Etymology of the name Jesus

[Amergin]

It was a common name. Yeshua ben Pacheria lived in Ashdod, and is as unrelated to "our" Jesus as any of the other few-dozen Yeshuas we know of.

Why does the Talmud report that Yesua ben Pacheria was the son of Miram Magdalene? His healing and magical arts surely resemble those of the later Jesus of Nazareth. The earlier Yeshua was tried for sorcery and executed in the Jewish manner of stoning. Then his dead body was hung on a tree for all to see. I hypothesise that hanging on a tree could be confused with crucifixion. Since if was the Jews who tried and executed Yeshua ben Pacheria, it might have led to the misconception that the Jews killed Jesus. We now know the Romans are described as executing Jesus in a political mechanism, crucifixion, for claiming to be King of the Jews.

Tacitus and Suetonius are quite straightforward that Jesus was crucified by Pontius Pilate.

Neither Tacitus or Suetonius were physically present at the alleged trial by Pontius or the crucifixion. Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus lived from 56 CE to 117 CE. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus lived from 71 CE to 135 CE. Neither was even alive at the alleged time of the trial of Jesus. Suetonius merely mentions a "Cult" called Christians. Their information was worse than second hand hearsay. Tacitus and Suetonius recorded hearsay about hearsay from Christians who heard it by hearsay from their parents. Second and third degree hearsay is not very good evidence in court.

You have an utterly unrealistic notion of what we have surviving from Roman bureaucratic records. The Dignitatem ("military ranks") is helpful, for example, listing all the legions and major sub-units: but we only have one copy, apparently assembled from two different documents, one listing the western units as of some time a little before 400, the other listing the eastern units from about a century later. We have several copies of the Acta Augustana, written late in his life listing what Augustus considered the major accomplishments of his life, because it was carved in stone at several locations. From Spain we have several city charters, indicating the standardized structure of local government, because for a while it was a habit to incise these onto brass plates. Once, we get minutes of a Senate meeting, on the occasion of the adoption of the Theodosian Code (the first attempt since the Twelve Tablets of the mid-Republic to assemble, reform, and systematize all of Roman law on every topic; later superseded by Justinian's Code), but all the Senators did was stand and chant in unison (they must have had a script beforehand), things like "All praise to the divine wisdom of our august emperor who has enacted such wholesome laws!" repeated a few dozen times; this was a special case (we only have the minutes because some copyist put them as a preface to a copy of the Code) and it was probably not always so "North Korean" (even late we sometimes hear of the Senate denouncing the emperor and declaring him deposed, as when the Goths marched on Rome in 410). Otherwise we get scattered fragments, and your notion that we have such a thing as a list of every execution that was ordered (do you also imagine that we have minutes of every trial?) is light-years from the truth.

There is the infamous Acts of Pilate, which scholars show that was written in the 2nd Century. Obviously Pilate did not write it. There are no written records of any Jesus being executed for sedition composed by Pontius Pilate.

He was not claiming to be a Hasmonean; he was claiming to be a Davidite. A large number of other Davidite claimants were also executed, such as Judah of Galilee and two of his sons in AD 7, other descendants of Judah in the mid-40's, a "Yeshua of Genassereth" in AD 70 (more likely to be a relative of "our" Jesus than others of that name); and all of these deaths we know about only through Josephus, and scattered references in other chroniclers, just as in the case of "our" Jesus.

I concede on the Hasmonean Royal line. However the claim on the Davidian Line is flawed geneologies have been proven. And if Joseph his human father was a David descendant, the Christian faith claim Joseph was not the real father of Jesus. The entire story is hearsay on hearsay, and mutilated myths, stories of other would be messiahs. Since Jesus is not documented by any non-Biblical sources, one might assume he is either entirely fictional or perhaps a fusion of other figures like Honi, Simon bar Kochba, Hanina ben Dosa, John the Baptist, and other itinerant preachers plus the non-Jewish virgin born saviours like Mithra (Mithras), Lugh (of Ireland), Baldur (Teutonic), Krishna, Horus, Osiris, Apollonius, Hesus, Apollo, or Aplu. Kersey Graves wrote a book on the other Sixteen divine/human saviours.

The "rock" was a kind of Cosmic Egg, the primordial unity that was the universe until the "Big Bang" or "Let There Be Light" moment when Mithra emerged.

That is no more absurd than the Judeo-Christian myth of an immaterial deity impregnating a virgin Jewish girl to produce a god-human hybrid with confusing philosophy to explain the absurd concept. Your interpretation of the rock being a cosmic egg prior to the Big Bang is highly irrational.

No, there was never any such version in the Roman Empire: it first appears in 19th-century French anti-clerical writings, has been thoroughly repudiated by scholars, and now is found only on the Internet. We have been through this before. Mithra could not have been "born of a human virgin" because no humans (or any multiplicity of objects, of any kind) existed: his emergence was the beginning of creation.

