Of Esaias, Elias and Zecharias

Of Esaias, Elias and Zecharias: how names were rendered in the KJV.

My first bible was a King James (Authorized) version given to me by a classmate soon after I became a Christian.

One of the peculiarities that struck me was how names of Old Testament characters were spelt with a final s, e.g. Esaias for Isaiah (Matt 4:14, 8:17), Elias for Elijah (John 1:23)

I learned much later that this was because the KJV transliterated those names from Greek forms, which required all masculine names to end in s, esp. in the genitive case.

Today I came across the following link to an even older KJV 1611 page which shows how the name of the Messiah was rendered: IESUS, transliterated from the original form iesou, which had to carry a final s because it's a masculine name, iesous, which in turn was a transliteration of the original Hebrew name Yeshua (rendered as Joshua in the OT).

Newer editions of KJV replaced the i with j and the name of Our Lord changed from IESUS to JESUS.

So, because of Greek and possibly some Latin influence, many Hebrew names are rendered in non-hebrew forms in the NT of the KJV.

Isaiah became Esaias, Elijah became Elias, Zechariah became Zecharias.

And Yeshua (or Joshua) became Iesou, Iesous, Iesus then Jesus.


http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/1611_John-Chapter-1/