Harmon Seaver wrote: > Translate/transliterate is irrelevant -- you don't change people's names, you > especially don't change the name of the god. This was a Jewish religion, after > all, and as I mentioned before, the Old Testament is simply awash with praises > for the *name*. The whole name thing became so utterly important to the Jews > that they wouldn't even say it aloud less they mispronounce it. So if Rabbi > Yeshua was god incarnate or the son of god, it's the same thing.
This is *so* off-topic and others have replied sensibly, but you really, really, do miss the point about transliterations, that is writing languages in different scripts. Alphabets don't usually map onto each other 1:1. Each version of the alphabet has some symbols that represent more than one sound, or sounds represented by more than one symbol. No alphabet codes for all sounds used in human language, and each alphabet misses out different sounds. It is *impossible* to take something written in the Hebrew alphabet and write it down accurately in the English alphabet, and vice versa. There are sounds coded for in each alphabet that are not coded for in the other. No-one was trying to change anyone's name. Hebrew words, place names, people's names, were written in the Hebrew alphabet, but read by people who spoke Aramaic and pronounced the letters differently. Then they were written down in Greek, which lacks some consonants, but adds vowels. No possible Greek version of any word could have been exactly the same as the Hebrew. Then they were written into Latin, and copied from Latin into English - and that over a thousand years ago, since then our pronounciation has changed. It is like the game of Chinese whispers, at each stage a different noise is introduced into the signal. "Yeshua" is probably a better English rendition than "Jesus" because it has only been through one stage transliteration, not 4 or 5, but it is still, inevitably, inaccurate. Also of course we don't actually know exactly how words were pronounced in those days, its all reconstruction about which scholars differ. And it seems that many people in Palestine in those days had a Hebrew name and a Greek name, just as many Africans these days have a name in their own language and one in English or French, so the Greek version of one of the names might well represent how it was spoken better than the Hebrew, at least some of the time. In fact one approach to trying to work out how people in Palestine actually spoke in Roman times is to look at the Greek spellings of words and assume that Greek writers wrote down the words as they were then spoken - Hebrew spelling had been fossilised for centuries and probably did not represent the actual sounds used very accurately at all, and anyway most people spoke Aramaic which was then a just-about-mutually-intelligible sister language of Hebrew There need be no intent to "change people's names". It is impossible to avoid. Maybe this isn't all that off-topic. It is hard to imagine how anyone who failed to see the real problems inherent in transliterating between different codes could have much of a grasp of software or cryptography.
