Vorkosigan

Yes, you've been extremely helpful in shaping my thinking on this.

Gundry notes that 1:9 is the only instance in Mark where one geographical reference is sandwiched in another ("nazareth of Galilee"). It's odd, though, that it wasn't inserted into Mk 6:1: "He went away from there and came to his own country; and his disciples followed him."

So just what is the origin of this word?

Ted Hoffman

I am preparing a paper on this and spin has been very helpful with respect to the etymological side of the whole Nazareth question especially the blurring line between transliteration, prophecy slutting, redaction and translation.

I have been looking at apologetic works of Glen Miller and Turkel besides others and by and large, Zindler, his polemics aside, manages to effectively squash their arguments.

To what extent can the scribal rendering of YOD and WAW 'confuse' scholars so as to have the confusion bring about the evolution : NZYR -> NZWR -> nazwraios?

Price defines Nazirite as "one who was for a short duration vowed to leave his hair unshorn, not drink wine, nor to touch any unclean thing. There were no lifelong Nazirites; Samson is made one after the fact to find an explanation for his long hair" Robert Price, Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, p. 66-67

He locates the usages of Nazerene and Nazorean as follows:

"Jesus the Nazarene" Mark 1:24, 10:47,14:67,16:6 Luke 4:34,2:9
"Jesus the Nazorean" Matt 26:71; John 18:7,19:9;Acts 2:22,3:6,4:10,6:14,22:8,26:9

He explains: "'The Nazarene' would imply a place but 'the Nazorean' appears to be a sect name, equivalent to 'the Essene' or 'the Hasid'. Epiphanius, an early Christian cataloguer of 'heresies' mentions a pre-Christian sect called 'the Nazoreans' their name meaning the Keepers of the Torah, or possibly, the secrets (see Mark 4:11, 'To you has been given the kingdom of God but to those outside all is by way of parable'). These Nazoreans were the heirs, supposedly of the neoprimitivist sect of the Rechabites descending from the times of Jeremiah (Jer. 35:1-10). They were like Gypsies, itinerant carpenters. 'Nazorean' occurs once unambiguously in the New Testament itself as a designation in Acts 24:5: 'a ring leader of the sect of the Nazoreans'. Robert Eisler (The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist), Hugh J. Schonfield (North Palestinian Sectarians and Christian Origins), have plausibly suggested that Jesus (an early Christians generally) were members of this Jewish pious sect" op.cit, p.53

Sid Green, in his paper Sons of Zadok, writes regarding the Nazoraioi in the Dead Sea Scrolls (he relies on Matthew Black): "The Scrolls are peppered with references to the sectarians as ‘Guardians’ or ‘Keepers’ of the Law. The Hebrew word for this is ‘Shomerim,’ but in the spoken language, Aramaic, it is ‘Natsarraya,’ whence the Greek ‘Nazoraioi’ is a very close transliteration. This allows us to see how the community which sheltered the Zadokite bloodline became known as the ‘Nazoraioi’ or ‘Nazoreans,’ bringing us to ‘Iesous Nazoraios,’ or ‘Jesus the Nazorean,’ the Jesus of the gospels"

We will find out soon. But going by the cronology: nazarhnos->nazwraios->nazaret->Nazareth, we will need the original version of Mark.

My bet would be, we need go back to Hebrew scripture and peer hard at NZYR (one devoted/consecrated to God) and NCR (branch - Isa 11:1 - Davidic line) and messianic expectations.

:banghead:

rlogan

Do tell...

Notsri

I think these are all valid points in their own right, Vorkosigan. However, what goes overlooked is Zindler's failure to remain true to his own methodology. He evidently believes that rabbinic literature has some relevance to Nazareth's historicity; if he is correct then the same should be true for the town of Magdala as well. But by ignoring said literature in the case of Magdala, he's being inconsistent.

As for Nazareth, Zindler of course implies that the Talmud and Josephus fail to mention the town because it didn't exist. But this is a non sequitur. The Talmud, according to Zindler, names 63 Galilean towns, while Josephus refers to only 45. Yet Josephus tells us (Life 1.45) that there were 245 (!) cities and towns in Galilee. This leaves 182 unaccounted for by the Talmud(s), while Josephus apparently fails to mention 200! We cannot argue, then, based on the silence from these two sources, that Nazareth didn't exist, any more than we can suggest that these other hundred or more cities and towns go unmentioned because they, too, didn't exist. The most I think we can say is that if Nazareth existed, it, like these other towns, had no relevance to anything that either the Talmud or Josephus addressed, and thus went unnoticed. John Crossan and Jonathan Reed suggest in Excavating Jesus:

spin

There is of course nothing untoward in the Greek though. The structure is not questionable. Acts' Paul is a Jew of Tarsus of Cilicia, eimi ioudaios tarseus ths kilikias, the only difference in structure is the genitive used instead of the preposition. Jesus is born in Bethlehem of Judea, en bhQleem ths ioudaias, which is the same structure.

