Chris Weimer

That's a problem you're going to have to take up with whoever translated your Bible. I'd recommend the KJV or the YLT personally. Seems to be a bit more accurate, if you can bear the Byzantine lineage.

Chris Weimer

No. They were named after their parents, often with the praenomen changed. Very often, they never acquired a nickname, especially if their cognomen was inherited from their parents. Daughters took after the nomen, so Gaius Cornelius' daughter became Cornelia, Quintus Valerius' daughter became Valeria, Marcus Antonius' daughters became Antonia. Often, if they had the same name, which was the standard for daughters, they'd be differentiated by the title maior and minor, so for Antonius' daughters you have Antonia Maior and Antonia Minor. The titles weren't part of their official name, but it was a common way to tell them apart.

pharoah

Thanks for this Ben.

With #2 one could argue that Luke was a Hellenized Greek ignorant of Jewish customs, but #3 is IMO compelling evidence that it was possible for sons to be named after fathers in 1st century Judea. It doesn't even matter if Josephus is factually wrong here (I'm not disputing him), because the mere fact that he wrote it shows that the phenonemon wasn't impossible or highly implausible.

Ben C Smith

I agree. Luke could be aiming at his target readership rather than at historical plausibility.

Again I agree.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Anat may have been referring to the Roman praenomina Primus, Secundus, Tertius, Quintus, Sextus, Septimus, Octavius, and Decimus, which IIUC did originally indicate the birth order, though this significance was (again IIUC) later lost or changed.

Ben.

Apikorus

Hey what happened to Quartus and Nonus? Were they unused for some reason? The Wikipedia article on "Roman naming conventions" leaves them out too.

Ben C Smith

It is my understanding that Quartus and Nonus, while not unheard of, were much less frequently used than the other numerical names. Not sure why, really. May be just a quirk of the stats.

Ben.

Anat

Quartus should have been at least as frequent as Quintus, and Nonus at least as frequent as Decimus. Unless they were avoided deliberately (unlucky? easily distorted into something unflattering? other?)

Apikorus

Romans 16:23 :

Gaius, my host and of the whole assembly, salutes you. Erastus, the steward of the city, salutes you, and the brother Quartus.

lpetrich

I'm trying to imagine how someone might be given a name like First, Second, Third, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Tenth (translations of the above names). Could it be short for <some name> <that ordinal>? Like King Henry VIII becoming known as "The Eighth"?

And it seems to me that both Iosês (>Joses) and Iosephos (>Josephus) are efforts to fit the name Joseph (Hebrew Yosef) into Greek grammar, where -ês and -os are common noun suffixes (first declension and second declension, respectively). Sometimes, however, such a name would be made indeclinable; in this case, plain old Ioseph.

To see what I mean, consider that Greek, like Latin, German, Russian, and many of the other older or more conservative Indo-European languages, is rather heavy on inflections. Thus, for Iosephos, we have:

Vocative: direct address ("Joseph!"): Iosephe
Nominative: subject ("Joseph is doing something"): Iosephos
Accusative: direct object ("something is happening to Joseph"): Iosephon
Dative: indirect object("to Joseph"): Iosephôi
Genitive: possession, etc. ("of Joseph"): Iosephou

Also, in prepositional phrases, the preposition's precise meaning depends on which case the noun phrase is in.

There's also a separate set of plural suffixes, one for each case, and all the suffixes differ between the declension patterns; Greek has three of them. However, there are various regularities, like vocative singular being nominative singular in the other declensions, vocative plural always being nominative plural, genitive plural always being -ôn, neuter accusative always being neuter nominative, etc.

This means that making names indeclinable is something of a kludge; in Greek, one would have to do some guessing from context to find what the "expected" case would be.

I'm talking about Classical Greek here; Modern Greek is somewhat different (no dative case), but it still has plenty of inflections.