Ben C Smith

Yes.

My apologies. I do not understand the term same person here. If you are asking whether the same person who redacted Matthew also redacted Luke, then no. If you are asking whether the person who moved the Marcan hometown before Capernaum is the same person who included a reference to Capernaum in that same pericope, then yes.

Again, my apologies. Your words are so compressed I do not always see the antecedent to your pronouns. If you mean that one needs a philological reason for resisting hypotheses that multiply textual entities, then I think I disagree. If you mean that one needs a philological reason for proposing those multiple textual entities, then I agree.

I have confused you with fuzzy wording. My apologies for the third time. Right or wrong, I was not calling a back-formation that leads to an incorrect place name natural. I was reserving that term for linguistic processes that follow the usual progression from real place name to real gentilic. (Give any location a place name and a population of one or more, and it is virtually guaranteed that someone will give that population a gentilic name at some point. It is not guaranteed that a gentilic will lead to an incorrect back-formation; that takes a different kind of intervention, as common and as natural, on your terms, as it may be.)

I understand that.

You may be right about Matthew 2.23. But we also have Nazereth in the texts of all three synoptics where there is no competition with any lectio difficilior.

How does one explain the presence of Nazara? It is a perfectly acceptable Greek variant of Nazareth. It is explaining Nazareth, with the zeta, that takes some work. Explaining Nazara is easy, given Nazareth.

Because Nazareth seems to have been a relatively unknown place. On the other hand, the Nazoraean sect seems to have left quite a mark, both inside and outside the gospel tradition. I say that, if the term Nazarene was a mystery to somebody, then he or she would have found it a lot easier to equate it with the term Nazoraean than to dig up the name of a Galilean village and deliberately place a messiah figure there, whence no messiah was expected.

I have given it. I do not know why you have not noticed it. Your arguments seem reversible. I do not think mine are so easy to reverse.

That is exactly what I dispute. I think Nazara (as a Greek elimination of the Semitic feminine ending in Nazareth), Nazareth (as a Greek transliteration of Nasareth, but better fitted for messianic attachments to the nazir word group), and Bethlehem (as a messianic replacement for nonmessianic Nazareth) are all easy to understand on the basis (A) that Jesus was really known to hail from Nasareth, (B) that Jesus was really thought to be the messiah, and (C) that Nasareth was not a very messianic place to hail from.

(I recall telling a Kansas farmer once that I was from California, and he replied: California. That's a good place to be from. A long way from. )

If, in order to accept your hypothesis, I will have to start viewing Nazareth in Mark 1.9 as a later addition to the text, well, I would have a hard time accepting that kind of argument even if it helped out a pet theory of mine. It is just not the kind of argument that is likely to convince me, for better or worse. And if, in order to accept your hypothesis, I will have to read Mark 6.1-6a as located in Capernaum, again, I am afraid I agree with Andrew Criddle on that score, for better or worse.

If Nazara came first in the tradition, then either your hypothesis is correct or the tradition probably started in Greek, not in Aramaic.

Ben.

spin

(I'm getting used to pulling hen's teeth: )

OK, you think it was the same person in Matthew who removed nazarhnos from his Marcan source and inserted nazwraios in different parts of the text at the same time, and who removed Nazareth and then inserted Nazara twice and Nazareth once. Why do you think this to be the case, and I mean why do you think this redactor removed nazarhnos only to insert nazwraios elsewhere? Do you think the writer saw no relationship between Nazareth and nazarhnos? (If not, why not?) Do you think that with nazarhnos and Nazareth the writer would have used nazwraios in preference to nazarhnos? (If not, why not?) And why do you think the writer removed Nazareth from Mark and introduce Nazara twice as well as add Nazareth at the same time once?

I think that Occam has hacked your belief system to pieces.

Let me get this straight. You think that the same person who inserted a new sentence about Capernaum into the hometown passage, "do here [what] you did at Capernaum", did it as the hometown passage was moved before the reference to Capernaum at 4:31?

Shall I do a poll to see how many people find this "yes" of yours credible for a thinking person?

The last "doing" you mentioned was your resisting certain kinds of arguments. All you need is a philological reason for resisting my argument for the division of Matthew into M1 and M2, and my simple argument that Nazareth was not an original element of the synoptic core.

(This notion of a synoptic core is very reasonable to me. The material received by Matt and Luke that was contained in Mark. Case in point: one cannot demonstrate that Mk 1:9 is part of that synoptic core.)

