this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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Christi, indeed. Genitivus. If it had been "Jesus", however, it'd be Jesu. Because Latin is strictly rule based./s Seriously, Jesus is irregular, it's not even proper Latin and the genitive is for reasons only Iupiter might know, Jesu.
Blame Greek:
Latin didn't borrow just the name, it borrowed the whole declension for the name. And at least in theory this should've happened with Chrīstus too, the genitive would end as *Chrīstū; but I think it was regularised because it looks like a native 2nd declension name way more than Iēsūs does.
Yes. Most of the middle eastern transcripts were into ancient Greek. I doubt, however, that anyone out in rural Palestine of 0 BC was speaking Greek so the origins should be somewhat more obscure.
The root was likely borrowed from Aramaic or Hebrew. However the origin of the genitive itself is Greek - unlike Latin, Greek typically didn't borrow full declension tables, it borrowed the root and plopped a native Greek declension. And that's clearly the case here, none of the Semitic languages use an -s for the base form, so Greek changed even the nominative: