Amaleq13

You also mention Gustav Dalman in your earlier thread Nazareth was a small Village of No Importance

ynquirer

Every parallel amounts to pattern plus noise. You use the noise to cloud the pattern.

Hopefully, I can.

It is not that difficult. Surely ekeinais puzzles you? It may always be translated into “the aforementioned.” Accordingly, en ekeinais means in the aforementioned. What is, or rather, since ekeinais is plural, what are in Mk 1:9 “the aforementioned”? Just read Mk 1:1-8 with a modicum of care.

(A little help: this is the reason why “came” is a better translation than “went.”)

spin

Gosh, I'm impressed how far you wanna take this bs. Ruth 1:1 talks of a family, not an individual -- yes, strangely it makes a difference there, ynquirer. Then again, it also talks of a sojourning from the verb paroikew. That should be a dead giveaway to you, but you're still fumbling around with the wrong things. Family moves from Bethlehem to Moab to stay should tell you that the move from Bethlehem indicates that they were staying in that town before the move. Ain't there in Mk 1:9. No context to help you make a parallel.

Non sprecare nostro tempo con queste stronzate per favore.


spin

ynquirer

However questionable the details you mention, your comment conveys a great truth: Nazaret has been an enigma for the last eighteen hundred years. Unfortunately, this thread has thrown no new light on it.

IMHO.

Ben C Smith

Hi, spin.

Look. Bottom line, people sometimes have preferences for which there is no predictable explanation. If you do not like the example I gave, please replace it with one that makes more sense to you.

Not that it matters, though, since I happen to think (at least at the moment) that Matthew wanted to link Jesus with the Nazoraean sect.

Do you have any arguments against Matthew wishing to connect Jesus with the Nazoraeans other than to call it rubbish?

This is the synoptic problem, not a scribe copying a text.

The Matthean Nazoraean in the second denial is the parallel to the Marcan Nazarene in the first denial just as (A) the Matthean Galilean in the first denial is parallel to the Marcan Galilean in the third denial and (B) the Matthean oath in the second denial is parallel to the Marcan cursing and swearing in the third denial. Unless you wish to argue that Mark included the swearing, the Galilean, and the Nazarene and Matthew included the oath, the Galilean, and the Nazoraean independently, just by coincidence.

This kind of rearranging of the elements is rather common between the synoptists. In Mark 10.3 it is Jesus who asks what [ti] Moses commanded; in Matthew 19.7 it is the Pharisees who ask why [ti] Moses commanded it. In Mark 10.21 Jesus tells the young man that he lacks one thing; in Matthew 19.20 it is the young man who asks what he lacks. In Mark 11.10 David is tagged onto the blessing clause (blessed is the coming kingdom of David); in Matthew 21.9 David is tagged onto the Hosanna clause (Hosanna to the son of David). In Mark 9.6 the disciples are afraid before they hear the voice from heaven; in Matthew 17.6 the disciples are afraid after and because of the voice from heaven.

Matthew is even free to completely mix up the order of larger elements. In Mark 1.2-6 = Matthew 3.1-6 the Matthean parallels in Marcan order come out as Matthew 3.3, 1-2, 5-6, 4.

Nobody calls it the synoptic situation.

I write a paragraph explaining why I think Matthew knew that a Nazarene was someone from Nazara, and you ask me how that explains what Luke did with Nazara?

But, since you ask, the Lucan use of Nazara is trivial to explain. He got it either from Q or from Matthew, and I prefer the latter. (This is obvious enough that I have to wonder whether I have properly understood the question.)

In context, I do not even see what this statement is referring to.

You ask me this after I have already written, in the same post even:

Asked and answered.

There is no way to tell whether Mark knew it. All we can say is that, if he knew it, he did not explicitly associate it with Nazareth (and for good reason, as you and I seem to agree). As for where the term Nazoraean actually comes from, I do not know. Nor is knowing vital to my hypothesis. All that matters on that score is that there was a sect called the Nazoraeans, that Jesus hailed from Nazareth, and that somebody at some point put those two concepts together artificially.

Is there a rule somewhere that the same author cannot use two different name variants for the same city? This objection is gossamer. Luke uses Ierosoluma in 2.22 and Ierousalhm only three verses later. Matthew also uses both forms, as does Paul.

Yes.

Yes. Always could.

I quite agree.

That is correct.

No.

Sure they did. All three of them mention the addition of the Capernaum line to the pericope and all three of them mention the moving of this pericope back to before the first mention of Capernaum.

I am not certain Streeter thought the author had forgotten. Streeter wrote (underlining mine):

[M]ost significant of all, [the author of proto-Luke] narrates, as if it were the first act of our Lord's ministry, the Rejection of Nazareth (though he knew it was not the first, since he alludes to previous miracles in Capernaum), because it seemed to him to sum up the history of the Christian message— the prophet has honour, but not in his own country....

If I understand you correctly, you are objecting to a single person having taken two mutually contradictory steps, namely (A) adding a reference to Capernaum to the Nazareth pericope and (B) moving this pericope to come before the real first mention, as it were, of Capernaum. If only one of these steps had been taken, there would be no problem; it is the combination of the two steps that creates the problem, and you see it as unlikely that a single person would take both steps.

But Luke does this elsewhere in even poorer fashion. In the parable of the pounds (19.11-27) Luke writes of ten servants instead of the three servants we find in Matthew (25.14-30), yet later he has the master summon the first, the second, and (incongruously) the other servant. Luke was thinking of three servants after all. Here again Luke has made two contradictory changes, namely (A) turning three servants into ten and (B) adding the term eteros, which the Matthean version lacks, to describe the third servant.

Just in case you missed my first response to this, Stephen did not contact me personally. He had posted a comment about the article on the NT Gateway weblog.

What an unnecessary statement.

I think it would help you in your hopefully upcoming article to review the relevant literature on the synoptic problem. I can understand, of course, not having heard of the Rowlingson article or of a fairly recent weblog entry by Goodacre, but Streeter? Even if you think these scholars are just dead wrong, there is no way for you to properly deal with the Nazareth evidence in the synoptic gospels without reviewing the synoptic problem, and several of your objections (no matter how right or wrong they are) betray that you are not up on the state of the debate over the synoptic problem.

Luke either was clumsy (incompetent is too strong, I think) or did not care enough about the apparent contradiction to change it once he had it in the works.

The novel Robinson Crusoe has a similar continuity error involving two steps. At one point Crusoe pulls off his clothes to swim out to the ship. Once on board he pokes around and finds foodstuffs, so he stuffs his pockets with biscuits. These conflicting statements come in the same paragraph. Shall we hypothesize two different authors for this novel? One author who wrote the part about Crusoe getting naked and another who added the part about Crusoe filling his pockets? Or did Daniel Defoe suffer what you are calling a short-term memory loss?

That is what I (and others) think, yes. And I also think Defoe was responsible both for Crusoe shedding his clothes and for Crusoe filling his pockets.

Hmmm. This particular chord may not be quite right for your article. But no worries. I am confident that, even if you cannot bring yourself to leave it out, your editor will do the cutting for you.

We are beginning to lapse here into ad hominum.

Quite right. Sorry.

If Matthew can pick up on a pair of phrases in Mark and remember the substance of at least one of them enough to use it in a different part of his gospel, why can Matthew not pick up on Nazareth in Mark and use it in a different part of his gospel?

I gave you the example of the Decapolis. Mark refers to it twice in his narrative, and Matthew fails to copy it over both times. But Matthew manages to work it into 4.25. Does that mean that the term Decapolis in Mark 5.20; 7.31 is likely an insertion?

If it is obvious that Nazarene is derived from something like Nazara, then why do you disagree with me when I argue that the place name Nazara came before the gentilic Nazarene?

Nazara has every appearance of being a perfectly acceptable Greek variant of Nazareth. I do not care if one author knew only Nazareth while another knew only Nazara, and if yet another knew both.

Luke 24.19 does not have Nazoraean. It has Nazarene. It is the place.

This is incorrect, unless you are picking at spelling; Matthew 2.23 also has Nazareth, but with a tau instead of a theta. It is also a non sequitur; an author is allowed to use a word exactly once if he wants to.