Are you joking? There were humans around long before 6th BCE when Mithra was born? Humans of the genus-species Homo sapiens had been on Earth for 200,000 years. Other species of Humans such as Homo habilis go back more than 2.2 million years. Humans were around on Earth long before Mithra, and long before Christ. Humans from H. habilis, H. ergaster, H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis, H. antecessor, and H. sapiens lived long before Moses created JHWY. The Earth was here 4.5 billion years before we invented gods. The Universe burst into existence 13.7 billion years before Mithra, Christ, Lugh, Lieu, Baldur, or Horus were invented by superstitious humans.

The myth of any human-god hybrid being born of a human virgin is rubbish. It violates the laws of genetics, trans-genus reproduction, and common sense.

Bull**** again. Mithra could not have been "visited by three magi" because no humans (or any multiplicity of objects, of any kind) existed: his emergence was the beginning of creation.

Mithra lived in the 6th Century BCE. The remarkable similarities of the Mithra Myth and the much later Jesus Christ Myth are unmistakable. I did not say the Magi visited Mithra. I said the Magi visited the infant Jesus according to the Bible. This mainly shows that much of the Christ Myth is borrowed from the Iranians. It might have reached Palestine and Asia Minor during the times of the Seleucid Empire, the Greco-Persian successor state to Alexander's Empire. There is nothing original in the patchwork Christ Myth.

Bull**** again. The Mithraist communal meal consisted of beef and beer.

That is true. But in the secondary Roman Cult of Mithra as a Sun God, the communal meal consisted of bread cooked in a solar disk shape which was stolen by the Christian Church. Roman Mithraists abandoned the killing of the Bull.

When they slaughtered the bull, the worshippers were sprinkled with the blood. There might be some symbolic resonance here with the Eucharistic "wine" but there is scarcely a resemblance to baptism (it was not a one-time initiatory ritual, but something repeated often).

No such concept appears in any version of Mithraism that we know of.

I concede that I am not sure about that. Church Father Tertullian wrote:

What are the historical origins of infant baptism? | Bible.org - Worlds Largest Bible Study Site

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] "[Non-Christians] ascribe to their idols the imbuing of waters with the self-same efficacy [of purification]. ... For washing is the channel through which they are initiated into some sacred rites--of some notorious Isis or Mithras...[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Moreover, by carrying water around, and sprinkling it, they everywhere expiate country-seats, houses, temples, and whole cities: at all events, at the Apollinarian and Eleusinian games they are baptized; and they presume that the effect of their doing that is their regeneration and the remission of the penalties due to their perjuries.
[/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]My Pre-Christian Celtic ancestors had Druidic Baptism (in Old Irish - Baiste--Geintlidhe.)[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
[/FONT]
www.irelandhistory.org/.../druidic-baptism-or-baiste-geintlidhe.html


Sorry, but you have failed to show that Christianity is not just another Iron Age Pagan Cult. Every idea is borrowed.


Amergin

 

[bob x]

But apparently circa 200 BC sees the dedication of a Seleucid temple in western Iran to “Anahita, as the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord Mithra”

No. First of all, it was in northern Syria. Secondly, Anahita, more commonly called Anath and commonly identified with Egyptian Neith and Greek Athena (how the consonants got switched is a mystery) was indeed a virgin-- and not the mother of ANYBODY. Thirdly, Anahita has no connection to Mithra whatsoever; she wasn't even a Persian godess. When this temple was discovered, it was considered of historical importance because the area was later a stronghold of Monophysites during the Nestorian controversy: Nestorius taught that Mary should only be called "mother of Christ" and not "mother of God" because the human and divine natures were entirely separate, and Mary contributed only the human part; the Monophysites went to the other extreme, that Christ was entirely divine in nature and Mary had to be quasi-divine to bear him (going much further in devotion to Mary than Catholics or Orthodox have ever done), so it was interesting that the "Grey Goddess" (as Anath/Neith/Athena was known, the source of wise advice and domestic crafts) had a strong cult there.

So where did this claim that Anahita was Mithra's mother come from? It is one of the many confabulations by the notorious Acharya S, who has done so much to spread fantasies and lies about this subject. I repeat, the pseudo-Mithraism with the Christian parallels did not exist anywhere in the world until 19th-century France, and now exists only on the Internet, not in scholarship. It is the atheist equivalent of "creation science".

Yeah, but Jesus apparently was visited by the magi who have been associated with the Zoroastrians.

This part is true. Persian astrologers had a reputation, and Matthew wants to claim that they endorsed the specialness of Jesus.

Zoroaster was attended to by 7 wisemen.

I have not heard this story before.

And what about the notion that Mithras birth was attended to by shepherds.

I have not heard that one either, but it is a typical confabulation by someone who does not understand the Mithraist cosmology in the slightest. As the Tao Teh Ching puts it, "One became Two, Two begat Three, and from Three proceeded the Ten Thousand things..." The birth of Mithra was the moment when One became Two: at this point there was only Light (Mithra) and Matter (the "rock") and before that there had only been the Primordial Unity. There were no shepherds because there were no humans, or any sheep, just like there were no "stables" because there were no horses, or any pieces of wood to build with, for that matter, no people, places, or things of any kind. The birth of Jesus is depicted as an event within history, inside a world full of people, places, and things that has been going on for a long time; the birth of Mithra was depicted as the very start of history, the Biblical analogue being "And God said, Let there be Light, and there was Light, and God separated the Light from the Darkness."