This is still not helpful to me. Is it that a back-formation is counter-intuitive for someone who expects things to go as language change should go according to one's colloquial understanding of how things go in language?

But notice where it is found. That is the problem for you. In Luke it only appears in the birth narrative. In Matt it only appears in a Matt only passage after the triumphal entry. In Mark it is placed in a position unsupported by any other synoptic; its position is one that shows ease of insertion from a marginal note, ie it requires no change in the text beside the simple insertion; and its placement makes the definition of Capernaum as containing the home of Jesus unexplainable. Either Jesus's home was Nazareth as 1:9 might suggest and the writer was pathetically unequipped to deal with narrative or that his home was Capernaum and the otherwise dubious mention of Nazareth in 1:9 is an insertion.

The placement of Nazareth in the three synoptics points to its late arrival in those texts.

Actually no: given Nazareth, there is no need for Nazara whatsoever.

Here we go, no longer "obscure" but "unknown". Why are you making this claim? What support do you have that it was indeed an obscure or unknown or hitherto unheard of place? The text tradition doesn't support this conjecture. "Nothing good can come from Nazareth."

As I am trying to explain what happened, I give a reason for the removal of nazarhnos rather than its replacement with nazwraios, which the Lucan writer did once. Your logic is a good reason for replacing nazarhnos with nazwraios, but this is not what happened.

You simply rejected my hypothesis to explain how Nazareth entered the tradition after the prior form Nazara existed in the tradition. I don't need the hypothesis, except that a step would not have any explanation.

Now you seem to be making another claim here, ie that my arguments are reversible. One usually accepts the lectio difficilior because it has prior rights because one goes from difficult to easy development rather than vice versa. Nazara has priority in the tradition, as it clearly was in the texts at Matt 4:13 and Luke 4:16. nazarhnos has priority over nazwraios because it has been omitted from Matt, though it is supported by Luke, and both Luke and Matt know nazwraios. Mark doesn't know about Nazara, which should put it as a form in the tradition after the tradition that the Marcan writer knew about. I don't find this notion of reversibility very convincing on your part.

Of course you realise that Nazareth as a transliteration of NCRT is a failure on any standard of Greek transliteration available from the era. The loss of the -et in your claim doesn't bode well due to the insertion of the -et in Gennesaret, a form unknown before the gospels and unknown outside the christian tradition. (You have to do more than show that in one or two sorry cases there was a transliteration which lost a -t.)

Working on a totally Greek level of the forms simply makes you have to argue that the tradition is purely a Greek one. I don't mind that conclusion. I see no reason to believe that the texts were written in a Semitic language context at all -- though this does not negate a semitic cultural context for the writers.

Can you show me that it was part of the synoptic core? Matt, which has a parallel doesn't have it. Luke doesn't have a parallel.

Sorry, I don't recall now, why isn't 6:1-6 about Capernaum?

That doesn't explain Nazareth in Mk 1:9. (If Nazareth was accepted in the tradition at that time then the gentilic in Greek should be as I have indicated. Or are you just taken as many slim chances as you must?)


spin

Ben C Smith

Yes.

I think Matthew preferred Nazoraean to Nazarene. There could be any number of reasons for such a personal preference (why do I prefer the terms Marcan and Lucan to Markan and Lukan?), but a reason I am running with for our purposes is that he wanted to connect Jesus with the Nazoraeans, a known Christian sect.

Inserting the term Nazoraean has the same explanation as above. Doing it elsewhere requires a look into the instances where Mark uses Nazarene and what Matthew does with those instances.

Mark uses the term Nazarene in 1.24; 10.47; 14.67; 16.6. Of these four instances, Matthew removes two from his parallel narrative (10.47; 16.6). Another has no parallel in Matthew at all (1.24; IOW, Matthew did not just remove the term Nazarene from this pericope, but rather removed the entire pericope). The remaining instance of Nazarene (14.67) Matthew replaces with Nazoraean (Matthew 26.71).

Granted that Matthew preferred Nazoraean to Nazarene, I see nothing out of place here. He treats these instances of Nazarene differently almost each time, eliminating two and replacing one (with no parallel at all to the other instance).

As I said before, I think Matthew knew the noun Nazara (from tradition or from Q) and that he knew the adjective Nazarene (from Mark), and that on the analogy of Gadara and Gadarene (Matthew 8.28) he would almost certainly have known that a Nazarene was supposed to be someone from Nazara.

