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.
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