Juststeve

Ferryman:

Two points before I go.

1. I agree the Gospels are based on hearsay. That necessarily means that there were oral traditions about Jesus before the Gospels were written. That is inconsistent with the theory that Jesus was just a character in a fictional account. It is more consistent with the proposition that there was a Jesus who was being talked about before the Gospels were written, in other words a historical figure.

2. I’m glad you agree that my account of why he is called Jesus of Nazareth fits. Do you have an account that fits better?

Steve.

Toto

Yes, Marcion did have him come straight down out of the sky. And the orthodox Christians who denied that he came from the sky did not produce witnesses who saw his birth or knew him in Nazareth. They argued from scripture about the nature of the Savior.

But you realize that the standard academic consensus is that by the time the gospels were written, Christians had forgotten most of the details of Jesus' life. Most of the details in the gospels were "made up" under either hypothesis.

But there is no mention of Nazareth in Paul's letters. There is no record of anyone who knew Jesus in Nazareth. And by the time the gospels were written, there were no eyewitnesses running around. Not that there is any indication that there were any skeptics or other checks on what the gospels wrote - or why would there be contradictions in the canonical gospels?

The data we have indicate that Nazareth did not predate Mark's gospel.

Ferryman to the Dead

In answer to #2, no I don't and I would be wrong if I said I did. Point being is that for every argument for existence another argument can be made for non existence there is a point counter point here and no one wins. I believe where the Christian argument suffers as far as evidence for his existence is in the fact that not one contemporary of his time even remotely acknowledges his existence and the ones that do have little to say about it. The credence of Jesus life as a solar deity creation makes much more sense to me. The historical part I do not even buy...........

aa5874

It is just completely FLAWED and extremely unreasonable to think that the claim that Jesus lived in Nazareth is the MAIN qualifying factor for the historicity of Jesus.

There are claims that Jesus walked on WATER by all the Gospel writers. If Jesus was just a man and people knew Jesus was just a man living in Galilee why would ALL the Gospel writers claim Jesus walked on water?

Because it was true?

The historicity of a man called Jesus the MESSIAH who lived in Nazareth NEEDS CORROBORATIVE NON-APOLOGETIC sources and there is ZERO. NONE. NOTHING.

By the way, in the Jesus story, the MYTH writers claimed Mary and Joseph with the OFFSPRING of the Holy Ghost , Jesus, FLED from BETHLEHEM to Egypt and then LIVED in NAZARETH.

In the MYTH stories, Jesus, the OFFSPRING of Ghost (HOLY) was NOT KNOWN to have been born in Bethlehem. It was a SECRET.

Why did the author/authors of the Memoirs of the Apostles claim Jesus was born in a cave? Because it was true?

If you can't find any EXTERNAL CORROBORATIVE source for your Jesus you are just wasting time.

The Bible says Jesus was from Nazareth so it is true? Only the truth is in the Bible?

Perhaps we are dealing with fundamentalists or inerrantists.

Matthew 2. 23 Why would the author of gMatthew claim Jesus lived in Nazareth because the prophets said he should be called a NAZARENE when PEOPLE knew that there was NO such a prophecy in the Scripture?

Because Jesus was fabricated from mis-construed prophecies and the Jesus story was NOT known in NAZARETH, Capernaum, or Galilee before the Fall of the Temple.

Ferryman to the Dead

Good post double A...........

avi

Mark 1:9
The text of Mark does not even reference JC living in Nazareth. The passage could easily refer to a guy who happened to have passed through Nazareth, on his way to visit with John. Maybe he spent the night there....

Sorry, Steve, which folks are those who "knew him as a child in Nazareth", or anywhere else on planet earth?

Where are these people identified? Is there some other passage in Mark, which describes such folk?

Here's part of the problem, Steve:

Mark 16:9
Codex Sinaiticus, same passage:
The English text confounds Nazareth with Nazarene. The Greek text is not fuzzy.

o de legei autaiV mh ekqambeisqe ihsoun zhteite ton nazarhnon ton estaurwmenon hgerqh ouk estin wde ide o topoV opou eqhkan auton

Here's your passage, Steve, Mark 1:9

kai egeneto en ekeinaiV taiV hmeraiV hlqen ihsouV apo nazaret thV galilaiaV kai ebaptisqh eiV ton iordanhn upo iwannou

avi

gupwalla

The word "Nazareth" is problematic in the Greek because it appears in at least two major variations and neither is an exact transliteration of the phrase "from the city of Nazareth." The same problem exists in the Talmud, where the term for Jesus (or not...it's up for debate still) doesn't exactly translate as "from the town of Nazareth" yet it's hard to find another suitable reference it could refer to. Spelling wasn't uniform back then, and transliteration of words from one language into another weren't any better then than they are today (just look at how many variants there are for the name of Libya's long-time dictator, just for starters).

My own personal leaning is to translate it as "Jesus of the Nasoraeans," a gnostic-leaning Jewish sect that prospered in the Samaria/Galilee/Syria area in the first century BCE. The Nasoraeans valued prophesy over written law and devalued the Temple service. It's just the kind of group that would have welcomed a charismatic teacher like a John or a Jesus.

aa5874

Jesus was charismatic?

Jesus in the myth stories used to talk in PARABLES.

Scarcely anyone understood Jesus. Or whatever people understood was ALREADY found in Hebrew Scripture.

This is the evidence supplied in the Synoptics.

Matthew 13. To the Jews, in the MYTH story, Jesus was perhaps incoherent, not charismatic.

spamandham

He went and dwelt in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, "He shall be called a Nazorean."

No one knows what prophecy Matthew is referring to, but clearly early Christians believed there was such a prophecy, and this is more than enough to explain the Nazareth connection from a MJ perspective.

spin

JustSteve,

1. Can you explain why the name Nazareth is spelled wrongly every single time it appears in the gospels?
   
   The name in Hebrew is נצרת, which should be transliterated into Greek as νασαρετ (or νασαρεθ), but it never has a sigma (σ), not in the christian bible or in the Greek and Latin writing fathers. The obvious conclusion was that the name "Nazareth" isn't derived from the town at all, but from a different Hebrew source (נזר, the source for ναζιρ, ie Nazirite, meaning "dedicated", "holy", and "crown").
   
   
2. Can you explain why the earliest gospel records indicate that the town was called Nazara? If you check ordinary scholarly new testament texts they give Mt 4:13 and Lk 4:16, you'll find ναζαρα, which is also the earliest form of Mt 2:23 (being Papyrus 70).
   
   This means that if you accept that the birth narrative was additive to Luke, "Nazareth" doesn't occur anywhere in the main text, only several times in the birth narrative. At the same time, Matt only has "nazareth" in non-synoptic materials, ie secondary materials. Although it follows more closely its source, Mark, Matt doesn't feature the one exemplar of Nazareth in our current Mark (Mk 1:9), though, had it been in Mark, there would be no logical reason to suppress it in favor of Galilee.
   
   
3. Can you explain why the gospel of Mark is under the impression that Jesus had his home at Capernaum? A decent translation of Mk 2:1 reflects the correct idiomatic meaning of εν οικων, ie "at home". Can you explain why Matt using Mark is obliged to move Jesus from Nazareth to Capernaum (Mt 4:13)? Can you explain why Marcion seemed to think that Capernaum was where Jesus started his earthly activities rather than Nazareth?

What we see in the christian literature is a movement towards the standardization of "Nazareth" as the name of the home town for Jesus. It wasn't there in the first place.


spin