There is a widespread claim on the internet that the name Jesus literally means “Hail Zeus.” This claim is frequently promoted by Mythicists—people who believe that there was no historical Jesus and that Jesus was invented based on earlier pagan deities. By linking Jesus’s name to Zeus’s, they hope to “prove” that Jesus is a made-up character based on Zeus.
Mythicists have apparently based this particular claim about the supposed etymology of Jesus’s name solely on the phonetic similarity between the name Jesus and the name Zeus in English. Unfortunately for the people out there on the internet, names that sound similar in English are not necessarily etymologically related to each and, in the case of the names Zeus and Jesus, there is simply no etymological relationship whatsoever.
A review of the misconception about Jesus meaning “Hail Zeus”
Here are some images I found on Google that present the claim that Jesus’s name means “Hail Zeus”:
This claim is often presented in conjunction with the equally false claim that the word Christ is derived from the name of the Hindu god Krishna. For instance, here is another image from Google that claims the name Jesus Christ means “Hail Zeus Krishna”:
Notice the silly arithmetic we have going here: add one “Hail Zeus” plus one “Christna” and apparently the sum is supposed to be “Jesus Christ.” As many of my readers doubtlessly already know, this isn’t how real linguistics works.
The names Jesus and Zeus
The names Jesus and Zeus are not even remotely etymologically related in any way whatsoever. The name Jesus is an Anglicized form of the Latin name Iesus, which is in turn a Latinized form of the ancient Greek name Ἰησοῦς (Iēsoûs), which is, in turn, a Hellenized form of Jesus’s original name in ancient Palestinian Aramaic, which was יֵשׁוּעַ (Yēšūă‘), a shortened form of the earlier Hebrew name יְהוֹשֻׁעַ (Yəhōšúaʿ), which means “YHWH is Salvation.”
Yəhōšúaʿ is the original Hebrew name of the hero Joshua, the central figure in the Book of Joshua in the Old Testament. Consequently, Yēšūă‘ was one of the most common male given names in Judaea and Galilee during the early part of the first century AD when Jesus was alive. There were many other people in the part of the world where Jesus lived with the same name as him—in precisely the same way that there are many people today with names like “Stephen,” “Samuel,” “Robert,” and “William.”
There are even multiple other people with the exact same name mentioned in the New Testament, including Jesus Barabbas, a man described as a murderer and insurrectionist in the Gospel of Mark, and Jesus Justus, a travelling companion of the apostle Paul mentioned in the Book of Acts and in the Pauline Epistles. The Jewish historian Titus Flavius Josephus (lived 37 – c. 100 AD) also mentions a large number of men with the name Jesus in his writings, including Jesus of Nazareth (i.e. the Jesus of the gospels), Jesus ben Ananias, Jesus ben Damneus, Jesus ben Gamaliel, and several others.
ABOVE: Illustration from 1910 of the crowd clamoring for the release of Barabbas, a famous, although probably not historical, incident described in the gospels
The name Zeus, however, is an Anglicization of the ancient Greek name Ζεύς (Dzeús), which was originally pronounced [dzeǔ̯s] in ancient Greek. Ζεύς is a shortened form of the originally longer name Ζεὺς Πατήρ (Dzeùs Patḗr) and is a reflex of the name of the ancient Indo-European sky-god *Dyḗus Ph₂tḗr, whose name literally means “Sky Father.” Other notable reflexes of *Dyḗus Ph₂tḗr include Latin Iupiter (Jupiter), Sanskrit द्यौष्पितृ (Dyáuṣpitṛ́), and Old English Tíw, the god after whom our day of the week Tuesday is named.
It is totally implausible that the name Ἰησοῦς in Greek could come from anything meaning “Hail Zeus.” For one thing, there is no record of ἰή (iḗ) being used in Greek to mean “hey” or “hail.” On the contrary, the normal Ancient Greek word for “hail” is “χαῖρε” (chaîre). The closest thing we have to ἰή being used to mean “hail” is the word ἰώ (iṓ), which is an exclamation that followers of the god Dionysos would make during their festivities.
Furthermore, the name Ζεύς and the ending of the name Ἰησοῦς are pronounced very differently in Ancient Greek. In Ancient Greek, the letter zeta ⟨ζ⟩ represents the double consonant sound /dz/ or maybe—as some scholars think—/zd/. The letter sigma ⟨σ⟩, meanwhile, represents the single consonant sound /s/. These are two distinct letters that would not have been easily confused with each other.
In Ancient Greek, the diphthong ⟨ευ⟩ represented the sound of an open-mid front unrounded vowel gliding into a close back rounded vowel (similar to the ⟨eu⟩ in “feud,” although not quite the same), while ⟨ου⟩ was a spurious diphthong representing just a plain close back rounded vowel (i.e. the ⟨ou⟩ in “soup”). Finally, Ζεύς and -σοῦς have different accents; Ζεύς has an acute accent, representing a rise in pitch, while -σοῦς has a circumflex accent, representing a rise in pitch followed by a fall in pitch.
Quite literally, then, the only thing Ζεύς and -σοῦς have in common pronunciation-wise is that they both end in the letter -ς, but, since nearly all masculine names in Greek end in -ς this can hardly be considered a noteworthy similarity. Given that we have very good, well-supported etymologies for both of these names, it makes no sense to reject the traditional etymologies in favor of a silly one that is based solely on how the names are pronounced in English.
Now, some supporters of the alleged connection between Jesus and Zeus have pointed out that many depictions of Jesus bear a certain resemblance to ancient Greek depictions of Zeus. This is certainly true, but it is only the result of the fact that, as I explain in this article I wrote in March 2020, in late antiquity, Christian artists began modeling their depictions of Jesus on older depictions of Zeus.
Prior to that point, Jesus was imagined in a whole range of different ways. Many early Christian depictions of Jesus show him as a beardless young man with curly hair dressed as a shepherd. In other words, it was only many centuries after Jesus’s death that his iconography became standardized. The fact that the way we portray Jesus today has been influenced by Greek depictions of Zeus does not in any way support the argument that Jesus’s name comes from “Hail Zeus.”
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Otricoli Zeus, a Roman marble copy of a fourth-century BC Greek bust of the god Zeus
The name Krishna and the word Christ
There is absolutely no etymological relationship between the name Krishna and the word Christ either. First of all, “Christ” is not a name; it is a title. The English word Christ is derived from the Greek word χριστός (christós), meaning “one who has been anointed with oil.” This word is derived from the Greek verb χρίω (chríō), meaning “to anoint with oil.”
The word χριστός is formed from the root of the verb χρίω plus the standard verbal adjective suffix -τος (-tos). The verb χρίω is, in turn, derived from the Proto-Indo-European root word *gʰrey-, meaning “to smear.” The English word grime and the Sanskrit word घृ (ghṛ), meaning “to besprinkle,” are both cognates of χριστός derived from the same Proto-Indo-European root.
χριστός acquired its religious significance from the fact that, in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible, it is used as a calque of the Hebrew word מָשִׁיחַ (māšîaḥ), meaning “anointed one” in the religious sense. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the word māšîaḥ is used to refer to various people who were perceived as having been metaphorically anointed by God to do his work on Earth. In the Book of Isaiah 45:1, King Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid Empire is described as a māšîaḥ.
The name Krishna, on the other hand is a rendering of the Sanskrit name कृष्ण (kṛṣṇá), which is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *kr̥snós, meaning “black,” “dark,” or “dark blue.” The Hindu god Krishna received this name because his cult statues usually depict him as having black or dark blue skin.
Given the fact that we have very good, well-supported etymologies for both the word Christ and the name Krishna, it makes absolutely no sense to reject these etymologies and insist that the words must somehow be related just because they sound vaguely familiar in English. This is especially true since there was very little contact between the eastern Roman Empire and India in the first century AD and it is unlikely that any of the earliest Christians worshipping Jesus ever heard of Krishna.
ABOVE: Fourteenth-century Indian fresco of Krishna playing the flute from Udaipur, Rajasthan, showing him with dark skin
Conclusion
It is generally a very, very bad idea to try to make etymological speculations based on superficial similarities of how words sound, especially when you are dealing with words that have been transliterated into English rather than with the original foreign language spellings and pronunciations of the words.
The fact that two words sound similar or even identical can often be misleading and does not in any way imply that the two words are etymologically related. To give a famous example of this, in the language of the Mbabaram people, an Australian aboriginal tribe, the word for “dog” is dog, but the language is completely unrelated to English; the phonological similarity is merely the result of a random coincidence. These sorts of random coincidences are not at all rare and they can be very confusing to many would-be amateur linguists.
It is also worth noting that, even if two similar-sounding words are related, they may not be related in the way that you think. For instance, as I discuss in this article I wrote in March 2020, the words secret and secretary are both derived from the Latin word secretum, but, in Latin, the word secretum meant something more like “personal” or “private” than “secret.” Thus, the word secretary does not mean “secret-keeper,” but rather “a personal attendant, advisor, or clerk.”
Could you do a post on the historicity of Krishna sometime in the future?
Perhaps. Indian history is not my area of specialty, but I do think I need to write about more diverse historical subjects. I am worried that, by writing so much about western history and so little about the histories of non-western cultures I may inadvertently be promoting an outdated western-centric view of history. My site has apparently begun to attract literal Neo-Nazis and that is certainly not the sort of crowd I want to attract here.
Understandable, but on the other hand, it’s getting progressively harder for Caucasian historians like us to publish about India and Hinduism with all the post-colonialist, post-truth factions out there (I have in mind, not just Hindutvavadis like RSS, BJP et.al but even self-proclaimed feminist “influencers” on social media) who insist that you must be “brown” (as if everyone over there were such) in order to have a proper place at the lecture podium. I honestly do not think that, in all my years of experience, I have ever seen a people gaslight their own culture and religion as much as Indians have. Contrary to popular belief, this is due not so much to “internalized colonialism” though there is that too perhaps, but this desire to “reclaim” their religion and culture from the “colonists” (as if all of Europe and America ruled India) and in the process end up with, ironically, an even more “white-washed” brand of Hinduism and Indian culture than that of which they were critiquing!
That is sad to say, considering that it was Indians who invented the concept of “zero” and were perhaps the world’s first astrologists. Now it is fashionable for them to openly degrade their motherland and their religion in order to impress their friends from a certain other religion (Islam). In this sense, Hindu fundamentalists and certain other Hindus who purportedly oppose them have become strange bedfellows. I have only managed to publish one essay dealing exclusively with Hinduism and during the research phase I would run into dead-ends with suspicious academics who were curious as to my “intentions” in doing my research (one Indian Hindu scholar literally accused me of being a Christian missionary).
Wasn’t the Roman king of the Gods Saturn? Hmm, seems there’s an awfully big religion presently in modern day Rome. What could it be…? Oh yeah, its Christianity!
Saturn’s Greek counterpart: Cronus was overthrown by Zeus. Who is the God of the Jews? Who’s flag has a 6 sided polygon. Doesn’t Saturn have a six sided polygon at it’s north pole? I believe there was a reference to 666 being the mark of the devil somewhere. Isn’t Saturn the 6th planet from the sun, there’s a 6 sided polygonal vortex at its north pole, and I do believe it represents the 6th day of the week, the sabbath, “Saturn’s day”. Wasn’t the original Christmas a festival of Saturn in Greece and Rome?
The ancient humans looked to the sky and saw interesting stuff and imagined sky-gods out of it. The ancients called the sky and the stars the heavens, its the Christians who changed the definition to mean paradise for believers somewhere in another dimension.
I think you need to reexamine your religion with a microscope and realize whats really going on which is there never were any sky-gods. Only planets orbiting our sun.
I am not a Christian; I’m an agnostic. I don’t know why everyone in these comments keeps assuming that I am a Christian.
You can find coincidences like the ones you mention here with literally anything. There’s no legitimate reason to suppose that the shape of the vortex at the north pole of the planet Saturn has anything to do with the Star of David, especially since no one in ancient times ever saw the vortex at the north pole of the planet Saturn, since telescopes did not exist in ancient times and it is impossible to see the vortex on the planet Saturn without a really powerful telescope.
Also, as I discuss in this article from December 2019 and this article from December 2020, Saturnalia was not in any sense “the original Christmas.” It was an ancient Roman holiday in December, but that doesn’t make it Christmas.