Yes. In order to connect Jesus with the sect of the Nazoraeans.

Mark has Nazareth only once, in 1.9, at exactly the point where we would expect the author to introduce the geographical point of origin of a character, to wit, at his first narrative mention (Mark 1.1 being more a preface or even perhaps a subtitle).

But Matthew has already given much narrative about Jesus in the infancy account. He likewise mentions the hometown of Jesus at the spot where we would expect him to do so, when his family first moves there (Matthew 2.23). There is simply no need for Matthew to tell us that Jesus came from Nazareth only 13 verses later. If he wishes, he is free to do so (as he does with Galilee), but to require him to repeat Nazareth or Nazara in the baptism account would be too much.

Matthew shows us that he knows the place name Nazareth in 21.11, the introduction of Jesus to Jerusalem. If you wish to see this as somebody having moved Nazareth from the baptism account (in Mark) to the triumphal entry (in Matthew), that is fine. It happens. Matthew also eliminates the Decapolis from Mark 5.20 and 7.31, only to add it in Matthew 4.25, the Marcan parallel to which is 3.7, which lacks the Decapolis.

Yes. I think that Luke, being intimately familiar with the gospel of Mark, imagined the Nazareth event in its Marcan context even while he was moving the Nazareth forward in his narrative.

Was B. H. Streeter a thinking person? Is Donald Rowlingson? Mark Goodacre?

1. Streeter proposed a proto-Luke without chapters 1-2 (and other sections, of course), followed by our canonical Luke later. This has every potential, IOW, to play into your hypothesis that one author added the Capernaum line to the Nazareth rejection and another moved it forward in Luke. Yet Streeter thought that both the content and the sequence of the Nazareth rejection came from proto-Luke, not from Mark; the oddity of the Capernaum back-reference in the incident coming before the otherwise first mention of Capernaum later in chapter 4 was due, IOW, to a single person having conflated proto-Luke with Mark. Furthermore, he thought that the author of proto-Luke and the author of canonical Luke were the same person, who wrote two different editions.
2. Donald Rowlingson, in his 1952 JBL article The Jerusalem Conference and Jesus' Nazareth Visit: A Study in Pauline Chronology, writes that Luke (singular) did several things to his Marcan source in the Nazareth incident. One of those things was to move the incident forward in narrative sequence. Another was to add a recognition of previous work in Capernaum (Luke 4.23). All along he treats Luke as a single author, not a composite. (Thanks to Stephen for mentioning this article in a comment to the weblog entry below.)
3. Mark Goodacre, in a weblog entry from only a few months ago, writes that Luke (A) places the Nazareth event at the beginning of the ministry of Jesus and (B) betrays his knowledge of its original location with the Capernaum comment in 4.23; Luke is, says Goodacre, imagining the event in its Marcan setting, not in the new setting he has provided.

Please note that I am not appealing to authority here. I am directly rebutting your implied claim that few if any thinking persons would hold that the same person both moved the Nazareth rejection pericope and added the Capernaum line to that pericope.

I do not need a philological reason for resisting slicing a text up into unattested pre-texts.

Your Nazareth hypothesis led you to put some verses in M1 and others in M2. When Chris Weimer asked you for an exposition of your division of Matthew in this manner, you admitted that this division was founded on the Nazareth evidence.

That is, you M1 and M2 proceed out of your Nazareth hypothesis. You cannot, then, use M1 and M2 to support your Nazareth hypothesis, and I therefore do not have to accept M1 and M2 on their own merits at all. All I have to do is argue against their foundation, which is your Nazareth hypothesis itself.

In order to hone in on your concept of a synoptic core (one which, I admit, I am unfamiliar with even after much study of the synoptic problem), let me ask you whether you think the phrase no one dared to ask him any more questions belongs to the synoptic core. Matthew places this phrase in the pericope about Psalm 110.1 and David; Mark places this phrase in the previous pericope, about the greatest commandment; Luke places this phrase in the pericope about the Sadducees and the resurrection.

What a mouthful.

No, back-formation happens. That is not the problem. What I am saying is that back-formation is a different kind of process than (shall we call it) forward-formation. I know many Americans, and they are all from America. I also know many Christians, but not one of them is from Christia. Back-formation (at least of this nature) betrays confusion of some kind. You are arguing that somebody was confused by Nazarene (whether he thought he was confused or not) and thus invented Nazara (that is, Nazara was not a real place name). That is possible. But I am saying that it seems more probable to me that Nazara was a legitimate variant of Nazareth, and that this variant led, in the usual way, to the gentilic Nazarene.

I do not see the problem here. Luke eliminates a ton of stuff from the Marcan narrative. That he should eliminate a reference to Nazareth in the Marcan baptism account (along with the colorful description of John the baptist, the Judeans and Jerusalemites, the confession of sins, and the ascent from the water) is not a shock. That he should include Nazareth four times as the hometown of Mary and Joseph in his birth account (unlike Matthew, for whom Nazareth is new to the family) is not a shock. Much of the action takes place there, and Luke includes Jerusalem even more times in the birth account for the same reason; much of the action takes place there.

When you state that Nazareth appears only in Luke 1-2 in that gospel, I get the impression you are saying that Luke 1-2 was not part of the original gospel. When you state that Nazareth appears in Matthew only at the triumphal entry, are you saying that everything from the triumphal entry onward was not part of the original gospel of Matthew? If not, what are you saying?

At that same position, you are correct. This is true of many words or phrases in Mark. How many of those words or phrases are marginal insertions?

There are many words or phrases in any given literary text that could be removed or inserted without changing the text otherwise. How many are marginal notes?

I disagree entirely. But this post is long enough as it is, and my time is short. I will hopefully be able to address the interplay of Capernaum and Nazareth in a future post.

Matthew did it in the Petrine denials pericope. Luke did it in the Bartimaeus pericope. It did happen.

The term lectio difficilior is a text-critical term, but here it looks as if you are using it in a different sense.

I think he did know about Nazara, since he uses the term Nazarene.

You think the evangelists took the perfectly good Greek or Latin place name Genesar(a) and intentionally inserted an Aramaic ending? Why did they do that, in your opinion?

As for the loss of the -t ending, I gave you Chinnereth becoming Chinara, and it sure looks like Gennesaret became Genesar or Genesara (pending your explanation for why the evangelists added the Aramaic ending). And ynquirer gave you RMT in 1 Samuel 30.27, which the LXX renders with Rama.

These are not sorry examples. They are examples, period.

I have now found another interesting apparent loss of the -t ending, this one within Hebrew itself, I think. 2 Kings 3.25 and Isaiah 16.7 both refer to the Moabite city of קיר חרשת. In Isaiah 16.11, however, this becomes קיר חרש.

Another one: Ezra 2.2 has מספר exactly where Nehemiah 7.7 has מספרת.

For the purposes of this thread I am submitting that the original village name NCRT was Semitic, but that it was turned into Nazareth, and thence Nazara, in Greek.

Ben.

spin

Well, it's a start to have one of our terms recognized as not related to Nazareth at all.

Poor analogy. The long vowel needs more explanation than you can eke out of such an analogy. It's not just a matter of the preference of one letter to another (as in the case of the English example you gave where there is no difference at all, because the English don't superficially make any difference between a "c" and a "k"). I wish you would try to make linguistic analogies rather than dictionary ones.

Rubbish. That's just someone not employing any linguistic thought to make excuses.

?

This is wrong. There is no parallel to 14:67. You will have to come up with some editorial theory just to explain the presence in 26:71 rather than 26:69. Why do you have to make your position consistently more complicated??

As I said, wrong.

How does that explain the Lucan use of Nazara? Want to complicate your story more? Don't you feel the razor coming down?

So, you don't think that the Matthean writer could recognize nazarhnos as derived from Nazara or Nazareth?

Where does the term Nazorean come from and why doesn't Mark know it?

No, it's not quite where you would expect it. Usually places of origin are given without the territory, so we already have something unusual about the reference to Nazareth. Fortunately Matt has it simply as a place from which one arrives, from Galilee, as you might expect of someone going from one place to another. That's what Mk 1:9 indicates: Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan. It's just been tampered with to add Nazareth, out of place.

This gives us no idea why the writer would use both Nazara and Nazareth in the same redaction.

I don't know how to make this much "more simple" for you Ben C. But let me try yet again. Do you notice the references to Capernaum in what I wrote? There are two references to Capernaum. One is an introductory reference, "Capernaum, a city in Galilee". The other is a second reference, what "you did in Capernaum". The problem is that the second reference comes before the first. This indicates that the second reference has been moved so as to come before the first because it belongs to the hometown passage which in the original was long after the first Capernaum reference. Can you see the problem, Ben C.? A Lucan writer has inserted material into the hometown passage about Capernaum. A Lucan writer has moved the hometown passage along with the new Capernaum reference to before the first Capernaum reference. Your attempt to deal with things has the same writer doing this and botching the job at the same time. Umm, do you see the problem, Ben C.?

They didn't have the information I've supplied you with.

So, having inserted the second reference to Capernaum himself, he decided to shift the hometown passage to before the first reference to Capernaum and forget about the fact that he had inserted the second reference which now appears first?

I do like the way that these guys make the redactor out to suffer short term memory loss. I do prefer my sloppy second redactional act.

(And perhaps Stephen could kibbutz for me some time. Naaa, guess not.)

I think you've just made a case for taking biblical studies out of the hands of religious people who botch them.

The emphasis should have been on thinking, not just persons who have dealt with the material.

But you need a reason for insulting the redactor as totally incompetent.

The option is so unpalatable in my eyes. One person both moves the hometown passage before the introductory reference to Capernaum (made clear by that same person as "a city in Galilee") and adds a second reference to Capernaum as though it had already been mentioned, yet it stands after that second reerence. This points to a bunch of incompetent analysts rather than a totally incompetent redactor. I find it hard to believe that you are so credulous as to accept the rendering of this evidence into one sad redactional act.

If you choose to use the verb "admit". It is part of the argument in order to stop myself from arguing for the sort of mindless redactor that you seem to resort to. I would not need to make the separation, if I had such lack of regard for the redactor as you do.

You don't supply anything credible in their absence.

(The references might have been nice.)

If you look at the Greek they are very different in form:

Mk 12:34 oudeis ouketi etolma auton eperwthsai

Mt 22:46 oude etolmhsen tis ap ekeinhs ths hmeras eperwthsai auton ouketi

No, I don't think the Matt usage is part of the synoptic core, though it is evidence that the Marcan material was. Look at Mk 9:32 efobounto auton eperwthsai. There is enough to show that it is a trope in Mark, a trope which left its impression on the Matthean writer.

Confusion is not the case at all. It's obvious that, for want of any other indications, nazarhnos is derived from something like nazara. Certainly not confusion; at worst, ignorance.

The problem is that it is only found in what Streeter sees as a second layer on Luke. The person(s) responsible for "proto-Luke" evince no knowledge of Nazareth.

So, do you think the reference to Nazorean in 24:19 was a reference to a sect or to a place?

Without the reference to Nazareth in 21:11 there is no indication of Nazareth at all in the gospel. The reference at 21:11 is an insertion at some point, though not from Q, as Luke shows no knowledge of its presence at the point. As Matthew is a literary work and its sources do not support the use of Nazareth at the point, yet someone writing in the Matthean tradition does know Nazara, this lone reference to Nazareth is suspect as not part of the Matthean tradition.

One has to argue at a case by case level.

How many have the evidence we have for this?

1. it is not supported by a close parallel in another text;
2. it is of an unusual form including the territory;
3. it is part of a description of movement from one place to another and does not suggest a statement of hometown origin; and
4. it is not supported as a hometown in Mark, though it is by later tradition.

I'll twiddle my thumbs.

Actually, you didn't do you homework correctly. The writer replaced the term nazarhnos with galilaios. I'll let you deal with the redactional policy of the Matthean writer.

Perhaps you would prefer "stronger claim" rather than "prior rights".

This was followed by:

Hopefully, this simple change deals with any lack of clarity from the use of lectio difficilior and allows you to concentrate on the discussion.

There is no necessary relationship between the two parts of this statement. What makes you say it and why? What about the apparent use of Nazareth in 1:9 as a reflection of whether the writer knew Nazara?

I don't know who did it, but it is not attested in any Hebrew source nor in Josephus. The only sources that have it are christian. The rabbinical sources do know Gennesar or Genusar. The finger points to the christians as the culprits. Whatever the case, the evidence is that it is a poor example for your argument.