I am at a loss as to why Mark choosing to use Nazareth in 1.9 means he did not know that it was also called Nazara. Mark uses Ierosoluma for Jerusalem, never Ierousalhm. Does that mean that he did not know it could be called Ierousalhm, too? Despite the fact that it is all over the LXX?

I have read and reread this paragraph for an answer to my question, but in vain. So, again, why did the evangelists add an Aramaic ending to Genesar(a)?

The ending itself is evidence. Unless you can explain why an Aramaic ending was added to a word in Greek.

But suppose I agree with you for the sake of argument that there is just no way in the world Gennesareth came before Genesar(a). Let us imagine together that those darned Christians are responsible for adding the quite unnecessary -t to this place name.

If this is the case, what are you and I arguing about? The argument is over. If Christians could take Genesar and tag the Aramaic ending on it out of the blue, just for kicks, then what in the world is stopping them from removing the Aramaic ending from Nasareth, or for that matter adding the Aramaic ending to Nazara, or using a zeta to transliterate tsade? All rules go out the window if these early Christians are going out of their way to buck the usual linguistic trends. (And that is something like what I am arguing happened to the tsade, at any rate.)

Does not matter here! If the scribes are confusing Rama(h) with Ramoth that only goes to show that they are confusable, and therefore that the ending can be seen as flexible. The same thing happens in 2 Chronicles 22.5. The Hebrew has Ramoth-Gilead; the LXX has Rama-Galaad (only four chapters before, in 18.19, the LXX renders this same Hebrew name with the ending, Ramoth-Galaad).

I accept this criticism with regard to my other example, but not with regard to Ramah and Ramoth, since there the difference is in the Greek, in which the -t ending does not indicate a plural, but simply follows the Hebrew mechanically. If the Hebrew Ramoth can yield either Ramoth or Rama in the Greek, and if the Hebrew Chinnereth can yield either Chenereth or Chinara in the Greek, and if the Hebrew Daberath can be either Dabiroth or Deberi or even Debba in the Greek, and if the Greek for a certain lake can be either Gennesareth or Genesar, and if the personal name Mispereth can also be Mispar in the Hebrew itself, then there is nothing, but nothing, in the world to prevent Nazara from being a Greek variant of Nazareth.

Notice that the topic is how to tell that a word or phrase is an insertion from the margin.

Number 1 is a red herring. There are lots of things in one gospel not supported at that position by another gospel or other gospels. At best, the lack of parallel can help to leave the door open for an insertion once the real arguments have been made.

Number 2 I have already shown to be factually false.

Number 3 is baffling. Why does movement from one place to another make the place name suspect as part of the original text?

Number 4 is likewise baffling. If, as you yourself have argued, the wording of Mark 1.9 is merely showing that Jesus was in Nazareth before he got baptized, how does your comment about hometowns in Mark impeach it?

You later wrote:

Number 1 here is the same as number 1 above.

Number 2 is the meat and potatoes, it would seem. You apparently think that Jesus having a home in Capernaum contradicts him having grown up in Nazareth.

First of all, it ought to be noticed immediately that the problem, if it exists, does not entail anything unrealistic outside the texts themselves. Where I grew up and where I now live are two different things. Even if one text were to say that Jesus lived in X and another were to say that Jesus lived in Y, we would have to look closer to make certain which timeframe each was discussing. (This comes up with regard to where Peter supposedly lived, for example. Was it Bethsaida, as in John 1.44, or was it Capernaum, as in the synoptics? This is not automatically a contradiction, since two different times could be in view. That said, I do not oppose seeing a contradiction in the case of Peter, anyway, but the principle still stands that a person can live in more than one place during his or her lifetime.)

Second, in order to impeach Nazareth in Mark 1.9 as an insertion without textual evidence, you have to show how it actually contradicts something in the rest of the text. Now, I am not at all sure how you can do this if, as you yourself hold, Mark 1.9 merely points out that Jesus was in Nazareth immediately before going up to the Jordan. How can placing Nazareth in his itinerary possibly contradict Jesus hailing from Capernaum? On your own reading, the presence of Nazareth in 1.9 does not conflict with Capernaum. This means that your second point in the list above is null and void on your own terms. You cannot simultaneously argue both that Nazareth in Mark 1.9 has nothing to do with a hometown, as you have stated...:

...and that Nazareth in Mark 1.9 conflicts with Capernaum, as you have also stated:

I will have to wait for you to clear up this contradiction on your part before going further down the path between Nazareth and Capernaum. I might note in the meantime that you called Streeter, Rowlingson, and Goodacre incompetent for thinking that Luke made two conflicting changes to his source material, but here you are making two contradictory assertions of your own. Did you forget about your first statement above when you made your second? If you can forget one statement of your own invention when making another statement of your own invention, surely Luke can make the same mistake.

