LogFAQs > #976627107

Lokarin posted...

How did Jesus find people named Mark, Matthew, Michael and Paul in the Middle East?

Because...

synth_real posted...

Jesus' name wouldn't have actually been Jesus either, remember that the Gospels were first written in Greek.

Yeshua ben Yosef wouldn't have known anyone named Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. He would (probably) have known Matityahu, Marcus, Lucas (or Lucius), and Yohanan.

Matthew and Johnathan are just modernized spellings of names that were originally Hebrew. Pass the original names through a filter of Greek to Latin to English and you get the current versions. Those names wouldn't exist at all today if not for the Jews.

Meanwhile, keep in mind that Judea was under Roman control at the time - so Greek and Roman influence was certainly present in any number of Jewish cities and towns. Which is where Mark and Luke come from - both would have been extremely common Roman names of the era (in the form of their original Latin versions), and there could easily have been Jews with those names at the time. It's also entirely possible that their names weren't Marcus or Lucius, but some other Hebrew name that latter got mistranslated into something closer to what Greeks and Roman's were already familiar with.

In the same vein, it's also possible that Matthew and John didn't have Hebrew names either - they could also have had Greek or Roman-style names (which would have made them Matthias and Iohannes instead).

As for Paul, his name wasn't actually Paul, and he wasn't really a disciple. It's right there in the book that his name was Saul (a very Jewish name) and he just changed his name later (ironically, probably just to sound less Jewish, and/or to cover up his own sordid past). Even more ironically, he wasn't even born/raised in a Jewish city (Tarsus was heavily Greek-influenced in that era), so he probably grew up knowing tons of Jews who had non-Jewish sounding names.