Amaleq13

Vinnie,


That Jesus was born in Nazareth is clearly nowhere near as secure as you tried to assert. Not only is it questionable that this was the word intended, it is questionable whether the town even existed at the beginning of the Common Era.

Please provide the source you "checked" that indicates Nazareth existed in the 1st century C.E. Otherwise, it would look like it is your scholarship that is lagging far behind.


Your foot must taste awful seasoned with so much arrogance.

Toto

We clearly need to get the search engine back, so we don't have to discuss whether Nazareth existed in the first century every time the last thread falls off the first page.

This is what I can find:

Nazareth or Nazorite?

Was there a Nazareth?

Was there a Nazareth in Jesus' Time?

Amaleq13

Thanks for the info, Toto, though I'm not sure it establishes the existence of a "Nazareth" at the beginning of the 1st century CE.

Not enough to warrant the certainty with which it has been asserted as the birthplace of Jesus but perhaps enough to keep Vinnie from eating shoe.

Maybe he has something more definitive to warrant his certainty.

Toto

I don't think that there was a Nazareth, but the record is sufficiently unclear that it's hard to prove that there wasn't.

However, the Nazareth described in the gospels does not fit the settlement that the archeologists have found, if they have found anything (which is still not really clear to me.)

Vinnie

So your comment about my seasoned foot was entirely premature and uninformed?

Allah, I praise thee for bestowing such blessings of humorous Irony upon me, thy faithful and not so humble servent!

Aint karma grand,
Vinnie

spin

As you can see from the material Toto has posted there is a range of possible significances for nazarhnos. However, one exquisitely interesting fact illuminates the question: the writer of Matthew who adapted Mark didn't know what the term meant. Whereas the Lucan writer in two out of three cases he found "nazarhnos" simply substituted nazwraios and in the third left it as is, the Matthean writer omitted them all, which is a very odd act if he knew anything about Nazareth or had access to the term nazwraios at the time of his redaction. While Luke supports the presence of Mark's nazarhnos, Matthew shows that Nazareth was not part of the gospel tradition at the time of the redaction, for nothing is made out of nazarhnos -- it is just a strange phenomenon that wouldn't make sense to the writer's audience.

Luke only has nazareQ (Q = theta) in the birth narrative, so the writer of this birth narrative obviously knew the term, while the earlier redactor didn't make the connection with nazarhnos either, and then the puzzling "nazara" in 4:15 (note this found in the Alexandrian text), which linguistically would have been an excellent source for nazarhnos had there been such a place -- along the lines of Antioch/antioxhnos (x = chi). Matthew like Luke has nazaret at the end of the birth narrative and the still puzzling nazara in 4:13 as well as nazareQ in 21:11. (I have used the Alexandrian Greek text though the Byzantine text has levelled out much of the differences. It is normal practice to use the more difficult forms as more probably original.)

So, I think one can see evidence of textual development through the way the group of terms nazarhnos/nazwraios/nazara/nazaret/nazareQ are used. But to come back to the original question 'What does "Nazarhnos" mean?', let me turn back to Mark and the little apocalypse of ch.13. We find the Greek verb grhgorew ("watch, be vigilant") used three times, 13:34, 35, & 37, the latter two being imperatives from Jesus to his listeners to be watchful, ending the passage with such an entreaty. Then in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus's companions twice receive the same entreaty to be watchful -- but they failed.

The term necer [c = tsade] ("watch, observe, be vigilant"), as in "nocri ha-brit" ("keepers of the covenant"), makes an excellent source for the Greek "grhgorew" (which occurs in key places in the nt) and gives us a meaning to our term nazarhnos, ie someone who is awake, alert, vigilant, watchful.


spin

spin

The Dead Sea Scroll evince an interesting phenomenon: scribes in various texts tended to write the letters YOD and WAW in such a way as to be indistinguishable to modern scholars -- they are both simple vertical strokes though a YOD is usually shorter --, so that the development could have been NZYR -> NZWR -> nazwraios. Usually an omega in Greek represents a WAW in Hebrew. What is interesting about Jdg 13:5, which my LXX gives with nazir, is the fact that it is transliterated and not translated, for usually NZYR is translated in various ways, with the only other exception being Lam 4:7.


spin

spin

I just found out why my LXX had nazir and not naziraios. The rescension uses the Vatican Codex rather than the Alexandrian according to a footnote which gives the spelling nazeiraion -- the -s indicates nominative, ie subject (but I wonder about the -ei-).


spin

Thor Q. Mada

Given that there is no proof of an historical jesus, the argumentation about where he was born seems to me a complete and utter waste of time.

spin

It might be useful to read where the thread has gone before commenting.


spin