I will hopefully in my next post demonstrate why the town in Mark 6.1-6a is not Capernaum.

Ben.

Toto

I thought that Origin generally put an allegorical interpretation on the gospels. Perhaps that is where Ted got the idea that Origin thought Nazareth to be imaginary?

A source that I have not checked says

S.C.Carlson

Actually, I think we need to distinguish between a "core spin" and what later scribed may have added during the transmission of the text. Surely, the real spin cannot make mistakes, so once we eliminate that impossible, we must accept the remaining possible, no matter how implausible it seems to be.

Ben C Smith

Core Spin. Sounds like a good name for a video game.

Ben.

spin

Great bottom line there, Ben C. You have to rely on the vague possibility that the Matt writer preferred something not in his source (ie nazwraios) to what was there (ie nazarhnos) -- which was closer to the toponym than what he proposed for a gentilic for that place (ie nazwraios) in 2:23. I gotta say that the two redaction processes, first removal of nazarhnos and second a later insertion of nazwraios is the simpler, more reasonable explanation for me.

You may be right, but it's a blow against his statement in 2:23 that it was a gentilic.

Does an unsupportable conjecture need another description? Do you need to get an explanation why a less transparent term for a gentilic (nazwraios) is preferable to a more transparent one in your source (nazarhnos), assuming that Nazareth was in that source?

First, note how the synoptics handled the denial sequence:
Luke has gone for simplification. You claim that Matt has gone for complication. However, look at Mark's third denial situation: "you are one of them for you are a Galilean". Well, how did the person know that he was a Galilean? Matt tells you in his rewriting: "your accent betrays you". So Matt went the same way as Luke, opting to simplify even more, getting rid of Galilee and replacing it with the comment about the accent to make the reference clearer. The rest is seems like secondary taint to me.

Gosh, great response, being asked to explain why you consistently complicate issues and you opt to respond with a non sequitur. Hmmm.

Yup. We are dealing with two separate exemplars in a tradition. You give some unsupportable "what you think" about the redactor who inserted nazwraios knowing Nazarene and its relationship with Nazara, so I attempted to keep you focused.

(I get the idea though from elsewhere in your response that you want to argue that the Lucan writer is redacting Mark, while using the Matthean redaction as a second or third source.)

Well, the editing of Luke I've shown illustrates that it wasn't in Q. Luke clearly knows that the hometown is not Capernaum so he has already named it in the rejection scene, so it was not in the same place as the Q-ers try to argue. You have nothing up your sleave for the Luke from Matt conjecture. Matt's approach with regard to Capernaum would surely have given the Lucan writer soem pause before hacking out of his tradition development. I don't think you are paying enough attention as to how the redactors relate to their sources.

You propose the least likely approaches to things so consistently in my eye, it should be clear where the statement was coming from and referring to. You seem to be courting Occam's razor.

It seems to mean that you are conceding that Nazorean has nothing whatsoever to do with Nazareth and you are cutting your throat over Nazarene as a gentilic candidate, at least if Mark had had Nazareth in 1:9. You seem to want things both ways, or else you are not making your opinions clear. Did Matt think Nazorean a gentilic? You think for some reason the Matt writer knew Nazarene was a gentilic. Why omit Nazarene and use Nazorean which you seem to be saying is nothing to do with Nazareth which Matt uses only once anyway? It would seem that Mark is much more consistent than those who used it as a source, if we follow your approach. (I'm just trying to understand wherever it is you are.)

(We don't agree because I don't think Mark had Nazareth in the text for the reasons already given numerous times and to which you have not responded with any conviction.)

And removed the reference to Nazarene at the same time according to you.

