Re: seemingly Christian given names #general
Judith Romney Wegner
My own given name (of course I was born in theRe the discussion of "non-Jewish" names:
50s, not the 1880s) is the most popular Catholic given name
in the world - my mother liked it -
Annemarie Jutel
Wellington, New Zealand
I recently sent a message to either jgsgb or jewishgen (can't recall
which) on this subject, listing all or most of the New Testament
names that are of Hebrew origin.
A great many New Testament names that people naturally tend to
consider "not Jewish" may not be Jewish sociologically, but they
most assuredly originate >from Hebrew biblical names.
Mary, for instance,\is simply the anglicized version of the Greek
rendering of "Miiryam" or "Miriam." (that's because Greek words
don't end in "m" -- that would seem literally and metaphorically
outlandish to Greek speakers, so the NT authors rendered the name as
Maria, but of course her actual name was Miriam.
Likewise Anna or Anne comes >from the Hebrew biblical name Hannah
(that's because Greek doesn't have an alphabet letter for the sound
"h" -- it uses a kind of apostrophe symbol -- So Hannah became Anna
in the NT).
Judith Romney Wegner