common form of this
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  Speaker 1: name in Late Biblical Hebrew. For example, Joshua son of
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  Speaker 1: Noon is called Yehoshua in the older Book of Joshua,
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  Speaker 1: but in the much later Book of Nehemiah he's called Yeshua.
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  Speaker 1: So the name was interchangeable depending on if you're using
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  Speaker 1: the earlier or later form. But it's this shorter, later
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  Speaker 1: variation that became popular in Aramaic during the Second Temple period.
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  Speaker 1: If you wanted to name your kid Joshua in the
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  Speaker 1: centuries after the Babylonian exile, you'd name him Yeshua. So
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: case closed, right. Jesus was living during the Second Temple
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: period when Aramaic became the day to day language for
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: Jews living in the Galilee, so his Arabic name must
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  Speaker 1: have sounded something like Yeshua. Well, it's a little more
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  Speaker 1: complicated than that, and the complication comes from that final syllable,
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  Speaker 1: a part of Yeshua. For those of you Hebrew, Bible
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  Speaker 1: and Aramic experts in the audience, you know I've been
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  Speaker 1: playing a bit fast and loose with that pronunciation. But
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  Speaker 1: before we get to that, I want to thank today's
• 3:10
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  Speaker 1: ancient documents to track down the original name of Jesus,
• 3:17
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• 3:39
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• 3:42
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  Speaker 1: Yeshua is spelled with four letters in Hebrew and Aramaic yod, sheen, vov,
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  Speaker 1: and ein, read from right to left and without vowels.
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  Speaker 1: That final letter ein is not actually an equivalent to
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  Speaker 1: the English vowel A, but rather it's what's called a
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  Speaker 1: guttural letter, one of several in the Hebrew and Aramaic alphabet.
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  Speaker 1: Iin is created in the back of your throat. This
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  Speaker 1: affected the pronunciation of the name.
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  Speaker 2: But we know from especially from Greek transcriptions, that this
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  Speaker 2: well you hear at the end before the einsound the
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  Speaker 2: h in Yoshua and the uh in Yeshua. That wasn't
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  Speaker 2: originally there. If you go all the way back in time,
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  Speaker 2: the names would have been pronounced as something like y
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  Speaker 2: yoshur and yeah sure without anha there.
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  Speaker 1: Thus the name probably sounded less like Yeshua with that
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  Speaker 1: prominent final syllable rhyming with words like kama or lama
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  Speaker 1: or iguana, but closer to what doctor Sushard is doing,
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  Speaker 1: yeah sure, constricting the upper portion of the throat to
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  Speaker 1: produce what's called a pharyngeal consonant. You might be thinking
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  Speaker 1: that's close enough. Many languages like English do not have
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  Speaker 1: an equivalent sound, and that ein sounds close enough for
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  Speaker 1: most people to justify the pronunciation Yeshua, and this eventually
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  Speaker 1: did become the proper pronunciation of this name. Remember I
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  Speaker 1: said that these two names for Joshua appear in the
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  Speaker 1: Hebrew Bible, specifically in Hebrew Bible manuscripts throughout late antiquity
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  Speaker 1: and into the medieval period. Hundreds of years after Jesus,
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  Speaker 1: Jewish scribes called the Mazerits started adding vowel markers alerting
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  Speaker 1: readers what vowels they should use to correctly pronounce the
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  Speaker 1: words in the Hebrew Bible. One of these vowel markers
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  Speaker 1: is a furtive patah, also known as the sneaky a.
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  Speaker 1: It's a little line added below a guttural letter if
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  Speaker 1: that letter appears at the end of a word, because
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  Speaker 1: in Biblical Hebrew, guttural letters prefer an a vowel before them.
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  Speaker 1: To summarize that, a sound in the final syllable was
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  Speaker 1: a later invention to help ease readers into pronouncing the
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  Speaker 1: final i'in. As the scholar of Hebrew Richard Steiner says,
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  Speaker 1: the furtive patackh must have originated as a short, barely audible,
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  Speaker 1: transitional vowel before final consonants, but eventually became so regular
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  Speaker 1: and so prominent that it came to be perceived as
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  Speaker 1: a separate syllable. Thus, Yeshua is correct if we're following
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  Speaker 1: the masoretic text. But as doctor Suschard said, this sneaky
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  Speaker 1: a did not exist during the time of Jesus. The
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  Speaker 1: name Yeshua just ended with the guttural iin. This might
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  Speaker 1: seem like a minor quibble, but it's actually very important
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  Speaker 1: for reasons that will become apparent in the final section
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  Speaker 1: of this video. So allowing for some level of imprecision
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  Speaker 1: and regional variation. It's this version that was the dominant
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  Speaker 1: form of the name in Judea and the Galilee during
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  Speaker 1: the Second Temple period. In fact, according to an extensive
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  Speaker 1: study on Jewish names, this was the sixth most common
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  Speaker 1: male name for the period. The name appears in the
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  Speaker 1: Dead Sea scrolls even when referring to Joshua the Sun
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  Speaker 1: of Noon, and it's also found inscribed on bone boxes
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  Speaker 1: called ossuaries, which were used around the time of Jesus
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  Speaker 1: to contain the skeletal remains of the deceased. And here's
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  Speaker 1: where Greek re enters the scene. In the centuries before Jesus,
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  Speaker 1: around the third century BCE, people started translating the Hebrew
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  Speaker 1: Bible into Greek, eventually producing a Greek version called the Septuagen.
