I came across this meme online posted by a Noahide follower of modern Judaism and decided to present what I found. I Here is the accusation posted along with the meme:
Your christ is the same Zeus of Greek mythology. J+Zeus. The Greeks wrote your New Testament. That is why Israel rejects Christianity because the Greeks made your religion. The Greeks made you worship their god by renaming your christ after their god.
Point number 1:
First, notice what exactly we are being presented with. This is a comparison between an Anglican translation of the Greek God we know as Zeus alongside a Greek transliteration ofἸησοῦς, Jesus name in Greek.
Point number 2:
Ie - ee-ay. This is NOT, as far as I was able to discover a prefix related to any Greek word meaning to Hail, praise, or worship. It is simply a baseless claim. Please post in the comments below if I am mistaken.
Point number 3:
The Greek deity was specifically referred to in the new testament as a worthless idol. Paul and Barnabas were confronted with a cult of Zeus followers in Acts 14. They were so enamored with them that they were calling Barnabas and the Apostle Zeus and Hermes. They tore their robes in protest and cried out:
"and saying, "Men, why are you doing these things? We are also men of the same nature as you, and preach the gospel to you that you should turn from these vain things to a living God, WHO MADE THE HEAVEN AND THE EARTH AND THE SEA AND ALL THAT IS IN THEM." - Act 14:15
Point number 4:
The New Testament was spread around the world initially, through extensive copying, recopying while being widely distributed. We get our current English translation through rigorous examination and textual criticism of approximately 5,000 ancient manuscripts. The texts reads Iesous because that is what the original authors wrote. There is no possibility that it could have been altered later.
Points 5,6 and 7:
Zeus is Greek it means "father of help." No paganized Greek Christian would confuse them. Jesus was not the father, but the son and the prefix does not mean to hail. It is a derivative of his actual Hebrew name Yahshua. Yah, Jah, Yeh are abbreviated forms of God's name. Just like in Elijah, Jeremiah, Hezekiah, and on and on. The phonetics do not support any parallel with Zeus either. That too is an anglicanized pronunciation which originally would have been Dzyoos.
Final Thoughts:
Ζεύς. is not the same as Ἰησοῦς just because they have the same last two letters.
Διὸς is the Genitive form of Ζεύς It is where we get our words divine and deity from. These two words together appear more than 15,000 times in the English translations of the various texts modern rabbis rely upon*. So if you have ever made the mistake of saying that Elohim was deity or that His ineffable name-divine then you are manifestly more guilty of what you are accusing Christians of.
Christians do not have the same mystical understanding of the nature of words. To me at least they are sounds that represent Ideas, which in turn represent our subjective notion of some ontological real-world fact. The words we use are important, They must accurately represent the ideas we are trying to convey such that they will be understood by our listeners in the way we intend them to be understood. They are not magical incantations with esoteric meaning hidden from a speaker and a listener.
There are Millions of people who follow Jesus. They are not all following the same person. Muslims know a different Jesus than a Catholic. Catholics know a different Jesus than the Baptist. The Jesus Mormons Worship is not the same as the Jesus the Jehovah's Witness's appeal to. They all use the same name, but that name represents many different ideas. D.Q. McInerny writes: "To ensure that our ideas are clear, we must vigilantly attend to the relationship between any given idea and its object."
My Idea of Iesous is deity, to a Jehovah's Witness and a Muslim he is not. Both their and my idea of deity is God, thus we can say that we disagree. My idea and every Jew's Idea of Zeus is an impotent piece of stonework. For us to argue over the matter would require one of us to disavow the objective underlying reality that ought to undergird all of our ideas.