The Eucharist brings to my mind the Hom (juice) and Dron (giving thanks to food) ceremony's of the Zoroastrians.

Yes, there is some symbolic resonance among these communal-meal rituals, but this pattern is very ancient in human cultures, and the Passover meal is the far more direct antecedent in the Christian case.

You know what? I'm far from an expert in the field of linguistics, but I do know that it's not an exact science

So you don't know anything-- and you refuse to learn from someone who does.

and in my opinion the Hebrew forms and the Avestan forms do not sound far apart nor do their meanings seem far apart.

I see your point about the Hebrew being used other than a proper name. Just out of curiosity in what literary work did this form meaning "save; rescue" as you say first appear and when?

It is a common verb, pervasive throughout the Old Testament and found in earlier Semitic dialects from long before Hebrew emerged as a distinctive language. The root is shin-waw-'ayin where the waw gives the u-vowel and the 'ayin the prolongation of the vowel, important features of all forms of this word which none of your Iranian words have anything remotely resembling. The root is totally native to Semitic, and in fact traces back to the Nostratic common ancestor of Semitic and Indo-European (that common ancestor possibly being about 30,000 years ago). The Indo-European root was something like *SALWE as seen in Latin salve, from which comes English save, and with S->H shift (as English salt, Latin sal = Greek halos; English sun, Latin sol = Greek helios; Sanskrit soma = Avestan haoma; Sanskrit asura = Avestan ahura) we find Slavic hayova "to guard" as in Czech hajoba "warden; ranger" (of a protected forest or park). The weak-liquid that I wrote "L" in *SALWE often disappears (as in the Slavic) or shifts to R (Podkorny writes it with R; the actual pronunciation is hard to tell) as in "preserve", "conserve" etc. from a different form of the same root that got into Latin by some other root. The liquid disappears in the Semitic from the Semitic habit of turning all roots into three consonants.

Avestan haurvait "he guards" actually IS this same word. The H is what is left of the sibilant (all the original Indo-European sibilants decay to H in Iranian; the sibilant in yaz/Yasna/Yasht is from original J, compare Sanskrit yajna "act of worship") corresponding to SH in Y-shua; all the "aurva" is from the weak-liquid plus the W, corresponding to the u-vowel, and the "i" is the prolongation, corresponding to the 'ayin at the end of the Hebrew name; and that -t suffix is 3rd-person singular, cognate to the English -s in the same role, not related to the Hebrew y- prefix but analogous. This is what is particularly wrong with what you are doing: the "y" doesn't really count for comparison, because it is just a grammatical add-on in the Hebrew word where it is part of the root in the Iranian yaz; it is like comparing English "saves" to Latin "Vesta" (the hearth-goddess) because of that VES match, but the final -s in English isn't part of the root.

 

[bob x]

Why does the Talmud report that Yesua ben Pacheria was the son of Miram Magdalene?

It doesn't. Yeshua of Nazareth is described as the son of Mary the mugaddeleh "hairdresser" evidently reflecting some confusion between the "Virgin" Mary and the Magdalene; the earlier Yeshua was the son of the "witch of Ashdod."

His healing and magical arts surely resemble those of the later Jesus of Nazareth.

In the earlier case it was the mother who had magical arts, and purely black arts, no "healing" (she was more the type to make you ill).

The earlier Yeshua was tried for sorcery and executed in the Jewish manner of stoning. Then his dead body was hung on a tree for all to see.

This is pure invention.

Neither Tacitus or Suetonius were physically present at the alleged trial by Pontius or the crucifixion.

Not one single execution from Roman times is described by someone who was there. Again, you have an absurdly inflated notion of what kinds of records we have from ancient times.

Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus lived from 56 CE to 117 CE.

He lost his home as a young child to the Great Fire, surely a traumatic event which he would remember quite faithfully. I trust what he reports about what people were saying at the time, particularly since he is passing on some things that were said which he himself does not believe. If the people at the time of the Great Fire, well within living memory of the crucifixion, were saying that Jesus had been executed under Pontius Pilate for spreading pernicious beliefs, the simple explanation for why they were saying that is that it is true.

There are no written records of any Jesus being executed for sedition composed by Pontius Pilate.

There are no written records of anyone being executed in Roman times that was composed by the executioner. None.

Since Jesus is not documented by any non-Biblical sources

Yes, he is, you just don't like the sources.

one might assume he is either entirely fictional

Only if you are bound and determined to invent such a scenario. I defy you to come up with a parallel instance.

or perhaps a fusion of other figures like Honi, Simon bar Kochba, Hanina ben Dosa

Honi the Circle-Drawer has no resemblances to Jesus whatsoever. Bar Kochba and Hanina were from generations later, well after the Great Fire or Josephus writing his history.

the non-Jewish virgin born saviours like Mithra (Mithras), Lugh (of Ireland), Baldur (Teutonic), Krishna, Horus, Osiris, Apollonius, Hesus, Apollo, or Aplu.

