How transliteration plus mistranslation became the basis for a movement...

Ok, you say, so Paul quoted Leviticus and it didn’t prohibit homosexuality.  And he quoted Deuteronomy, and was trying to open Judean praxis to Greco-Romans.  And he got his communities to pay Temple tax and send it to Jerusalem.  But what about Jesus?  He believed in Jesus.

Did he?

Ιησους ο χριστος, latinzed to Jesu Christou, is, in Hebrew החשׁמ עושׁיה. Yehoshuah HaMoshiach.  And that is the problem.

Iesous is the transliteration of Yehoshua, not, as some believe, Yeshua.  There is no Greek phoneme that is a mid-word equivalent for the soft “h” of the Hebrew letter he.  So when the word was transliterated, the consonant was elided out of the Greek word.

If we check the LXX, we find that the book of Joshua (Yehoshua, transliterated from Hebrew into English), was transliterated, not translated, into the book of Iesous:  Jesus.

Yehosuha is a name.

HaMoshiach, in Hebrew, means “the anointed.”  In Greek, this translates as “o christos.”

Yehoshua is also a verb:  it is the third person, masculine future of the verb “save.”  Yehoshua means “he will save.”

So we have a name that could also be a verb, plus an adjective.

In biblical Hebrew, the verb precedes the noun:  “b’reshit bara Adonay” (in the beginning, created God…), VaYomer Adonay leMoshe” (and said God to Moses), etc.

Yehoshuah HaMoshiach was not a name, it was a sentence:  “The anointed one will save…” (except, of course, the literal translation would be “will save the Anointed One…”)

How did the sentence come to be understood as a name?  It happened as a two-part intercultural misunderstanding.   The first part, we have already identified:  The word “yehoshua” was transliterated into a name, rather than being translated into a verb.  The second part is a misunderstanding based on differing cultural literary traditions:  in Greek literature, it was not uncommon to assign an epithet to a character, in addition to the character’s name.  In Homer, we find “the wily Odysseus” and “fleet-footed Hermes.”  So in Greek literary tradition, Iesous the anointed was not an anomaly, but a name with an epithet that was entirely consistent with classical Greek literary tradition.

It is very likely that Paul, finding his communities were conversant with this mistranslation and misinterpretation of Judean linguistic structures, nonetheless took that as a sign that the communities were serious about adopting Judean praxis so they could emulate the “philosophy” they understood their hero followed.