The Origin of the Quran’s Name for Jesus

Sponsored by Athletic Greens, in a previous video we explored the actual name of Jesus. The English name Jesus is a transliteration of how his name appeared in Greek, Iesous, which itself is a transliteration of the Aramaic name Yeshua. Almost all of the modern names of Jesus in almost every modern language derive either from the Greek Iesous, like his Latin and Amharic names, or directly from the Aramaic. But there is one very prominent exception, one version of his name that has perplexed scholars for generations: the Arabic name of Jesus as it appears in the Quran. To help unlock this mystery, I’ve enlisted the help of Dr. Ahmed Al-Jallad, a professor at The Ohio State University and an expert in pre-Islamic Arabic. Unlike Christian Arabic—where Christian Arabic uses an arabicized form of the name Yeshua that comes into Christian Arabic as Yasu, which is completely expected—Jesus’s name in the Quran, depending on the reading tradition, is most commonly rendered as Isa, with an ayn at the beginning, a long ya, a seen, and a final long ah vowel.

When we look at the quranic spelling, the consonantal text of the Quran, the name is spelled y-‘s-y, and some reading traditions render it as Irise. As a non-Arabic speaker, I’m not particularly good at pronouncing that initial ayn, a letter produced in the back of your throat called a pharyngeal consonant. I’ll try my best throughout this video, but rely on Dr. Al-Jallad for the correct pronunciation. So, the name of Jesus in quranic Arabic is Isa, but the problem is that unlike his Arabic name as pronounced by Arab Christians, his quranic Arabic name has no obvious linguistic connection to the Aramaic Yeshua. The ayn is at the beginning instead of the end, and the vowels do not correspond. So, how did this transition happen? Some have argued that the pronunciation may have changed over the centuries as it was transmitted from Aramaic into quranic Arabic, but linguists are not satisfied with any explanation for how that change may have happened. The simple fact of the matter is that the Quran was our only evidence; there was no earlier attestation of this name Isa to help us piece together its origins, until now.

Maybe a few years ago, while surveying with his research team in Northern Jordan, Dr. Al-Jallad made a discovery that may have cracked the case: a Safaitic inscription that might bear a pre-Islamic version of the quranic Arabic name of Jesus. But before we get to that, I want to thank today’s sponsor, Athletic Greens. AG1 by Athletic Greens is a nutritional drink that puts all of your daily vitamins in one simple drink. Now, when it comes to simple drinks that I consume on a daily basis, I have always been one of those people who drinks way too many cups of coffee each morning, always at least three cups a day—not super proud of that fact, but to me, drinking a cup of AG1 is a preferred energizing health routine compared to that daily hit of caffeine. It’s much more than a greens powder too; one scoop of AG1 contains 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole-food sourced ingredients, and it’s an easy morning ritual to get used to as well. Just mix one scoop or travel pack with eight ounces of water, that’s it, super simple, and it tastes great and works with any lifestyle. If you’re the type of person who always hits the gym, then you’ll appreciate the magnesium in AG1 to help with muscle soreness, or maybe you don’t work out at all and you just want to know for a fact that you’re getting all the necessary vitamins and minerals to fill any nutritional gaps in your diet. To get started on your order, go to athleticgreens.com/religionforbreakfast. Athletic Greens is offering the Religion for Breakfast audience a free one-year supply of vitamin D3 plus K2 and five free travel packets with your first purchase. And with that, back to the show.

Safaitic is an ancient South Semitic script that people in southern Syria and northern Jordan used to write all the various dialects of old Arabic, which are closely related to quranic Arabic. In fact, many of the 28 Safaitic letters correspond to modern Arabic letters. Scholars think the script was used between the first century BCE and the fourth century CE, give or take a few centuries, so this is during the late Roman period and earlier, during the reign of the Nabataean Kingdom, an Arab kingdom that built the famous ruins of the city of Petra. Here are a few examples of Safaitic inscriptions on screen. These inscriptions were discovered in what’s now known as the Black Desert, a region of thousands of square kilometers of volcanic rocks spanning southern Syria and northern Jordan. And although it looks like a desolate place, humans have lived in this region since the Neolithic period, and it was well-traveled by traders and nomads during the Nabataean and Roman periods. Many of these people would stop along their journeys and carve Safaitic inscriptions on the rocks; one database of Safaitic inscriptions records over 50,000 texts, so this supposedly desolate basalt desert is actually a huge wealth of archaeological data.

