What's in a name?

Would Mary and Joseph's everyday language be Aramaic? Or was it Hebrew?

Aramaic. Hebrew proper would have been a little like Latin at a Catholic Mass, only you'd understand more of the words. The name in the Bible is Hebrew, and that was likely to be his actual name, just like many of our names are derived from Old English. We don't know how he'd pronounce it, as we have no idea what a 1st century Galilean accent sounds like.
 
More to the point, if Jesus (or the Aramaic or Hebrew precursor of it) was his first name, what was his last name?

And if his name was more commonly translated to be Joseph, that'd be a problem. His father was also named Joseph. "Joseph Jr, Son of God"? You can see how that'd be confusing.
 
What sort of biblical names are you talking about? For some reason the only stuff that comes to mind is Moses and Jeremiah. I've never come across a Moses other than Moses Znaimer, and anyone named Jeremiah is usually a redneck :lol:

Do you just mean names like.. Paul, Tom, Peter, etc?

Going back a few generations in my family I can point to an Isaiah, Ruth, Ezekiel (these are the guys that you call Zeke), Moses (middle name), and Joshua. That's just old testament. My dad and one of my brothers are James.
 
What sort of biblical names are you talking about? For some reason the only stuff that comes to mind is Moses and Jeremiah. I've never come across a Moses other than Moses Znaimer, and anyone named Jeremiah is usually a redneck :lol:

Do you just mean names like.. Paul, Tom, Peter, etc?

When I looked at the names this was my first thought.
Top ten white boys:

Daniel Joseph Michael David Matthew Alexander Jacob Nicholas Jack Samuel

Biblical except for Alexander, Nicholas and Jack.

Girls:

Olivia Esther Sarah Sophia Rachel Emma Chaya Ava Leah Miriam

Biblical except for Olivia, Sophia, Emma, Chaya and Ava(Which according to wiki actually means Eve)
 
When I looked at the names this was my first thought.
Top ten white boys:

Daniel Joseph Michael David Matthew Alexander Jacob Nicholas Jack Samuel

Biblical except for Alexander, Nicholas and Jack.

Girls:

Olivia Esther Sarah Sophia Rachel Emma Chaya Ava Leah Miriam

Biblical except for Olivia, Sophia, Emma, Chaya and Ava(Which according to wiki actually means Eve)

Actually, it could be argued that there were no non-biblical names of your boy's list.


If you include the Books of Maccabees in the bible, then Alexander is a biblical name too. It would be kind of like naming your son Nebuchadnezzar or Nimrod though, not something many Jews or early Christians would have done, but it is biblical.


Although Greek in Origin, Nicholas is a biblical name. It is found in the New testament, referring to one of the first deacons appointed over the Hellenistic Jewish Christians. (Church tradition claims that he was the founder of the Nikolatians, an early heresy condemned in the book of Revelation. Some protestants teach that their name comes not from a founder of the heresy, but the idea of conquering "nike" the common people "laos" by creating the clerical hierarchy that became the Catholic Church.)

Jack is a variant of John, and thus may also be considered a biblical name.




Of the girl's names, Olivia was made up by Shakesphere and Emma is of Gernamic origin. Ava is sometimes a variant of Eve (which would really be Chawa in Hebrew), but there are non-biblical origins too. I'm not sure if Sophia refers to a person in the bible, but as the word wisdom it is certainly used.
 
Jacob, Jeremiah, Aaron, Joseph, Andrew, Noah, Elijah, Samuel, Isaac, Luke, Jason, Eli, Adam, Michael, Joshua, Jonathan, Benjamin, Gabriel, Matthew

Maybe it's just that I'm from Poland, where most kids are given traditional Christian names (usually saint names), so names like Michael, Luke, Adam, etc. seem normal names to me as opposed to "biblical"
 
I just noticed the top three Norwegian boys names. It's the Norwegian versions of Luke, Matthew(more or less) and Mark. I know it's correct, I've seen it before but this is a VERY recent development. I don't know anyone called either of those names. Perhaps biblical names simply have become more popular the last years.
LEt's see here's the amount of people called Lucas in Norway(notice the "exotic" spelling of the name, since we almost always use k in stead of c)

lucas.gif
 
Maybe it's just that I'm from Poland, where most kids are given traditional Christian names (usually saint names), so names like Michael, Luke, Adam, etc. seem normal names to me as opposed to "biblical"

But being common doesn't make them any less biblical.
 
More to the point, if Jesus (or the Aramaic or Hebrew precursor of it) was his first name, what was his last name?

Last names weren't common for non-Romans - or even Roman commoners. (E.g. most Greeks are only kown by one name, like Alexander/Alexandros. And even other famous Jews like Herod and David aren't known to have a last name.)
 
The Jews used patronymics when necessary, but nothing other than that. Outside of Rome, last names were pretty rare.
In the Classical and Medieval eras, just about everybody used patronymics, if they used any kind of second name/designation at all. Some cultures used place names in addition to/instead of patronymics (ie. Robin of Locksley).

So Jesus' "last name" would have been the Aramaic/Hebrew equivalent of "son of Joseph."
 
In the Classical and Medieval eras, just about everybody used patronymics, if they used any kind of second name/designation at all. Some cultures used place names in addition to/instead of patronymics (ie. Robin of Locksley).

So Jesus' "last name" would have been the Aramaic/Hebrew equivalent of "son of Joseph."

Yeah. Jewish people in Austria and Germany didn't have last names until the late 1700s, when the German Kings decided to standardize them. According to a book I read, the reason a lot of Jewish people have "funny" last names like Dreyfus (3-foot), Klein (Small), or (my personal favorite) Katzenellenbogen (Cat's Elbows) is because when the names were being standardized something similar to Ellis Island happened (What's your name? *some foreign name* Too hard! Welcome to America, John Smith.)
 
In the Classical and Medieval eras, just about everybody used patronymics, if they used any kind of second name/designation at all. Some cultures used place names in addition to/instead of patronymics (ie. Robin of Locksley).

So Jesus' "last name" would have been the Aramaic/Hebrew equivalent of "son of Joseph."

Well, in the bible he is generally referred to using the place name "of Nazareth" instead. Even the Koran makes a point of a matronymic "son of Mary" instead of claiming him to be the "son of Joseph," although it uses patronymics for essentially everyone else.
 
"Jason"? I don't think that is biblical...

To reiterate what has been pointed out, "Jesus" is the same name as "Joshua", and means something like "God saves". It would therefore have been a very appropriate name for Jesus from a Christian point of view and one can understand why they imagined that God had commanded that he be given this name (Luke 1:31). It was, however, also a perfectly common name at the time, and we know of various other Jesuses. For example, Jesus son of Ananias, who according to Josephus made a prediction of the Temple's destruction in the 60s and got arrested and flogged for it.

People in Jesus' day did not have surnames - they had patronyms, in the form "bar [father's name]". (That is the Aramaic version; the Hebrew version is the more familiar "ben".) The most obvious example from the New Testament is Barabbas, whose full name, according to Matthew 27:16, was Jesus Barabbas (so there's another Jesus for you). He was Jesus son of Abbas. Our Jesus would have been known in his lifetime as Jesus bar Joseph (or, rather, Yeshua bar Yosef). Alternatively, people were often known by their place of origin or association, which is why he is also Jesus of Nazareth.

"Christ" is simply the Greek version of "Messiah", meaning "anointed". If Jesus himself ever used the term, he would have said "Messiah" (or the word that this is a transliteration of). It is unlikely that Jesus regarded himself as the Messiah or talked about it much, a fact which is reflected in the Gospels, where only once does Jesus ever explicitly claim to be the Messiah (Mark 14:61-62) even though the authors of the Gospels are quite clear that he was the Messiah.

Christians certainly believed from a very early stage that Jesus was the Messiah and they seem to have called him "Christ" as if it were his name from an early stage too. If you look at 1 Thessalonians, the earliest book of the New Testament to be written, you will see that he is called "the Lord Jesus", "the Lord", "Jesus Christ", "the Lord Jesus Christ", "Christ Jesus", and simply "Christ" interchangeably; although bear in mind that in Greek proper names carry a definite article (e.g. you would literally say "the Paul" to mean simply "Paul", and similarly "the Jesus" to mean simply "Jesus"), so in Greek there is not quite the grammatical distinction between a name and a title as there is in English. When Paul says "the Christ" (ho christos) it is not quite clear whether that is a title or a name, since it would have the definite article either way. However, the various names mentioned above seem to be used completely interchangeably, and in particular, "Christ" is used even when there is no particular reference to his messianic status or function. So it has basically become a name.

Jesus and his family would have spoken Aramaic. It is possible, but unlikely, that Jesus knew a little Greek as well. However, scholars disagree over the extent to which someone like Jesus, and Jesus in particular, was familiar with Hellenic or Roman culture; the basic problem being that there were certainly Hellenic cities in Galilee at the time but they do not feature in the Gospels at all.

[EDIT Looks like other people said most of this while I was writing it...]
 
[EDIT Looks like other people said most of this while I was writing it...]

If it took you two days to write this post(notice the date of the previous post), it's a wonder that you have ever finished a book. :lol:
 
To reiterate what has been pointed out, "Jesus" is the same name as "Joshua", and means something like "God saves".

I am somewhat amused by the fact that Jesus was named after himself. (God)
 
Wait, does that mean that "Jesus saves" is as redundant as "ATM machine"? ;)
 
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