Not a single one of these was a "virgin born savior".

Kersey Graves wrote a book on the other Sixteen divine/human saviours.

His book is full of fabrications and frauds.

Your interpretation of the rock being a cosmic egg prior to the Big Bang is highly irrational.

This was how they explained the origin of the universe. You wanted them to use the word "singularity"?

There were humans around long before 6th BCE when Mithra was born?

You are confusing when the story was first told with when the story was SET. You are mistaken in any case if you think Zoroaster (who did live in the 6th century BCE) invented Mithra ("Mitra" appears in the Rig-Veda from thousands of years earlier for example); but the point is that the story is set at The Very Beginning of Time.

Humans were around on Earth long before Mithra

Before the first emergence of Light and Matter? Oh no they weren't.

The Universe burst into existence 13.7 billion years before Mithra

That's what they CALLED the bursting into existence of the Universe: they called it the birth of Mithra. They were factually mistaken in thinking that the Sun was the original Light, the oldest distinctive entity in the universe, but it was not a bad guess given what they were capable of observing. Cut them a break.

in the secondary Roman Cult of Mithra as a Sun God, the communal meal consisted of bread cooked in a solar disk shape which was stolen by the Christian Church.

Pure fabrication.

Roman Mithraists abandoned the killing of the Bull.

No they didn't. Everything that you think you "know" about Mithraism appears to be 100% derivative from the "creation scientists" who concoct lies out of nothing.

 

[mojobadshah]

The root is totally native to Semitic, and in fact traces back to the Nostratic common ancestor of Semitic and Indo-European (that common ancestor possibly being about 30,000 years ago).

I'm glad you mentioned this because I've been searching for a good source that would point out the connection between the Semitic and Indo-European roots. Is there one you would recommend?

If what you're saying is true you have revealed an interesting connection that may be more concrete according to you than my Yaz/ Yeshua hypothesis, and that is that the Saoshyant / Yeshua hypothesis. The Saoshyant therein being the savior(s) to come according to Zoroastrianism.

Also, what do you have to say about the fact that the Nostratic family appears to be refuted by most people?

 

[bananabrain]

Not one single execution from Roman times is described by someone who was there.

i assume you are discounting the talmudic and midrashic accounts of, for example, the ten martyrdoms of the hadrianic persecutions, including such details as r. 'aqiba being raked to death with iron implements and his remains sold for animal food, or whoever it was (can't remember right now) was wrapped in a Torah scroll and burned alive. these were reported by disciples, of course, so the tales, by the time they are written down, may have grown in the telling or have been embroidered or even fictional details invented, but they must presumably have come from somewhere. also, i was under the impression that condemned criminals were very often executed in the arena and those details are certainly documented, aren't they?

the Judeo-Christian myth of an immaterial deity impregnating a virgin Jewish girl to produce a god-human hybrid with confusing philosophy to explain the absurd concept.

er... there's nothing "judeo" about it. we don't expect any such thing, it would violate our ideas of G!D.

as far as i am aware, there are a number of different yeshuas mentioned in the talmud, but i am not convinced that any of them are 100% the same as the christian one.

Honi the Circle-Drawer has no resemblances to Jesus whatsoever. Bar Kochba and Hanina were from generations later, well after the Great Fire or Josephus writing his history.

doesn't geza vermes come up with a picture of a "galilean charismatic" that somewhat resembles jesus? certainly honi and hanina are included in this category, aren't they?

b'shalom

bananabrain

 

[bob x]

i assume you are discounting the talmudic and midrashic accounts...

Not at all: I would put him in a similar category with the gospel accounts; that is, basically reliable although

these were reported by disciples, of course, so the tales, by the time they are written down, may have grown in the telling or have been embroidered or even fictional details invented, but they must presumably have come from somewhere.

Amergin however was wanting to reject everything that was not written down straightaway, and directly without any intermediaries; which is demanding more than we can ever realistically expect to get.

also, i was under the impression that condemned criminals were very often executed in the arena and those details are certainly documented, aren't they?

Amergin wouldn't accept the kind of documentation we have, unless we got bureaucratic archives from the Coliseum with a list of scheduled events from every day.

doesn't geza vermes come up with a picture of a "galilean charismatic" that somewhat resembles jesus? certainly honi and hanina are included in this category, aren't they?

Amergin is wanting their biographies to be the actual sources of the Jesus story, which in Hanina's case is impossible without time-travel, and in Honi's case involves no specific points of similarity.

 

[bob x]

I'm glad you mentioned this because I've been searching for a good source that would point out the connection between the Semitic and Indo-European roots. Is there one you would recommend?

Aside from very technical expositions, I don't know of a good book. I could ask on the "MTLR" (Mother-Tongue Long-Rangers) group at groups.yahoo.com

the Saoshyant / Yeshua hypothesis. The Saoshyant therein being the savior(s) to come according to Zoroastrianism.

