So, one of the questions that was asked of me is why the King James Version bible, in discussing the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew, says that Jacob "begat Judas" and his brothers instead of what we read in most modern bibles (including the NKJV) where Jacob was the father of Judah and his brothers. Understand first of all that I am not in this post making an argument for any particular translation of the bible. Personally I use multiple translations, but I also try and understand the philosophy of translation behind the English versions of the bible I read. In this case the answer is simple, so I thought I'd write a simple post explaining it today.
The KJV translates the name as Judas because, simply put, that's what the text says. Most modern English translations use the name Judah because that is what the text says. While you're scratching your head trying to reconcile those two sentences let me make it easier for you: Judas and Judah are the same name.
In the Greek alphabet there is no "H". There is a mark that indicates a breath sound at the beginning of certain words that is translated into the English as an "H", but in the classical Greek alphabet in which the New Testament was written, there is simply no letter "H". So, when translating Hebrew names from the Greek, names that ended in "H" were often transliterated (not translated, just copied over from one language to another) with an "S" at the end. This is not as foreign or odd as it seems, and it occurs in multiple places in the New Testament. (I note this as something that was done with Hebrew names because I'm familiar with Scripture, I'm not familiar enough with other textual traditions to say whether or not this "H" to "S" transliteration was something that was common among them as well.)
For instance, while the name "Jesus" is well known to most in the Western world as the name of the Christ, the fact is he was never called that in his time, nor did anyone else use that name for him until much later. The Spanish tradition of pronouncing the "J" as an "H" is closer than the English version of pronouncing the "J". A true transliteration of the name of Jesus from the Greek would look like this: Iesou (in this case the "I" should be pronounced as a "Y" and the "E" as a long "A" and the "OU" as an "OO" like in "zoo"). Likewise a true transliteration of Judah or Judas would read: Ioudan.
The reason for the pulling of the "S" over from the Greek has to do with how the names are developed in Greek. For instance even though the name of Jesus is spelled "Iesou" in Matthew 1:1 we see it spelled "Iesous" in 1:16. Thus the name we most commonly translate as Jesus could also be translated from Greek as "Jesu".
The use of the names Jesus, Judah, Judas, Joshua, and basically any other name with an origin in the Hebrew that we spell with a "J" also indicates that these names traveled through Latin into our language. Neither the Greek nor the Hebrew has a "J" sound. So when we use a "J" to start a name from either Greek or Hebrew, we have to first bring it through a language that uses a "J". Latin was the lingua franca through which we got the names we use today, and in Latin they used the "J" at the beginning of a name instead of a "y".
In fact, even today the German does not use a "y" sound the same way we do in English. The "y" in German is "Upsilon" and is pronounced as "u". ("Gymnasium" is pronounced "Gumnasium" where the first "U" is a long vowel sound. And just so you are aware, the word means "school" or "prep-school" in German.) So, where we might use "I" or "Y" the Latin commonly used "J" to transliterate the Greek "I" at the beginning of names.
Following all of this we get the following: Iudah (Hebrew) becomes Iudas (Greek) becomes Judas (Latin) becomes Judah or Judas in the English, depending on which personage we are referring to and which tradition of translation we follow. Likewise Yehoshua (or Y'hoshua) in the Hebrew becomes Yeshua as a shortened form, which becomes Iesou or Iesous in the Greek which becomes Jesus in the Latin and is most often translated as Jesus in English. Yet, when we read the Old Testament we usually transliterate more directly and take Yeshua in the Hebrew to Joshua following the pattern of the "Y" to "J" transliteration of the Latin tradition.
So, Judah equals Judas, and Joshua equals Jesus when we follow the steps through how the names came to be in our language.
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