This is where I begin to see why analogies don't work well. You dutifully march out a pair of forms that are well known and point to two separate approaches to the name, yet the analogy needs to say something. If it is as simple as that you can have two forms of a name, that is certainly not good enough. There is too much theology and symbolism riding on Jerusalem. You need just an ordinary town with your variations.

You can get to the end of the process, agreeing with much and you can't see the problem it imposes. I'm a little amazed a how you can respond "no" without embarrassment. As I say, it's like you're calling the guy a sufferer of short term memory loss, a little like Guy Pierce in Memento. He does something one minute and the next he has totally lost having done it. At this rate you can justify anything with the guy. You don't need to be involved in this discussion because you just can't see the problem.

And their defence seem like yours. Luke is a loser whose right hand doesn't know what his left hand is doing.

So, what happened, the redactor added the stuff about Capernaum being a city in Galilee and removed the stuff about Capernaum being where Jesus was home, then got to the hometown rejection, inserted a reference to Nazara and a second reference to Capernaum, then moved the whole passage back to its present location? What did he do to insert it? Was it a cut and stitch to put it right before the bit that introduces Capernaum? How did he find the place to put it? I gather he didn't read that it was about Capernaum. Please go through the redactional process as you think it might have happened so that the hometown rejection was placed immediately before the Capernaum passage. I thought the usual process was copy and change as you went, so that you decide, I've got to put the hometown rejection here before Capernaum so let's copy it now and add the reference to Nazara and then to Capernaum...

Do you think Streeter makes any sense? I don't. It's as though Streeter seems to think that he moves the hometown piece before the Capernaum reference, then inserts the stuff about what Jesus had done in Capernaum and the next verse after the passage the narrative talks about Capernaum for the first time. Streeter deserves a lemon.

This doesn't seem in even poorer fashion than the Capernaum issue to me, yet it could also illustrate a later editorial change, ie three becomes ten and fatigue causes a slip.

I can understand your collusion.

I try to work on material from the material, not from the opinions of others. These guys seem to be good illustrations of why this isn't a bad process.

I'm from a literary school that says, "don't read the critics, read the text." I'd rather reinvent the wheel than to get stuck in the ruts of other wheels.

The very next verse after the passage is the first mention of Capernaum after just writing a second and you, refusing the more reasonable approach of a later redactional effort, wouldn't call this incompetent. I can understand why you saw nothing wrong with the three guys you ran with earlier, if you can remember that you mentioned them.

And you can guarantee that Defoe didn't add this stuffing of pockets at a later time or the taking off the clothes? I'd need to read the passage to see the continuity.

You are arguing without knowing what happened with the Defoe example.

As I said, I prefer not to deal with the opinions of others, though I know that it is fashionable to trot out others' opinions.

It is a reflection of my sense of futility regarding the approach I'm responding to.

(That is only part of the problem.)

If you can give me some reason why a later Marcan writer might insert references to the Decapolis, I'll listen.

Up until this discussion you probably didn't know that there was a place called Nazara. In fact, you don't know that there was a place ever called Nazara by any natives. We have the term nazarhnos without any Nazara in Mark and we have the term Nazara without nazarhnos in Matt. All the evidence we have points against these gospel writers accepting a relationship between Nazara and nazarhnos. The term nazarhnos existed in Mark without a reference to Nazara, a toponym only inserted in the other synoptics, so there is a chronological precedence for nazarhnos.

Of the Greek toponym Nazareth maybe, not the Hebrew and Aramaic NCRT. You have avoided the fact that many of your attempts to justify the loss of the -t have simply been unacceptible in that they showed no understanding of the -t. You seemed to think that any -t loss was sufficient, but showed none that was parallel with the feminine -t of Nazareth. The plurals that you looked at were irrelevant. The artificial form Gennesaret was unattested in reality. You may feel happy that you can justify the difference between the two Greek forms, but it isn't based on any evidence.

You're not trying to deal with all the data.

Sorry, that's my mistake. You now seem to be saying that Luke uses Nazarene for the place and Nazorean for the sect, yet Luke has Nazorean in 18:37 where Mk 10:47 has Nazarene. It would seem that no such distinction is being made in Luke.

