Chili

Typical, and they remained attached to the old tradition and never changed in fear of losing their salvation. To be fair I should add that the 30 above above inlcudes their children.

show_no_mercy

"ha Notzri" meaning a person from Nazareth is 1)Grammatically incorrect in Hebrew ("a person from Nazareth in Hebrew today is "'Naztrat'") and 2) makes no sense in the 1st century CE since there's no evidence of a town called "Nazareth" until Constantine's mother "found(ed)" it in the fourth century. The mention of "Notzri" in the Talmud is in reference to a sect of gnostic Jews, not people from a town called Nazareth. Yeshu ha-Notzri in the Talmud was hanged on the eve of Passover in 100 BCE - about 150 years prior to Jesus' alleged crucifixion.

Chili

Nazareth is the city of God = Eden where Mary was from (the woman was never banned in Gen.3). Prior to the arrival of the messiah there can be no Nazareth on earth and since the Jews did not recongnize Jesus as their messiah he had to move to Rome where they have been singing ever since.

The gnostic "Notzri" sect has what we call the mind of Christ

No Robots

By the time the Babylonian Talmud was produced, Notzri had become the standard Hebrew word for Christian and Yeshu Ha-Notzri had become the conventional rendition of "Jesus the Nazarene" in Hebrew. For example, by 1180 CE the term Yeshu Ha-Notzri can be found in the Maimonides' Mishneh Torah (Hilchos Melachim 11:4, uncensored version). Although the word Ha-Notzri literally means the nezarene (the one who was born in Nazareth), Maimonides' reference is clearly intended to indicate Jesus.--Jewish view of Jesus.

Richard Carrier on 1st century Nazareth.

Notzrim is a form of Nazarenes, meaning followers of Jesus of Nazareth.

Talmudic references to Jesus of Nazareth have been subject to heavy censorship. In all probability, the setting of the execution in 100 BC is anachronistic obscurantism.

show_no_mercy

How can there be followers of Jesus "of" Nazareth before Jesus of Nazareth existed?

Yeishu ha-Notzri doesn't have to mean your personal Jesus, since Noztrim as a sect existed 100 years before Jesus' birth.

No Robots

There weren't. The Notzrim did not exist prior to Jesus of Nazareth, contrary to what one reads here and there. That whole article Notzrim is terrible. You might want to try Nazarene Jewish Christianity by Ray A. Pritz, who argues that Epiphanius isn't to be trusted in this matter. Basically, the Church Father wanted to back-date the Nazarenes in order to undermine any notion that their Jewish Christianity was directly descended from that of Christ's earliest disciples.

Chili

But there is nothing special about being what they called a Noztrim or we call a Jesuit or a Buddhist calls a Sotapanna.

He is just a stream entrant into the Tigris, if you wish, on his way to Eu-phrates. In fact I hold that that is the best thing the Jews ever did.

The personal Jesus idea is for those who see him as a good guy instead of bad and one who deserved to be crucified.

DCHindley

It looks like the Wiki article is an elaboration based more or less on Hugh Schonfield's Jesus Party (1974 in UK, 1975 in USA, and later reissued as Pentecost Revolution in 1985), part 3, chapter 28, Nazarene Country.

A map just after the Table of contents shows a shaded area labeled "General and refuge region of Nazoreans, Zadokites, disaffected elements and outlaws" that encompasses the southern tip of Ituraea, down through Caesarea Philippi, ranging to NE Galilee to the west and Auranitis to the east, continues south through Gaulanitis, to the eastern edge of the Sea of Galilee, including as one travels south the cities of Bethsaida, Gamala, Hippos and Gadera, extending east to the city of Abila in the western half of Batanea, and terminating in the northern half of the region of the Decapolis ending just north of, but not including, Pella.

I generally like Schonfield, as it was precisely the above book that started me looking at early Christian history, but subsequent reading has convinced me that Epiphanius and other early Christian writers cannot be trusted as sources in matters of etymology or specifics about the relationships between various Jewish and early Christian groups. Same goes for Lady Drower's work on the Mandaeans of Iraq & Iran, Robert Eisler's speculations on the Sleb in Messiah Jesus, or even S G F Brandon's works Jesus and the Zealots or The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church, all of whom/which influenced him heavily.

Keep in mind, though, that as hokey or speculative as these works seem today, all of these authors were, at the time they wrote, considered cutting edge ground breakers by a significant subsection of legitimate critics. My how time flies ...

FWIW, Pritz doesn't look much better. He seems to be a populist. The only thing he got right was the unreliability of Epiphanius (the Josh McDowell of his day), but I think he has to discredit Epi to firm up his own alternate, although not much better, ideas.

DCH

No Robots

Probably true. I haven't read the whole book closely. I just wanted to cite the bit on the unreliability of Epiphanius. Still, whatever he has to say has to be better than that horrible Notzrim article.

DCHindley

That chapter from Schonfield has been elaboated upon by someone into Hebrew or Aramaic. Jack Kilmon has some pretty specific ideas about early Christianity and he does know Aramaic, although I will come short of making a firm attribution. The other guy I have heard talk a lot about the Hebrew/Aramaic side of Christianity and Schonfield specifically was James (Scott) Trimm
(on Synoptic-L http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Synoptic/message/826 ).

DCH