"If Jesus was a Jew, how come he has a Mexican first name?"
About this Quote
Billy Connolly’s remark, “If Jesus was a Jew, how come he has a Mexican first name?” is a playful jab at linguistic and cultural misperceptions that many people harbor, particularly in the English-speaking world. The humor comes from the conflation of names and identities across different languages and eras, reflecting how names and labels can shift in meaning and association as they migrate between cultures.
Jesus of Nazareth, historically, was a Jewish man living in what is now Israel and Palestine, and his Hebrew name likely would have been Yeshua, a common Jewish name at the time. Yeshua, through translations first into Greek (“Iesous”) and then into Latin, evolved in English into “Jesus.” Meanwhile, Spanish and Latin American cultures, influenced by Catholicism and the spread of Christianity from Europe, have their own pronunciation, “Jesús,” with a soft ‘h’ sound at the beginning, sounding distinctly different from the English pronunciation. It’s one of the most popular male names in Mexico and much of Latin America, echoing the broader reverence for religious figures in naming traditions.
Connolly capitalizes on the coincidence that the English-speaking world often hears “Jesus” pronounced in a way that aligns with Spanish-speaking cultures, leading to an amusing mental image: a figure iconic for being Jewish is inadvertently assigned a name with strong associations to Hispanic identity in the present day. The joke is, at its heart, about anachronism and cultural confusion, highlighting how religious figures are often reconstructed and recontextualized in ways that sometimes strip them of their original context and reassign them new identities based on contemporary perspectives.
By pointing out this seemingly absurd disconnect, Connolly invites laughter, but also gentle reflection on how easily history becomes muddled in translation and how assumptions about names and origins can produce both comic misunderstandings and deeper, sometimes unexamined questions about cultural identity and appropriation.
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