You're back to having Nazareth in 2:23 instead of the more reasonable Nazara, attested to in some early sources and pointed back to by 4:13.

You need a better example than Jerusalem. There is too much riding on the term for it to be casual.

It should be simple you're trying to claim that some native used a term equivalent to the Greek Gennesaret, yet there is no evidence for it at all. It is something that appears in the gospels and later christian tradition, yet you have no idea when or where the gospels were written, though they are the only texts bearing Gennesaret, no Hebrew source, no Jew writing in Greek, no Jew writing in Aramaic. Not even in the Syriac Peshitta. It's just totally unattested where it should be attested. At the same time Gennesar or Genusar is seem in Rabbinical literature, so we have attestation from the 2nd c. BCE until rabbinical times, ie a continuation of one form and nothing in native evidence for the form you want.

If the term had been attested to in a Semitic language.

I don't need to: you have to show that it is relevant, and you can't as I see it.

Umm, NCRT is attested to in Hebrew, while the other isn't. If Nazareth is the form of favor in the gospels then the gentilic is plainly something like nazarethnos. Did your Jesus according to you come from Nazareth? Or doesn't it matter that everyone calls him Jesus of Nazareth when it apparently isn't correct? If you want to argue that it's just a Greek confabulation, be my guest. However, my aim is to understand the evidence we have, not shift and shuffle and move things around so that you can bear the problems without suffering too much.

Nazareth is somewhat attested to in Hebrew. It has a zeta which is difficult enough for me to postulate a reason for the unusual Greek, but you still have it.

Well, if you want to ignore what the -t is, then I guess it doesn't matter. That's why you're so willing to cut the ties with the Hebrew. It doesn't matter that the Hebrews would have used the -t despite its absence in the unsuffixed form when you add to the word. This is a feminine ending, not a plural and acts differently.

Yeah, that they're undecided whether to put singular and plural. So? It is no reflection on the issue of Nazareth.

Whoa thar, fella! There are two forms, "height" and "heights", Ramah and Ramoth. Here you are getting into a tizz about scribal activity over whether it should be singular or plural. This is totally irrelevant to your attempt to say that the Greek scribe could somehow decide to leave off the feminine -t and write Nazara instead of Nazareth.

Yeah, alright, you do want to say that this is purely a Greek affair and that it is not based on Hebrew or Aramaic. You have this bunch of forms that existed all about the same time and there is no real coherence in the way the scribes used them, preferring one form to another by whim. You guess that it starts off with the unaccountable form Nazareth, invariably with zeta, despite the fact that the tsade hardly ever transliterates into a zeta. That should signal a grave problem, but at the same time there is also another form also in circulation, also featuring zeta instead of tsade, ie two forms for a small town in Galilee, which you have bled at the ear about being some unknown little joint, yet there are two forms for the name! At the same time there are also apparent gentilics nazarhnos and nazwraios, also with zeta and never sigma, the former you claim as a gentilic for the otherwise unattested Nazara, while Nazareth the one based on the Hebrew gets no gentilic whatsoever. Then there's nazwraios, which you seem to think is not a gentilic, but is used as a sect name, though you don't account for it (unless you take my suggestion of Jdg 13:5,7), which gets tied into the issue and related to Nazareth, and the gentilic you claim gets totally admitted as a gentilic from Matt -- oh, unless you want to include the rewrite on the denial scene.

Red herring it is not. You have to create yet another reason for editorial intervention. This is your frequent response. The fact that it is not in Matt means that one of the forms, either Matt or Mark is not a reflection of the synoptic core. You need to show why you choose as you do. You may come up with yet another plea for editorial intervention, but that seems like you merely post hoc guessing.

For something written in Greek, not translated?

It doesn't support the notion that the place is a hometown, just the starting point. But then, you are responding to a post well before the later conversation on this material. And you go on to deal with the later statement.

Your response is baffling to me. You are trying to claim that Nazareth was in the text and that it was the town of origin of Jesus. If Capernaum is the residence of Jesus, then the reference to Nazareth is unexplainable. Umm, Jesus just happened to come from Nazareth in Galilee, not contextualised, not having much significance, just mysterious, as we know that Jesus had his home in Capernaum, as seen in Matt's understanding of Mark, along with Luke's alteration of the Capernaum information. So, who cares if Jesus came from Nazareth, why would the writer say it, considering we know that Jesus entered Capernaum where he was eis oikon? The reference to Nazareth is puzzling given the home reference to Capernaum.

