A slightly different approach to Cephas/Peter in Galatians.

[Bernard Muller]

to spin,

That's modern Hebrew.

About same pronunciation in ancient Hebrew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7RIAPosxEI starting at 5:40 (it's pronounced either as k or kh)

Cordially, Bernard

[Bernard Muller]

to spin,
According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qShHCreWbdM starting at 13:38, the ancient Greek letter chi has a "k" sound (with others!) in it.

Cordially, Bernard

[spin]

to spin,

That's modern Hebrew.

About same pronunciation in ancient Hebrew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7RIAPosxEI starting at 5:40 (it's pronounced either as k or kh)

This is passing the buck to internet pundits who won't answer how they know how ancient speakers pronounced the sounds. I can demonstrate how the sounds were perceived from Greek transliterations.

to spin,
According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qShHCreWbdM starting at 13:38, the ancient Greek letter chi has a "k" sound (with others!) in it.

Actually that is not what the person said. He said they'd say it as a "ch" as in "loch" or he also notes as "k-h" (run together) in an effort to give people not familiar with the language something to work with. He does not say that it like a simple "k", but with a little extra guttural into it. The speaker is not a paragon of phonology, given his pronunciation of "loch" as an American would say the "o" not as a Scot would, and given his pronunciation of the German "ich" with a long vowel. He's got the "ch" though. The extra that he is putting into the chi is what separates it from the kappa and why the Greek transliterators chose the Qof to be rendered as a kappa and usually not the Kaf.

Of course, as we have no ancient speakers of Greek, pronunciation can only be surmised by the written clues, such as transliteration (into various other languages).

Long ago I wrote a musical entertainment called "The Miserable Tragedy of Julio and Romiette: or Julio Sees Her" about self-indulged representatives from two families who supported the opposite football teams in the town of Verona. The awful pun "Julio Sees Her" reflects how we in English pronounce Caesar, but from all the transliteration from the ancient world, we know the Germans got it basically correct with "kaiser" (a bit better is a town in Turkey called Kayseri, originally called "Caesarea"). Transliteration is our best indicator of ancient pronunciation. (Others include the way sounds are used for assonance in poetry and diachronic studies of letter usage.)

[arnoldo]

Roger Pearse has a coptic translation of the Acts of Peter available.

Coptic usually rightly ignores Greek morphology, but here it is noticeable that the vocative form of 'Peter' is used.
http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/wp-c ... _Peter.pdf

[arnoldo]

And a Syriac point of view. . .

Syriac Pillar.PNG (35.35 KiB) Viewed 6568 times

http://www.syriac.talktalk.net/petersconfession.pdf

[Bernard Muller]

Looking at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%87%C ... ient_Greek, it looks that for certain Greek words starting with a chi (X), the transition from a "k" sound to a "ch" sound took many centuries.
When the LXX was first written (3rd to 1st cent. BCE), it seems the chi could have had still a significant "k" sound in it.

And for the Aramaic/Syriac kap, it appears the pronunciation was either a "k" or a "ch", depending of the word (and maybe there was a transition from "k" to "ch" during antiquity): http://www.learnassyrian.com/aramaic/

Cordially, Bernard

[spin]

Looking at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%87%C ... ient_Greek, it looks that for certain Greek words starting with a chi (X), the transition from a "k" sound to a "ch" sound took many centuries.
When the LXX was first written (3rd to 1st cent. BCE), it seems the chi could have had still a significant "k" sound in it.

And for the Aramaic/Syriac kap, it appears the pronunciation was either a "k" or a "ch", depending of the word (and maybe there was a transition from "k" to "ch" during antiquity): http://www.learnassyrian.com/aramaic/

Cordially, Bernard

Conjecture based on Wiktionary and the like is not useful. The subject is how Semitic sounds (Kap and Qof) were perceived by outsiders and specifically by Greeks.

[robert j]

"Cephas" & "Peter" were very rare names in those days.

In Paul's day, how rare was the Greek name Peter (Πέτρος)?

[Ben C. Smith]

"Cephas" & "Peter" were very rare names in those days.

In Paul's day, how rare was the Greek name Peter (Πέτρος)?

I have done no research on this of my own, but Ehrman writes on page 16 of Peter, Paul, and Mary:

It was an auspicious moment in the history of names. Even though rock (Peter) was just a noun before this, it became a popular name in the early Christian period, on down, of course, until today.

[robert j]

In Paul's day, how rare was the Greek name Peter (Πέτρος)?

I have done no research on this of my own, but Ehrman writes on page 16 of Peter, Paul, and Mary:

It was an auspicious moment in the history of names. Even though rock (Peter) was just a noun before this, it became a popular name in the early Christian period, on down, of course, until today.

Thanks Ben.

Does anyone have evidence that contradicts Ehrman here?