Dr. Al-Jallad and his team discovered the inscription in question during the 2019 survey season. It was situated nearby a watering hole, potentially a rest station on a trade route. As you can see on screen, the text winds back and forth, probably because whoever inscribed it was trying to avoid other inscriptions on the same stone. So what does the inscription say? It contained a prayer to a deity that had not yet appeared in the corpus, and the prayer itself was also unique. So this man, named something that could translate to the gift of God or gift of El, recorded being at this place and grieving for his uncle, and then he asks a deity that is spelled in Safaitic as ‘n-s-y, so very close to quranic Isa, ayn-y-s-y, to help him against those who deny you. To summarize, we have an invocation here inscribed by a man grieving for his recently deceased uncle. After the formula, he ends his invocation with a prayer based on the grammatical case and vocabulary of the prayer; the man seems to be calling upon a deity that Al-Jallad argues is compatible with the quranic Isa. ‘n-s-y is the way you would spell Isa because the Safaitic script does not write internal long vowels, so when a long vowel occurs inside of a word, it is not represented graphically, but the final y is present, and that corresponds to the Arabic spelling of the name Isa in the Quran, which is ‘y-s-y.

All right, so this is a one-to-one match. Are we dealing with a prayer to Jesus? Well, notice the rest of the prayer: “help him against those who deny you.” Based on the vocabulary here, Al-Jallad argues that we’re dealing with a Christian invocation. The phrase “those who deny you” in particular has a certain Christian ring to it, the denying of Christ being a major theme in the gospels and a common motif in Christian polemics. In other words, a Christian may have carved this inscription, and the divine name spelled ‘n-s-y is none other than Jesus Christ. This is significant because most scholars of the past few decades have argued that the quranic name Isa was a much later development, the result of the Arabic name Yeshua being imperfectly transmitted into Arabic around the time of Muhammad during the sixth and seventh centuries. But if this text is indeed referencing Jesus, that would push back the timeline of this development by hundreds of years. But the question of its etymology remains: the origins of this name ‘n-s-y, why would this hypothetical Christian inscribing a prayer for his uncle in the middle of the Black Desert spell the name of Jesus like this instead of something that sounds more like Yeshua? There is just no obvious linguistic relationship between these two names, so what’s the etymology?

First thing to note is that the name is attested as a personal name in Safaitic in a pagan context as well, so it was a pre-existing Arabian name. And what seems to be the case is that Arabic speakers equated a pre-existing Arabian name with the name Yeshua through perhaps phono-semantic matching. Phono-semantic matching is when people incorporate a foreign word into one’s language by matching it with a pre-existing word with a similar sound and/or a significant meaning. Phono-semantic matching happens in the Quran. Take, for example, John the Baptist: the English name John comes from the Greek Ioannes, which itself derives from the Hebrew name Yohanan, but in the Quran, John the Baptist is called Yahya, which is not related to the name Yohanan, but rather is a pre-existing Arabic name that we find in Safaitic inscriptions, and it was just adopted for John the Baptist. Al-Jallad argues that the same thing happened for the quranic name of Jesus. So the name Isa could mean “purchaser” or “redeemer”; this noun pattern is one who does the action of the verb, sort of a participle, so it would be the purchaser or redeemer. And perhaps that meaning motivated Arabic-speaking Christians to equate the name with Jesus, because Jesus, unlike the pre-Islamic pagan gods, was a redeeming savior. You have lots of inscriptions that invoke the gods for salvation, for escape, for deliverance, but the ancient gods never pay or give up anything to do this; they simply grant these boons and wishes. But Jesus would have been distinguished from these other gods because of this redemptive aspect, and therefore it’s possible that the name Isa, which they would have understood to mean redeemer, was equated with Jesus because of that aspect of redemption. Thus, based on phono-semantic matching, some Christian Arabic speakers may have adopted this name as the name for Jesus, not because it was directly related to Yeshua in any linguistic sense, but rather because it was an existing name in their culture that had a significant meaning related to Jesus’s divine role in their theology.

Al-Jallad concludes that if he’s correct that this text mentions Jesus, then this is the earliest Arabic evidence of Christianity ever found, perhaps predating the fifth-century Christian authors. Saint Jerome does mention Arab nomads converting to Christianity in the fourth century, but these are second-hand sources, so this unique text may be a rare witness to the transition from Arabian paganism to Christianity among the nomads of the fourth century. And moreover, this evidence may explain the name of Jesus in the Quran as it would have been known to Muhammad and his contemporaries on the Arabian Peninsula during the early formative years of Islam.