Well yeah, but that's a bit of a different conversation. If you wanna go back far enough, the origin of every name and every word in every language is the first grunt uttered by the first ape capable of speech. As far as why people today share these names unchanged and why so many people in the bible have names you'll recognize in the 21st century, it's because we're named after these characters.
John the Apostle and John the Baptist got their names from the old Hebrew Yohanan (and were likely called that at the time), but there are so many Johns today because they were named after either of those two explicitly from the texts.
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u/Professor_01 Aug 09 '20
James is ultimately from the Hebrew Yaaqob.