Deborah_ said:
She would have called him 'Yeshua'.
'Jesus' comes from the Greek form of his name - Iesous - which is how it is always written in the original Greek New Testament. The Greeks evidently found it easier to pronounce Hebrew names if they were altered slightly. In particular, names ending in a vowel sound got an 's' tacked on the end. So 'isaiah' became 'isaias' and 'Elijah' became 'Elias' and so on.
The idea that the name 'Jesus' is linked to 'Zeus' is based purely on the similarity of endings - which has far more to do with the rules of the Greek language than with any actual relationship between the two.
The similarity of endings would apply to just about any male name in Latin or Greek, wouldn't it? By the time Jesus came, Alexander had done his thing, and wept because there were no more worlds to conquer, and then the Romans took up where Alex left off...and anybody who was anybody had a Greek slave who taught their children.
I never could figure out how Iesous got to be Jesus, though. Except for the "us" on the end, I don't see any similarity.
Of course, there is the fact that Zeus was the king of the Greek gods...
And he had a son, too, didn't he? None of that virgin business for ol' Zeus, though...he got Hercules in the regular way...he had godly sex with a married woman...
Greek Mythology 101. For some reason, it went along with the year of Latin I took back in high school.
Of course, if you didn't get it in school, there was that Disney movie.
I love the name Yeshua. It means "The Lord's Salvation". Remember Joshua of Nun? He would also have been Yeshua in his native tongue...