But then, Mark indicates that Capernaum was his home town, so I wouldn't expect it...

I went on briefly to explain. And Ted picks it up.

So, on to Ted...

It's caused modern scrolls scholars hell. There have been a few articles written on the matter and there are a number of readings which are in doubt because of the confusion. There is even an apparent name, PWTL'YS over which some scholars have tried to reconstruct as Peitholaus, in which the confusion is supposed to have gone both ways WAW to YOD and YOD to WAW. I think this last is more a modern problem of wishful thinking based on the knowledge of the WAW/YOD confusion.

He's just wrong: there is no "appears" about it. The endings -hnos and -aios are both gentilics, a Jew is a ioudaios and a Hittite is a xettaios. Gentilics could be used to indicate groups which follow a person or some other non-ethnic tradition. One finds both esshnos and essaios in ancient literature.

While this is Epiphanius, he's probably wrong, if my etymology is correct, which seems linguistically quite justifiable, as in NZYR -> NZWR -> nazwraios -- given the first step, the second is guaranteed. "Keeper" comes from NCR a different Hebrew source, which is harder to relate to nazwraios because of the long vowel in the Greek, omega, which indicates a Hebrew WAW in a transliteration.

The problem here is that shomerim is the source of "Samaritan" and was used in the spoken language, though this should help people see that there was some connection between the people of the scrolls and the cult of Samaria from Mt Gerizim.

Hopefully this is just chronology, for I don't think there is a direct relationship between any of these words except the last two (two different Greek renditions of the same Hebrew name).

There seems to be some linguistic justification for the following two equations:

1) NZYR --> nazwraios
2) NCR --> nazarhnos

though this last needs a proviso: the Hebrew letter TSADE (here transliterated as "C") is usually transliterated into Greek as a sigma, though there are a few examples of TSADE becoming a zeta.

NCR

These equations indicate that the two Greek manifestations are from two distinct Hebrew sources, which suggests two distinct traditions which have coalesced in Greek with the place name Nazareth. As I indicated in an earlier post, Luke has no problem in its reworking of Mark in using nazarhnos, nazwraios or Nazareth for Mark's nazarhnos, though it would seem that Matt which later knew nazwraios and Nazareth didn't know nazarhnos. (It's interesting that we in English prefer the least used Marcan form, Nazarene.)


spin

Vorkosigan

Yes, to pick up this thread here, I was reading Josephus Ant 18. again last night, and once again was struck by the sequence of the man who claims Moses hid the Temple vessels on Mt Gerizim, and Jesus' with the Temple vessels in Mk 11, and the fact that the TF was inserted nearby. Somehow they seem to be related, but it can't quite see it clearly. As if someone was silently commenting on something....

In other words, nazarhnos, Mark's word, is unquestionably a sectarian (or other group) designation, not a place name.

spin

No, I was arguing that one cannot conclude from the form of the word that nazwraios indicated a sectarian. Obviously you cannot conclude on form that nazarhnos indicated a sectarian either. A person from Damascus was a damaskhnos, 2 Cor 11:32. A person from Gadara was a gadarhnos, both in nt and Josephus. These suffixes -hnos and -aios just indicate "that which is from" and most frequently seen with geographic terms, but, as "Essene" shows, they are not restricted to geography.


spin

Vorkosigan

Gotcha. So the real indicator of ahistoricity is that the evangelists who copied Mark didn't know how to regard nazarhnos ??? If they had been working with a prior tradition, there wouldn't be so much confusion??

spin

That's basically my understanding of Matt. Luke just saw it as some form of the Nazorean/Nazareth nexus. The hypothetical 2nd redactors of Matt also had Nazorean and Nazareth together as 2:23 shows (though some translations erroneously supply Nazarene), but they had already lost nazarhnos.


spin

Ted Hoffman

:banghead:
I don't think I will write the paper. This is too damn complicated.

I dont have Price's address but I have emailed Doherty and asked him to alert Price on this: