Amaleq13

It doesn't matter what the percentage is, Ted, it tells us absolutely nothing about whether the author deliberately chose the name. It only makes it possible. There is no statistic that can inform you of this. Only the author can answer that question and, given his current ability to communicate, that limits us to what he gives us in the text.

If you have no real idea what constituted "victory" in the mind of the author, you cannot reliably identify the competitors. What seems appropriate to you tells us nothing about what was appropriate for the author. I suspect you could rationalize quite a few names as good choices but it doesn't get you any closer to what the author was thinking. What you are pretending to do is peek into the imagination of an author by running a frequency count on his choice of words but there is no necessary connection between those numbers and his thoughts.

Chris Weimer

What author wrote this, though? Don't you think it's equally possible if not probable that the name came first and the savior aspect of him came following afterwards? Are we to assume Josephus made up Judas the Galilean also? I mean, Judas, the Greek of Judah, the land which the Messiah was supposed to restore. Parallels are very easy to make and I'd caution anyone concluding anything based off of alleged parallels alone.

Slaughterhouse 5 was based off a true story...

Tigers!

Try a good book on babies names, they often have the langauge of origin, meaning etc:
My wife and I were gibven one before our daughter was born and it had about 2000 boys & girls names. It is an Australian book but I will try to find it if you wish.

TedM

Amaleq, that's what statistics are all about. They are utilized in exactly these situations--when one CANNOT determine the exact answer--in order to give us the odds for the exact answer that can't be determined. IOW it accepts the reality--we can't read the author's mind. Then it looks to see how meaningful the proposed "claim" is. Without looking at the odds the claim "Jesus means Savior" actual is a meaningless claim, because for all we know ALL names mean SAVIOR. IOW the claim itself adds no information of value for comparison purposes. In the absence of any comparison material it would be a mistake to say that "since Jesus means Savior is consistent with a mythical Jesus, it is evidence in favor of a mythical Jesus." All one could say is that it is consistent with the hypothesis. Well, so what? It is consistent with a historical Jesus too.

I hope this helps you understand my take on this--and in fact I hope this helps you understand why I frequently try to determine the odds of various claims made in these forums. Determining what likely happened in the absence of information which confirms a particular claim actually REQUIRES the use of statistics like those I'm asking for. Otherwise, it often seems to me that one can't make any meaningful claims at all.

ted

Anat

Someone brought up baby name books - in my experience these tend to be extremely lacking when they deal with names in languages the compiler isn't very well versed in. Maybe a book intended for a Jewish audience would be more accurate for Hebrew and Aramaic names, though in some cases you would need to find out what the Hebrew name is from a Helenized (or Latinized or Anglicized) version.

Amaleq13

Absolutely and the name statistics are just as useful in identifying whether the story is history as they are in helping identify it as fiction.

Tubby Lardmore

Jesus was engaging in a bit of word play when he said, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my church" [or something close to that--I'd have to look it up to get the exact quote]. I was probably in my teens before I realized that. I wonder how many Christians read that passage and don't 'get' it.

Amaleq13

That's what the misuse of statistics is all about, Ted. You are creating the illusion of relevant knowledge but there is simply no rational connection between the information you are collecting and the conclusion you are pretending to draw from it. All the frequency counts in the world cannot inform you whether a character in a story was named deliberately by the author to signify his role in that story or if the character in the story has that name because he is based on a real person. You are generating trivia and calling it mind-reading.

On the contrary, you are clearly denying that reality by pretending that name counts or speculative "better choices" can inform us whether the author wrote history or fiction. That is simply absurd.

I agree and whomever is saying that is, IMO, as wrong as you are in your name-counting efforts.

YES! And no amount of counting names or speculation about what you think might have been a better choice is going to change the significance of the name.

I completely understand why you do it, Ted. You want to find a definitive answer but appealing to irrelevant frequency counts simply isn't going to provide it. Like so many other individual factors, the name of Jesus fails to make either position more likely.

Using irrelevant data certainly doesn't help one avoid that outcome.

TedM

While it can't definitively "inform" us of what happened, I disagree that it is of no value in determining which would be more likely. Actually what I was planning to use the statistics for was to determine whether the name Jesus was BY CHANCE any more likely than a "non-messianic" name, under the assumption that it was "messianic" in some way. For example, if out of a typical sample of 10 males, there were 5 with a name having an equally messianic meaning and 5 without, I would conclude that there is no reason to use the name Jesus as evidence for a deliberate fabrication of the Messiah's name by the early Christians. If, on the other hand there were only 1 with a messianic meaning, and it happened to be the name "Jesus", then I would say that this is positive evidence for fabrication.

AT THE SAME TIME, if only "Jesus" had a messianic meaning, I would say that the odds are against a historical man considered to be the messiah to have been randomly given a name with a messianic meaning by his parents, ALL OTHER VARIABLES BEING EQUAL. There is some chance that all other variables would not have been equal however. Parents choose names for a reason and children in that culture would have been more likely on avg to have seen some level of appropriateness of their name. As such Jesus himself would have been more likely than someone with a non-messianic name to behave like a messiah.

Still, if the chances are very slim that the person considered to be the messiah would have a messiah-appropriate name, then the odds ARE greater that the author fabricated such a name than that of a historical person engaging in self-fulfilling prophecy on the basis of his name alone. As such, this is PROPER use of statistics--not a misuse as you call it.


If you think I'm trying to find a definitive answer using statistics, then I have somehow been misinterpreted. I"m NOT looking for proof. I'm looking for the most likely claim, and that IS what statistics are all about. They can't always be used, and people can disagree with the assumptions behind them (is a name really messianic in nature, etc..), but to the extent that the assumptions are agreed upon as reasonable, they are absolutely valid and helpful for determine convergence of the data, even if they can be 100% misleading for any single example.

IF you can show me what is wrong with my above examples, I'd be more than willing to agree with your claim that frequency counts are irrelevant. It seems to me that you had the same viewpoint when we discussed the likelihood that the Wisdom Preacher would have had the same name as the Christian Savior, and you said it was a coincidence, yet didn't seem to see any relevance in that conclusion. Events that deviate from chance likelihood are statistically significant--and therefore ARE significant to the topic they pertain to! I continue to think that you are looking at statistics as somehow being irrelevant because they aren't "PROOF". IF that is the case, it seems to me that your viewpoint regarding the relevance of statistics is simply wrong.

ted

Anat

Well, Ted, what would you consider a 'Messianic meaning'? Or more importantly, what would have been considered a 'Messianic meaning' by the authors and the intended audience of the Gospels?

Of the names I have listed in post #18, which would you consider 'Messianic'?