Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 January 17

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January 17

Languages where the same word is used for Moses's successor and the name of the Christ?

While the Hebrew Bible was written in Hebrew (more or less) and the New Testament in Aramaic, it seems to be generally acknowledged that Moses's successor (generally spelled Joshua in English) and the name of the Christ (generally spelled Jesus in English but coming through the Aramaic) are considered to have come from the same source. Are there languages where the same name is used for both of them?Naraht (talk) 00:25, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

According to the article Joshua, so it'd seem. If so, Joshua would generally get an epithet. ± Wakuran (talk) 01:10, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Naraht -- Yeshu` was the post-Exilic Hebrew and Aramaic form of the name which appears in the earlier parts of the Hebrew Bible as Yehoshu` (note that these names end with a voiced pharyngeal consonant, and are given a kind of offglide to the pharyngeal consonant -- Yeshua` and Yehoshua` -- in the Tiberian masoretic text). In the last few centuries B.C. and the first century A.D., Yeshu` was the form used in everyday life (what babies were named, etc), while Yehoshu` was an archaic Biblical form. To see the same form used for Jesus and Joshua, just turn to Acts 7:45 and Hebrews 4:8 in a Greek New Testament... AnonMoos (talk) 05:48, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

By the way, while there's a much-disputed possibility that some of the synoptic Gospels may have been influenced by a written Aramaic document (which would have been a mostly unadorned list of quotations from Jesus), none of the books of the New Testament were originally written in Aramaic in substantially the same form as we have them today. AnonMoos (talk) 06:00, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanx, I should have looked at the article on Joshua as Wakuran pointed out. Greek and some of the Slavic Languages (so most of the languages where a significant numbers of the speakers are Orthodox Christianity.Naraht (talk) 15:26, 17 January 2022 (UTC)