The "Saoshyant" concept has a lot to do with the evolution of the Jewish "Messiah" from a purely political figure, the royal heir who was to restore the earthly fortunes of the nation (although this "political" view of the Messiah was still held by a lot of people 1st century CE), into someone expected to teach wisdom and virtue, and/or give access to an afterlife in a better world. In this respect (as also with the development of "angels" and "demons") I think the influence of Persian thought was undeniably important.

As to the word Saoshyant itself, it is not cognate to Y-shua but is cognate to a very important word in early Christian thought: Greek sozein "to save" and its actor-noun soter "savior", both ubiquitous in gospel of John and other New Testament books. (English, like Greek, generally uses -er for the actor-noun affix "one who does [such-and-such verb]" but the -ant on Saoshyant is also an old Indo-European affix for that role, seen in some Latinate words in English like claimant, one who makes a legal claim, or Protestant, originally meaning one who protests.) The root is not the same *SALWE/SARWE discussed last time, but something like *SOTYE with a "palatalized" T that turns into a sibilant in some of the Greek (soZEin) and all of the Persian (saoSHYant) forms. What is particularly interesting linguistically here is that the initial S- in Saoshyant is from an original S in the Indo-European: I told you that "all" the original S turned into H, but there are a handful of exceptions (the word Avesta is another), and this suggests that these words were used religiously for centuries before Zoroaster (words used in repetitive chants, etc., are resistant to the pronunciation shifts that words used day-to-day undergo). The Greek word did not originally have a religious usage, and probably came to acquire one under the influence of the Persian cognate.

Also, what do you have to say about the fact that the Nostratic family appears to be refuted by most people?

The field of linguistics is dominated by conservatives who only like to work with languages and language groups for which there is an abundance of evidence. In reconstructing languages from long ago by comparing huge language groups whose divergence has been extreme since their last common ancestor, the evidence is necessarily sparse. As far as I'm concerned, that just means the work is difficult, not that it shouldn't be undertaken: paleontologists take it for granted that they often have no more than a couple teeth held together by a little fragment of jaw-bone to work with, and archaeologists are thrilled to find a decent-sized pottery shard. But for some reason linguistics has a stridently emotional culture where disagreements are expressed with a lot of nastiness, and the conservatives and the long-rangers have not been on speaking terms for a long time.

 

[Muslimwoman]

Here are a few reasons:
1. Jesus is probably named after Joshua because in Christianity Jesus is supposed to be the prophet that comes to follow up after Moses. (I realize that in Islam it is not Jesus but Muhammad[P]).

Hi Dream

Sorry to but in ... I just wanted to point out that this is incorrect. Jesus (pbuh) is called Isa in Arabic and he is accepted as the virgin birth of Mary. In Islam he is considered a Prophet and he is mentioned more times in the Quran than the Prophet Mohamed (pbuh).

Will tiptoe out now

 

[mojobadshah]

As to the word Saoshyant itself, it is not cognate to Y-shua but is cognate to a very important word in early Christian thought: Greek sozein "to save" and its actor-noun soter "savior", both ubiquitous in gospel of John and other New Testament books. (English, like Greek, generally uses -er for the actor-noun affix "one who does [such-and-such verb]" but the -ant on Saoshyant is also an old Indo-European affix for that role, seen in some Latinate words in English like claimant, one who makes a legal claim, or Protestant, originally meaning one who protests.) The root is not the same *SALWE/SARWE discussed last time, but something like *SOTYE with a "palatalized" T that turns into a sibilant in some of the Greek (soZEin) and all of the Persian (saoSHYant) forms. What is particularly interesting linguistically here is that the initial S- in Saoshyant is from an original S in the Indo-European: I told you that "all" the original S turned into H, but there are a handful of exceptions (the word Avesta is another), and this suggests that these words were used religiously for centuries before Zoroaster (words used in repetitive chants, etc., are resistant to the pronunciation shifts that words used day-to-day undergo). The Greek word did not originally have a religious usage, and probably came to acquire one under the influence of the Persian cognate.

So we know that the second part of Jesus's name "Oshea" is related to the PIE root for words like Latin salve. But what about the first part? What IE. words besides names is the Hebrew Yahweh related to?

Also what is your source for the Avestan cognates?

 

[Quahom1]

Hi Dream

Sorry to but in ... I just wanted to point out that this is incorrect. Jesus (pbuh) is called Isa in Arabic and he is accepted as the virgin birth of Mary. In Islam he is considered a Prophet and he is mentioned more times in the Quran than the Prophet Mohamed (pbuh).

Will tiptoe out now

How ironic, wouldn't you think?

 

[Quahom1]

Hi Dream

Sorry to but in ... I just wanted to point out that this is incorrect. Jesus (pbuh) is called Isa in Arabic and he is accepted as the virgin birth of Mary. In Islam he is considered a Prophet and he is mentioned more times in the Quran than the Prophet Mohamed (pbuh).

Will tiptoe out now

The Avatar...is that your face?

My avatar is me...

 

[bob x]

Podkorny's Indo-European Etymological Dictionary and its various reworkings by later editors is the standard source for cognates within the Indo-European family; I don't own a copy but just Google around (any PIE etymologies you find on the net are going to be Podkorny).

The source of YHWH is of course a matter of controversy, but like the majority I accept that the y- prefix is the usual 3rd-person-singular and H-W-H (heh-waw-heh) the archaic form of the root H-Y-H (heh-yod-heh) "to be", as in Exodus where the Name is explained as "I am what I am" (other proposals for the precise grammatical of "to be" that is used in YHWH are "He becomes" or "He causes to be"). Shifts from waw in old Canaanite to yod in Hebrew are frequent: Canaanite wayin "wine" (from which the English derives, through Greek oen-, Latin vin-) becomes Hebrew yayin; the old city which Egyptians recorded as Wuru-Shalim became Hebrew Yerushalayim "Jerusalem"; the similar root CH-Y-H (cheth-yod-heh where cheth is not a semi-sibilant as in English church but a guttural as in German ach du lieber) was older CH-W-H preserved in the name Chawwah "Eve" (explained as "mother of life"). The preservation of the archaic W in YHWH and Chawwah indicates (like the preservation of archaic S in Saoshyant and Avesta) that these names were not spoken day-to-day but only in conservative religious contexts: when YHWH is used as an element of personal names, it is deliberately somewhat distorted to avoid pronouncing the Holy Name in non-religious context; as a first element it becomes Y-how eroding to Yo- or just Y- while as a final element it becomes -yahuw eroding to -yah.

As for what could be cognate in Indo-European here, the problem is that "to be" is an intensely irregular verb in all of Indo-European. In Semitic there is not much irregularity; compare the totally regular conjugation of
chasad "to love":
echsed "I love", tichsed "thou lovest", yichsed "he loves";
nichsed "we love"; tichseduw "you love"; yichseduw "they love"
with the conjugation
hayah "to be":
ehyeh "I am", tihyeh "thou art"; yihyeh "he is;
nihyeh "we are"; tihyehuw "you are"; yihyehuw "they are"
the only irregularity being the form yesh "there is..." to assert existence of something. But in Latin, contrast the regular
amare "to love":
amo "I love"; amas "thou lovest"; amat "he loves";
amamus "we love"; amatis "you love"; amant "they love"
with the weird conjugation
esse "to be":
sum "I am"; es "thou art"; est "he is";
sumus "we are"; estis "you are"; sunt "they are"
where the initial vowel of esse disappears in I/we/they (in English the vowel doesn't disappear here but shifts to A), and at I the ending is -m instead of -o (which in English kills the S: compare Persian ahom with the typical S->H shift; and in English S->R at we/you/they is like other cases of S between vowels, since the final E wasn't always silent: Italic Ausosa "dawn" like Sanskrit Ushas, Greek Eos, English east, Easter shifting to Latin Aurora). The root looks like the Hebrew yesh but run amuck.

Latin also has irregular forms in F such as the command fi! "be!" seen with 3rd-person ending in fiat lux "let there be light"; and in subjunctives (for hypotheticals) like fuit "he might be" (source of English future). This F is consistent with other cases where English has B (frater "brother") and is thus cognate to the English irregulars be as infinitive "to be" and also command, and been. The B particle in German is also in the main conjugation at ich bin "I am", du bist "thou art". Then there is the odd W prefix in the English past was, were pronounced V (though written "w") in German war "was", gewesen "been", Wesen "being; entity". Nobody is quite sure whether this is another eroded form of the B particle, or some third root that was also in use.

One possibility is that Indo-European, at one stage, lost the verb "to be" almost completely: in Russian, for example, you say on xoroshiy chelovek "He good fellow" where we would say "He is a good fellow" and this omission of the verb is typical of Slavic. But Russian does still have yest "there is" used like Hebrew yesh, and past tense bwil "was", infinitive bwit "to be", command bwi "be!" from the B particle. So maybe the old verb related to H-W-H died out, and the old yesh and the new B particle were drafted to make up replacements.

Or perhaps the B actually is the cognate of H-W-H, if the Nostratic root was something like *B-H with the B often eroding, expanded to three consonants in Semitic (which always wants three-letter roots, much as the *S-R-W-A "save" root becomes SH-W-A in Semitic losing the liquid). It is particularly difficult to be confident, however, about any reconstruction at the Nostratic time-depth in this case, because even at the Indo-European level it is so puzzling to figure out what is really going on.

There is a conceptual relative of YHWH in Indo-European, however, and that is the naming of some gods as "the beings that are". In Norse, one race of gods is the Aesir (that's the yesh/is/are root again), found in Vedic Sanskrit as the asura, in Persian becoming the divine name Ahura (oddly, in Hinduism the asura came to be thought of as "bad" gods while the deva were "good"; quite contrariwise in Persian, the div were "bad" and the ahura "good"; in Norse neither the Aesir nor the Vanir were any better or worse than the other).

 

[mojobadshah]

Are you saying, in other words, that the beginning part of the name Jesus "Yahweh" could be related to either the Indo-European words "be" or "is"?

 

[bob x]

It would be the W in YHWH which would be related to "be", if anything is; but that is part of what's missing in Y-shua as the name eroded down from Yehowshua to avoid speaking the holy name too much. The root of "is" seems to be a different word, although associated with a "be" for a long time; the way the "is" root is used in Aesir, asura, and Ahura is the same concept as YHWH, even if not using the same word.

 

[Muslimwoman]

How ironic, wouldn't you think?

Hi Q

I don't think it is ironic at all ... I should have pointed out that Jesus (pbuh) is mentioned BY NAME more times than Mohamed (pbuh), which seems natural as the Quran was revealed to Mohamed (pbuh). Moses (pbuh) on the other hand is actually referred to more than any other Prophet.

The Avatar...is that your face?

My avatar is me...

No it is not me, I stopped putting my picture on the internet a couple of years ago. I did ask for the picture of me in the what do you look like thread to be removed but not sure if it ever was. Just a personal decision.

 

[Dream]

Hi Dream

Sorry to but in ... I just wanted to point out that this is incorrect. Jesus (pbuh) is called Isa in Arabic and he is accepted as the virgin birth of Mary. In Islam he is considered a Prophet and he is mentioned more times in the Quran than the Prophet Mohamed (pbuh).

Sorry about that! Somehow I got this impression from a previous post of someones, but either I could not find their post (I looked) or I somehow misunderstood. It is possible I read it on a different site, so thanks for taking the time to point that out. It shows you have not put me into the hopeless bin.

 

[mojobadshah]

It is a common verb, pervasive throughout the Old Testament and found in earlier Semitic dialects from long before Hebrew emerged as a distinctive language. The root is shin-waw-'ayin where the waw gives the u-vowel and the 'ayin the prolongation of the vowel, important features of all forms of this word which none of your Iranian words have anything remotely resembling. The root is totally native to Semitic, and in fact traces back to the Nostratic common ancestor of Semitic and Indo-European (that common ancestor possibly being about 30,000 years ago). The Indo-European root was something like *SALWE as seen in Latin salve, from which comes English save

The reason I assumed there may have been some etymological connection between the name Jesus and the language of Zoroaster's Yasna was because of the conceptual connections between Zoroastrianism Judaism and Christianity. So I realize I'm just shooting now, but this root akin to the Avestan sav-? Because it's used in Zoroaster's Yasna 10 times and to mean "to be useful, profitable; to produce benefit." And to bring up a previous point there are apparently Iranic loans in Hebrew so maybe this was one of them?

 

[mojobadshah]

Zerubabbel is indeed a somewhat puzzling name, but the second half is simply the Hebrew pronunciation of "Babylon"; he was of course born decades before the Persian capture of Babylon, so a Persian connection to the first half of his name seems unlikely, but not as impossible as your other suggestion.

Well is there anything that you know of that could support the possibility that Zeru- in Zerubabbel is related to the Avestan name Zarathushtra (Gk./Eng. Zoroaster)? Because I'm not the only one who came to the conclusion that the Pharisees may have been related to the Persians in some way.

"Some of the higher critics have placed the name Pharisee, with Parsi; the claims of that Hebrew sect to superior sanctity, its aloofness and cleanliness, its belief in the continuance of life after death and in future rewards and punishments, have been traced to the religion with which the Jews had come in contact during the Babylonian captivity" - Miles Menander Dawson, The Ethical Religion of Zoroaster

 

[bob x]

So I realize I'm just shooting now, but this root akin to the Avestan sav-? Because it's used in Zoroaster's Yasna 10 times and to mean "to be useful, profitable; to produce benefit."

It is counter-intuitive, but when you look for related words, you don't look for things that look the same but for things that look different in a systematic way; every language undergoes some history of sound-shifts. For example, when you see that Latin frater is English brother, then you know that a Latin root like frag- (as in "fragile", "fragment") is not going to be related to anything in English starting with F, but rather, something starting with B (the cognate of frag- is break).

The cognate in Iranian of the *SALVE root is haurva- "to guard" as I pointed out before, with the initial sibilant S shifted to H, as usual (and the liquid L/R, of which there is no trace in Semitic SH-W-A, still preserved). When you do find S in Iranian, it does not come from original S in Indo-European, but will be seen as J or G elsewhere (I pointed out before how Yasna is like Vedic Sanskrit Yajna "act of worship"; in Latin we have the iug- root "to submit" as in "subjugate", akin to English yoke). So: I do not know the Avestan sav- root you speak of, but I would guess it to be related to English give, for example, not at all like save.

And to bring up a previous point there are apparently Iranic loans in Hebrew so maybe this was one of them?

No. Just, no. The Semitic languages are recorded in writing from well over a thousand years before Iranians had any writing or political power or cultural influence, and the SH-W-A root is thoroughly native in Semitic going all the way back. You keep on wanting to rescue your original theory, but it is not tenable.

Well is there anything that you know of that could support the possibility that Zeru- in Zerubabbel is related to the Avestan name Zarathushtra (Gk./Eng. Zoroaster)?

I know of nothing to support it, but nothing to contradict it either. It is a puzzling name, not native Hebrew in form. The second element appears to be a form of the name "Babylon" which doesn't make much sense with a Persian first element, but I do not know of any particularly convincing etymology.

Because I'm not the only one who came to the conclusion that the Pharisees may have been related to the Persians in some way.

"Some of the higher critics have placed the name Pharisee, with Parsi; the claims of that Hebrew sect to superior sanctity, its aloofness and cleanliness, its belief in the continuance of life after death and in future rewards and punishments, have been traced to the religion with which the Jews had come in contact during the Babylonian captivity" - Miles Menander Dawson, The Ethical Religion of Zoroaster

That a lot of concepts in Pharisaic thought, including the concept of "angelic" beings as well as the afterlife rewards/punishment concept Dawson mentions, look very much like Persian influence is undoubtable. But the Pharisees did not branch off as a distinctive sect until the Hasmonean period, after the Persians had been overthrown by the Greeks, and the Greeks by native rebels; by this time the concepts had soaked into the culture so that they were no longer remembered to be of foreign origin. The Pharisees claimed that their ideas were the original teachings of Moses, as passed down from teacher to student in an "Oral Torah" alongside the "Written Torah"; so, although I think it is true that they were strongly influenced by Zoroastrianism, they would never have chosen a name like "Parsi" which said that they were foreign-influenced. The root P-R-SH "to separate" is another entirely-native Semitic root; it appears to be a variant of P-R-TZ "to make a sharp break" which is sometimes found as a name for children born as a "breach birth" (Pharetz son of Judah in Genesis, Paris son of Priam in the Iliad; perhaps also the founder of the Parisii in Gaul, hence the city of Paris).

This root, however, only makes it into Indo-European in one peculiar derivative: the root fart "to break wind"! This, of course, is not the origin of the "Persian" name: Pars, like anything else in Iranian containing an S, should be related to words in other Indo-European languages where a J or G appears instead; I would guess it is like purge, and that the "Pars" faction of the Anshan tribe was a group which had been "purged" (banished) by reason of some now-forgotten dispute.

 

[mojobadshah]

I do not know the Avestan sav- root you speak of, but I would guess it to be related to English give, for example, not at all like save.

In Zoroastrianism: An Introduction to an Ancient Faith Peter Clark mentions the use of the Avestan root sav- and its meaning which I take it is Porkorny's sava- which according to him means "salvation" as well as "benefit."

No. Just, no. The Semitic languages are recorded in writing from well over a thousand years before Iranians had any writing or political power or cultural influence, and the SH-W-A root is thoroughly native in Semitic going all the way back. You keep on wanting to rescue your original theory, but it is not tenable.

Well I've also noticed some connections between Zoroastrian, Sumerian, and Semitic concepts. Though I realized its often discredited the ancient Greek placement of Zoroaster often makes me second think the possibility that the Zoroastrians may have influenced the Sumerians and the Semites long before the Persians and Jews met in Babylon. But I see your point.

know of nothing to support it, but nothing to contradict it either. It is a puzzling name, not native Hebrew in form. The second element appears to be a form of the name "Babylon" which doesn't make much sense with a Persian first element, but I do not know of any particularly convincing etymology.

Well for what its worth according this quote Zoroaster had a connection to Babylon...

"In connection with his history he [Berosus 360 B.C.] mentions the name of Zoroaster as living a period twenty-four hundred years before Jesus' time. Berosus was not a prophet, predicting the birth of this great teacher at some future day. He was simply a chronicler of facts and events, as he found them stamped in clay or burnt upon bricks. It happened that Babylonia was overrun and conquered at that distant period, and Zoroaster's name is mentioned in connection with that event." Loren Harper Whitney, Life and Teachings of Zoroaster the Great Persian

That a lot of concepts in Pharisaic thought, including the concept of "angelic" beings as well as the afterlife rewards/punishment concept Dawson mentions, look very much like Persian influence is undoubtable. But the Pharisees did not branch off as a distinctive sect until the Hasmonean period, after the Persians had been overthrown by the Greeks, and the Greeks by native rebels; by this time the concepts had soaked into the culture so that they were no longer remembered to be of foreign origin. The Pharisees claimed that their ideas were the original teachings of Moses, as passed down from teacher to student in an "Oral Torah" alongside the "Written Torah"; so, although I think it is true that they were strongly influenced by Zoroastrianism, they would never have chosen a name like "Parsi" which said that they were foreign-influenced. The root P-R-SH "to separate" is another entirely-native Semitic root; it appears to be a variant of P-R-TZ "to make a sharp break" which is sometimes found as a name for children born as a "breach birth" (Pharetz son of Judah in Genesis, Paris son of Priam in the Iliad; perhaps also the founder of the Parisii in Gaul, hence the city of Paris).

This root, however, only makes it into Indo-European in one peculiar derivative: the root fart "to break wind"! This, of course, is not the origin of the "Persian" name: Pars, like anything else in Iranian containing an S, should be related to words in other Indo-European languages where a J or G appears instead; I would guess it is like purge, and that the "Pars" faction of the Anshan tribe was a group which had been "purged" (banished) by reason of some now-forgotten dispute.

Well another theory is that Persia means "frontier or borderland" which seems close enough to "to make sharp break," but you're the expert