You have no evidence of Gennesareth as being a prior form to Gennesar or ever used by a native. The relation with Kinnereth is one of confusion on your part. They are linguistically unrelated names. Note this paragraph from the Jewish Encyclopaedia:

Kinneret was one of the five fortified cities which fell to the lot of Naphtali (Josh. xix. 35). It is mentioned after Rakkath, which is identified in the Talmud with Tiberias (Yer. Meg. i. 1). Genusar as an inhabited place is also mentioned in Yer. Ma'as. i. 2 and in Tosef., Kelim, B. B. v. 6; but, as it appears from another Talmudic passage, the ancient town was no longer in existence in Talmudic times, and the name "Genusar" was applied to the forts BetYeraḥ and Sinnabri, which had protected it: on account of this the plural "Kinnerot" is met with (Yer. Meg. i. 1; Gen. R. l.c.).

It's simply a poor example, there are two toponyms in the Hebrew bible, Ramoth and Ramah.

I can understand your wishful thinking, but you do not want to analyse your sorry examples for what they are. You need to supply meaningful examples and you continually fail to do so. Just look at them: Gennesar, which you fail to show was ever used by any native, and which obviously wasn't; and ynquirer's unanalysed Rama example.

As with the case of Ramah/Ramoth we are dealing with singular/plural with QYR-XR$/QYR-XR$T, though it has been confused in the tradition. If you see Jer 19:2, it talks of $(R HXRSWT the "gate of potsherds". The Qere reading is $(R HXRSYT which hides the plural so that there is some confusion over the name. QYR-XR$ would be the "wall of pottery", whereas QYR-XR$T would be derived from the "wall of potsherds". Nazara/Nazareth has nothing to do with any singular/plural confusion.

This is not a toponym, but a family name. Different forces apply.

The source literature doesn't agree with you.


spin

Ben C Smith

Hi, spin. Let me address just one little issue that ought to be easy to handle before I tackle the rest sometime in the (hopefully) near future (it may be a bit; I am going out of town for part of the weekend).

You wrote:

In context, you are referring to Mark 1.9, and the relevant phrase is Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee.

But surely it is hardly out of the ordinary to name the territory along with the locale. In the Hebrew scriptures we find:

Thus Israel dwelt in the land of Egypt, in the land of Goshen (Genesis 47.27).
The king of Jokneam in Carmel, one (Joshua 12.22).
Then Abdon the son of Hillel the Pirathonite died and was buried at Pirathon in the land of Ephraim (Judges 12.15).
Now there was a young man from Bethlehem in Judah (Judges 17.7).
And a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went... (Ruth 1.1).
Now there was a certain man from Ramathaim-zophim from the hill country of Ephraim (1 Samuel 1.1).
You will find two men close to the tomb of Rachel in the territory of Benjamin, at Zelzah (1 Samuel 10.2).
Then Samuel arose and went up from Gilgal to Gibeah of Benjamin (1 Samuel 13.15).
Now David was the son of the Ephrathite of Bethlehem in Judah (1 Samuel 17.12).
He proceeded from there to Naioth in Ramah (1 Samuel 19.23).
Then David fled from Naioth in Ramah (1 Samuel 20.1).
They buried the bones of Saul and Jonathan his son in the country of Benjamin, in Zela (2 Samuel 21.14).

In the New Testament we find:

Nathanael of Cana in Galilee (John 21.2).
Now Paul and his companions put out to sea from Paphos and came to Perga in Pamphylia (Acts 13.13).
I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia (Acts 21.39).

Seems common enough to me.

Ben.

spin

Not a single analogous example, though the one for Nathaniel is the closest.

We are not dealing with a person introducing themselves, but an author doing the introduction. Nathaniel for example was introduced back in Jn 2, so even it isn't analogous. Paul is not Paul of Tarsus in Cilicia, but descriptively a Jew, Tarsean, of Cilicia or, another time, a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia.

I have no trouble with a place being qualified by its region. The problem I have is the naming process of a person by town, such as Saul of Tarsus or Joseph of Arimathea, when that town is qualified by a region, as being atypical of the naming process.

The majority of your umm... examples simply don't make sense being referred to here -- unless of course you aren't taking Nazareth as a statement of provenance of Jesus, but just some place he was before he went to the Jordan.

It could be though that I am retrojecting a later christian tendency for nomenclature onto the gospels. Paul of Samosata, Eusebius of Caesarea or Eusebius of Nicomedia, or Athanasius of Alexandria, etc., etc. This tendency is probably where Jesus of Nazareth comes from. Simon of Cyrene is really Simon the Cyrenian. Paul of Tarsus is really Paul the Tarsean.


spin

Ben C Smith

Oh, and one more little thing that I missed the first time through, in the interests of accuracy on behalf of Stephen.