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  Speaker 1: What's interesting is the Greek translators decided to transliterate both
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  Speaker 1: Hebrew versions of the name Joshua as Jesus. Go pick
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  Speaker 1: up your copy of the Septuagen and you'll notice that
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  Speaker 1: the Book of Joshua is called the Book of Jesus,
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  Speaker 1: ironically the Book of Jesus. This means they dropped Yohoshua
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  Speaker 1: entirely in transliterated Yeshua, basically following the dominant variation of
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  Speaker 1: the name during their own contemporary peerer. So how do
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  Speaker 1: we get from Yeshua to ya SEUs? To create the
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  Speaker 1: first syllable, the Septuagen translators use the Greek vowel eyota
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  Speaker 1: to create the y sound, thus we get ea, but
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  Speaker 1: Greek doesn't have a sh sound, so they changed the
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  Speaker 1: letter sheen to the closest approximation, the Greek letter sigma,
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  Speaker 1: so we get eyes. But Greek also doesn't have the ein,
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  Speaker 1: so they just dropped it entirely, leaving us with the
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  Speaker 1: name ya Su. The s was added to the end
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  Speaker 1: because that's a Greek grammar thing. It's how Greek renders
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  Speaker 1: what's called the nominative case, the grammatical case used for
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  Speaker 1: the subject of a sentence, giving us ya SEUs. This
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  Speaker 1: explains why the Gospel writers and Paul use the name
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  Speaker 1: ya SEUs in their own writings. As Greek speakers, they
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  Speaker 1: read the Septuagen Bible in their day to day life,
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  Speaker 1: and they constantly quote the Septuagen Bible in their own writings,
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  Speaker 1: so they already had an established way to write this
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  Speaker 1: name in Greek, and in fact when Joshua, the Son
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  Speaker 1: of Noon is mentioned in the New Testament, he's also
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  Speaker 1: called Je Sus that made its way into Latin, almost
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  Speaker 1: unchanged as Jesus. But you might notice where's the Jay.
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  Speaker 1: Weill as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade taught us
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  Speaker 1: Jay is not in the Latin alphabet. Jay is actually
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  Speaker 1: the most recent addition to the English alphabet. It started
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  Speaker 1: its life as just a fancy way to draw the
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  Speaker 1: letter I, a flourish used at the end of a
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  Speaker 1: Roman numeral or to start a paragraph. But eventually this
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  Speaker 1: fancy I was adopted as a new letter to denote
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  Speaker 1: the just sound that entered the English language thanks to
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  Speaker 1: influence from Old French and in fact, early modern English
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  Speaker 1: writers would write English J words with an I. Even
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  Speaker 1: as late as sixteen eleven, when the first edition of
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  Speaker 1: the King James Bible was published, I and Jay were
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  Speaker 1: not distinguished from one another. All j names in the Bible,
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  Speaker 1: including Judas, Jesus, and John, were all spelled with an I.
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  Speaker 1: It was not until sixteen twenty nine, with the first
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  Speaker 1: major revision of the King James Bible, that they were
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  Speaker 1: finally differentiated. Add some influence from Germanic languages, which makes
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  Speaker 1: the s between two vowels sound like a z, and
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  Speaker 1: we finally arrive at Jesus. But let's complicate this even more.
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  Speaker 1: You might be wondering why did the Greek translators transliterate
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  Speaker 1: this name as je Seuss and not yesuas that guttural
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  Speaker 1: ein makes some sort of noise, enough of a noise
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  Speaker 1: that later scribes leading up to the Masoretic text started
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  Speaker 1: adding the sneaky a to help pronounce it, which begs
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  Speaker 1: the question when transliterating this name, did they drop the
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  Speaker 1: iin because they didn't know how to write it in
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  Speaker 1: Greek or because they were not hearing it pronounced in
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  Speaker 1: the first place. Some academics have argued that the name
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  Speaker 1: of Jesus sounded more like Yeshu or Yeshu, completely dropping
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  Speaker 1: off the final guttural letter because of a linguistic quirk
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  Speaker 1: of a Galilean accent. As the argument goes, Galilean Aramic
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  Speaker 1: speakers were supposedly very bad at pronouncing guttural letters. There
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  Speaker 1: is some evidence for this position, but it's not conclusive.
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  Speaker 1: The main body of evidence that academic site comes from
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  Speaker 1: later Jewish texts.
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  Speaker 2: Jesus is mentioned in some rabbinic texts, and there the
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  Speaker 2: form of his name is Yeshu without an eyen at
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  Speaker 2: the end. So that's interesting because there's also mentions in
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  Speaker 2: other rabbinic texts saying that Galileans have a hard time
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  Speaker 2: pronouncing the aha and daha and things like that.
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  Speaker 1: One of these stories that doctor Suschard is referencing comes
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  Speaker 1: from the Babylonian Talmud. The text says, a certain Galilean
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  Speaker 1: went around saying to them, who has Amar? Idiot Galilean,
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  Speaker 1: do you mean a donkey for writing, wine to drink,
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  Speaker 1: wool for clothes, a lamb to kill? Because if you
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  Speaker 1: were sloppy with your gutturals and your vowels, donkey, wine, woolen,
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  Speaker 1: lamb could all sound like Amar. Another passage implies that
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  Speaker 1: Jews from northern towns around the Galilee, like Haifa and
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  Speaker 1: Baitshan were not even allowed to read the Torah or
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: recite particular prayers because if they would mess up their eyes,
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  Speaker 1: they could accidentally say something blasphemous. So are these Talmudic
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  Speaker 1: stories evidence that Galileans were dropping the iron and calling
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  Speaker 1: Jesus Yeshu? Some scholars say yes, others are not so convinced,
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  Speaker 1: and many respects the Babylonian Talmud is not particularly strong evidence.
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  Speaker 1: It's true that the text contains a lot of older
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  Speaker 1: material that may shed light on daily life in earlier centuries,
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  Speaker 1: but it's a much later text compiled in the five
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  Speaker 1: hundred CE, so it might be more possible that these
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  Speaker 1: stories reflect the Galilean accent during the five hundreds hundreds
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  Speaker 1: of years after the time of Jesus. Moreover, we should
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  Speaker 1: be skeptical because stories about Galileans being unrefined bumpkins should
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: be taken as unflattering caricatures and not unbiased reflections of
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  Speaker 1: a regional speech pattern. Another tantalizing line of evidence comes
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  Speaker 1: from other Semitic languages related to ancient Aramaic, like Syriac
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  Speaker 1: and Mandaic, a form of Aramaic used as a liturgical
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  Speaker 1: language by the ethno religious people group called the Mandaeans.
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  Speaker 1: In Mandaic, Jesus is called issue, and the ancient Christian
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  Speaker 1: writer e from the Syrian mentions that some Syriac speaking
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  Speaker 1: Christians were calling him Isue, both of which lack and iron.
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  Speaker 1: Some have proposed that if these variations were passed down
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: orally from an earlier form of Aramaic. They might preserve
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: an ancient pronunciation of the name without an iron, but
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  Speaker 1: as is the case with the evidence from the Tulmud,
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: this is making a historical argument using data that post
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  Speaker 1: dates the time of Jesus by hundreds of years. Evidence
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  Speaker 1: from closer to the time of Jesus is not conclusive.
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  Speaker 1: There are some indications that Aramaic speaking Jews everywhere in
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: the region, not just in the Galilee, were softening their gutturals.
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  Speaker 1: For example, describes of the Dead Sea scrolls frequently drop
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: the guttural letters out of Hebrew words when they appear
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: in the middle of the word, but not so much
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: when these letters appear at the end of a word. Ultimately,
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: we don't know whether or not the inin was pronounced,
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: but several recent studies on the subjects say that the
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: idea that Galileans were dropping their gutturals is overblown and
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: relies way too much on those funny stories from the Tumud.
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: Whether or not the name had a final eind though
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: there's a strong possibility it had short vowels.
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: And east Syriac it's e shall with an e and
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: an all that looks like it comes from yesho with
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: short vowels. So that's a bit surprising because the name
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: ya sho has two long vowels in Hebrew. And that's
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: also why in Greek it gets written with an a
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: long day, right ya and suslong oo. But we do
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: know something about Galilee and Aramaic from a few centuries later,
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: when Galilee for a while was the center of Judaism
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: after the revolt got the Jews kicked out of Judea.
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: There's a study of that kind of Aramaic which has
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: shown that they didn't have vowel length. They just had
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: five vowels a e o u and no no length,
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: no a eo ooh anymore, which means that yah shue
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: or yeah sho would have been pronounced as yeshue or
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: yeah show, and that could have been borrowed into East Syriac.
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: And I think that's a very cool idea that even
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: though Syriac itself originally preserved a length distinction, they heard
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: people talking about this Galilean called yeah sho, they borrowed
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: it with the short vowels and that ends up as eShop.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: So to summarize in later Hebrew Bible, manuscripts, the name
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: for Joshua and Jesus is Yeshua during the time of Jesus.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: In Aramaic, the answer is somewhat more inconclusive, but we
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: can arrive at close approximations depending on how we hypothesize
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: what the Galilean accents sounded like, whether the name had
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: long or short vowels, and whether or not they pronounced
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: the final iroin.
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: I think it's likely that if you want to have
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: a really strong Galilean accent and say Jesus, you're gonna
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: get Yeshu with two short vowels and no iron. The
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: iron might have been present there, because it does show
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: up in Syriac, so yes, sure, with a short vowels
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: and an iron at the end there would probably also
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: still be fairly recognizable.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: Though Let's say you were a Galilean who wanted to
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: speak a proper form of the name, then you'd say
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: it with long vowels and a nice guttural iron.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: Yay. Sure,