No. The narrative doesn't allow you to come to such a conclusion. You are tainting your reading of Mark with your knowledge of the other synoptics. This is a common problem when reading the gospel material.

This is just further clouding of the issue by importing information and not reading Mark.

Why? Does an insertion have to contradict something for it to be an insertion? This seems unreasonable to me.

You are misreading me. Saying that Jesus came from Capernaum in Galilee to the Jordan doesn't indicate that Jesus must have in some way had his home in Nazareth, but it needs to have some reason to be there. The other gospels think that Nazareth is the origin of Jesus, which can supply enough grounds for the marginal reference to end up in the text. But as a text, the reference to Nazareth, isn't transparent, given the unintroduced reference to Capernaum as having his home.

Naaa.

Misunderstanding. The first comment, says that you cannot, reading Mark, eke the notion of hometown out of the reference.

Yet, the later tradition does have Nazareth as Jesus's hometown, which would explain the reference to Nazareth here in the margin.

Had the Marcan writer intended a reference to Nazareth in 1:9 as such a hometown, then the narrative wouldn't make sense with the sudden appearance of Capernaum, unannounced (contra Mt 4:13), as where Jesus had his home.

Ben is from Deadwood. He went into Dry Gulch, and everyone knew he was home.

And don't you find the subtext incoherent?

These are two separate issues and stated as such:

You will note that the two numbered points argue for the proposition of interpolation (and then I supply a further consideration), but then you want to take a casual brief statement in a forum message as some lawfully binding commitment on my part to a particular expression of information.

So you thought you'd caught me in some kind of incoherence. If you had, you wouldn't have had anything along the lines of blunder that your guys (and you) are accusing the Lucan redactor of.

Yeah, sure.

I cannot help your readings of my statements other than attempt to clarify myself. I find your support of this extremely strained position of these writers about the Lucan text an effort in participating in the obfuscation of the process of redaction.

By now you seem to be waffling. Anyone who wants to argue that a writer can forget the fact that he had just mentioned Capernaum and immediately write about it as though it was the first reference is tacitly accusing the writer of short term memory loss. That shows a gross lack of understanding as I see it. It's not strange though, for there is just too much encrustation by centuries of formalization of the texts to read them for what they say.

I also find it interesting that despite the fact that both Matt and Luke are themselves redactions, having adapted the Marcan text, that such a redaction process can only have happened once for each text.

For you the notion of synoptic core seems so strange when Mark has a longer and a shorter ending, which shows that at least one is a later editorial act from the time it was written, so Mark has clearly itself been through two sets of hands. The shorter ending surely isn't in the synoptic core. What about Mk 15:28, not found in the earliest forms of Mark, yet seen in Lk 22:37. Hasn't the Lucan text tainted the Marcan, rather than it being lost from the synoptic core as represented by Mark? This sort of taint is what I argue for the presence of Nazareth.



Just checked the length of this post. It makes the mind boggle. It's getting around the length of what I wanted to write for such an article. The rearguard action that it seems I will have to supply will maybe double the article length and it then becomes too long for publication.


spin

Ben C Smith

Hi, spin.

I wanted to respond to the following statement right now and get to the rest later:

Are you joking?

Just to put your mind at ease about Nazara, please take a look at my ongoing list of agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark. Notice the date of last modification (08-29-2006) at the bottom of the page (and that revision was to add the links at the top of the page, not to add Nazara!). And notice agreement #25 on the list. In my synoptic inventories I always retain the spelling Nazara where appropriate. Nearly a year ago (I think) I went back to my list of Jewish-Christian gospel fragments and retransliterated the terms Nazarene, Nazoraean, and so forth in order to retain in English translation the distinctions in the original Greek or Latin.

The Nazara issue in Matthew and Luke is an old one in the synoptic problem. One would have to try very hard not to stumble upon it at some point in the course of studying the synoptic problem.

I would appreciate a bit more restraint in your ad hominem comments, if you please. Thanks.

Ben.