It appears you think Stephen contacted me personally about the Rowlingson article. That is not the case. I gave you the link to the Goodacre weblog entry where Stephen posted his comment mentioning the article. Stephen was commenting on the weblog entry; he was not even responding to me. I was merely crediting my source for having originally found that article.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Let us narrow the examples down, then:

Judges 17.7 identifies the Levite by town (Bethlehem) and then adds its territory (Judah).
Ruth 1.1 identifies Elimelech by town (Bethlehem again) and then adds its territory (Judah).
1 Samuel 1.1 identifies Elkanah by town (Ramathaim-zophim) and then adds its territory (the hills of Ephraim).
1 Samuel 17.12 identifies Jesse by town (Bethlehem) and then adds its territory (Judah).

Compare:

Mark 1.9 identifies Jesus by town (Nazareth) and then adds its territory (Galilee).
Matthew 21.11 identifies Jesus by town (Nazareth) and then adds its territory (Galilee).

So it is okay for an author to add the territory to the town in the third person, but not okay for a character to add the territory to the town in the first person. Who makes up these rules?

So the author is allowed to identify Nathanael as from Cana in Galilee the second time round, but he is not allowed to do so the first time round. Who makes up these rules?

Besides, Judges 17.7, Ruth 1.1, and 1 Samuel 1.1 are all first mentions of their characters.

Ben.

spin

This should help you see the difference with Mk 1:9 "Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee to be baptized by John at the Jordan." The sentence as constructed has nothing to do with provenance. It merely provides prior location.

You did.

Mark has Nazareth only once, in 1.9, at exactly the point where we would expect the author to introduce the geographical point of origin of a character, to wit, at his first narrative mention (Mark 1.1 being more a preface or even perhaps a subtitle).

Gosh, this must be too difficult for you. As you are persisting despite my last post, none of these are analogous to [NAME] of [TOPONYM [+ extra geographical information]], are they?

But don't let me distract you too long from the main substance.


spin

Ben C Smith

You appear to be shifting issues. You claimed:

The topic was places of origin and their territories, not verbs of motion. You claimed that origin points are not usually accompanied by their territories.

But this is false. My list included places of origin with their respective territories (Judges 17.7; Ruth 1.1; 1 Samuel 1.1).

I never meant to exclude later mentions. I wrote:

I can see whence you derived your point, but I meant only that to mention the origin point of a character once, and that at his first narrative mention, should not be considered odd. I apologize if my wording misled you into accepting the principle (which kind I would always disagree with) that characters should be so named only at that time.

But neither is Mark 1.9! The name Jesus immediately precedes the toponym in the sentence as it stands, true, but surely the prepositional phrase goes with the verb (that is, it is adverbial, not adjectival). Mark 1.9 does not mean Jesus of Nazareth, as such. It means Jesus came from Nazareth. I know you agree with this, because this is where, after all, you are bringing in the verb of motion as implying no more than that Nazareth was the immediately preceding port of call for Jesus.

In this case, then, Judges 17.7, Ruth 1.1, and 1 Samuel 1.1 are exactly analogous to Mark 1.9 with respect to your original claim, which was that points of origin usually do not come with their territories (therefore, since Nazareth in Mark 1.9 comes with a territory, it must not be a point of origin). My argument at this stage is entirely defensive against your positive claim.

However, you have also argued that the wording of Mark 1.9 (mainly the verb) indicates previous location. I have no problem with that, of course. My argument is again defensive, since I am not using the phrasing of Mark 1.9 on its own as proof that Mark thought Jesus was from Nazareth. On its own that phrasing could potentially mean exactly what you have indicated, just as on its own the phrasing of Ruth 1.1 could simply mean that Bethlehem was the most recent port of call for Elimelech:

...και επορευθη ανηρ απο Βαιθλεεμ της Ιουδα του παροικησαι εν αγρω Μωαβ....

...and a man journeyed from Bethlehem of Judah to dwell in the country of Moab....

(It is certain from context, of course, that Elimelech actually hailed from Bethlehem.)

My reasons for accepting that Mark thought Jesus actually hailed from (not merely travelled from) Nazareth are different than the mere phrasing of Mark 1.9, and I plan to discuss them when I get around to discussing the interplay of Capernaum and Nazareth.

Ben.