IOKOBOS to JAMES

Jeffrey B. Gibson jgibson000 at attbi.com
Wed Aug 7 09:16:54 EDT 2002


"Carl W. Conrad" wrote:

> At 10:24 PM -0400 8/6/02, Eric S. Weiss wrote:
> >IACWBOS = JAMES is a weird convolution/evolution, but what personally gets
> >me is the refusal (in English at least) to name the short book before the
> >Apocalypse JUDAS. The author's name is IOUDAS, not IOUDH/E. I know that
> >more than one set of eyebrows will be raised in my "Greek for non-Greeks"
> >class when they see for themselves that Jude is actually Judas.
>
> Well, it does indeed appear that this is one of the longest threads ever
> over a rather marginal issue and I certainly didn't think I'd be having any
> input into it, but now I can't resist. "Yehudah" once Hellenized to IOUDAS
> and later Anglicized to "Judah" has indeed suffered its own fate of
> linguistic transformation. My guess is that the form "Jude" is the
> Gallicized IOUDAS and that the Biblical book took its name from the
> Gallicized form--but there's no reason in the world why it couldn't have
> been "Judah"--certainly that name is common enough among English-speakers
> as a proper name.

Should we not take into consideration that what we here is an indication of how
shameful the name Judas had become,  given that this was the name born by "the
traitor"? We have a similar phenomenon -- the origin of which is known only now to
those who are interested in historical trivia -- in the expression "your name will be
Mudd".

Yours,

Jeffrey Gibson


--
Jeffrey B. Gibson, D.Phil. (Oxon.)
1500 W. Pratt Blvd.
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