Happy Birthday, Baby Iesus

JMerry Christmas, all ye Christmas celebrators out there, the day of the year where (after about a month of build up), Christians everywhere celebrate the birth of their savior... except in Russia, where it won't be celebrated for another couple of weeks. But I digress.

It's not like it's a big deal which day people use for their celebration. Few people actually believe that Jesus would have been born on the 25th of December, or even in the year we now refer to as "0". I'm of the opinion that Jesus never existed at all, but most (or at least many) believe that he did, and that--regardless of his official affiliation with any god--he was born on an undetermined day in the neighborhood of 4 BC.

Most people also believe that his name was actually "Jesus", and that's something I think we should clear the air of right now.

How do we know this? Well, for starters, the letter J doesn't exist in Hebrew or Greek (or Latin, or Aramaic), and it didn't even exist in English 500 years ago. Even after it came to have its own meaning, it remained interchangeable with "I" for quite some time (hence, Thomas Jefferson would initial things "T.I." and the lack of a J Street in D.C.). So "Jesus" clearly can't be, well... canonical.

Slate's Explainer column did a nice write-up of this recently, so this maybe re-cap for many of you.

Jesus's name would have actually been Yeshua (and even that "actually" is a stretch, since his name would have been in a totally different alphabet, but that's the pronunciation), a common Hebrew name at that time, and a rather popular one in the Old Testament (it refers to four different people in the O.T. in this form, and in slightly longer form it's the same name as "Joshua" of battle-of-Jericho fame).

Lacking a "sh" sound, the Gospel writers wrote the name as Iesus, adding an "s" to the end to make it masculine. The "J" came later, when the Swiss wrote the Geneva bible, using "J" as a "Y" according to their own pronunciation. This, incidentally, would have been the bible used by the Puritans, as it was popular in Europe until redacted into the King James edition, which softened some of the language and removed annotations that were anti-monarch or anti-Catholic.

So, it turns out that our modern phonetic conception (ahem) of Jesus is an English mispronunciation of a Swiss-ification of Greek-ified Hebrew name.

In that light, I choose to find the following line from our old church hymnal utterly hilarious:

"Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, there's just something about that name."

]{p