aa5874

And we can't even find any prophets who claimed Jesus was to be called a Nazarene.

Matthew 2:23 - No prophet in the KJV Bible can be found to have made such a statement.

Jesus has fulfilled non-prophecy once again.

And, if you think the CITY of Nazareth did not exist, wait till you hear you hear what CITY HE lives in now.

The CITY OF GOD. I am not going to look.

jgoodguy

I agree. The difference between a HJ that was a miracle worker preacher with a following whose name was hijacked by Paul or later and worked into their mythical Jesus versus a HJ that inspired Paul's mythical Jesus is not very much.

dog-on

I look at it like this.

Whether or not HJ actually was, Jesus Christ is definitely a myth.

Of that, I am sure.

spin

Ya know there may have been a Jesus who was the major source for the gospels, but you are in no position to say anything substantive. You don't have any evidence. So many people are willing to give opinions as though they were facts on this matter. I see no difference between the vacuous mythicist claims and the vacuous historicist claims. None of it is based on evidence. We are all too busy retrojecting our own beliefs onto the past, to worry about what is necessary to know anything about it.


spin

aa5874

Mythicists claims are reasonable once historical evidence of Jesus cannot be found.

There is no such thing as "vacuous mythicist claims" when the NT and Church writers have recorded the description of Jesus.

It is PRECISELY because of the description of Jesus and events surrounding Jesus that have caused people to consider Jesus a mythical figure.

The mythicist was not the one who wrote that it was true, even providing witnesses, that Jesus was the offspring of the Holy Ghost of God, born of a virgin, was tempted by the devil on mountain tops, walked on water, transfigured, resurrected and ascended to heaven.

The mythicist case is based DIRECTLY on recorded information of antiquity.

Homer's Achilles is considered a myth for the very same reason. Homer provided information where Achilles was described as the offspring of a sea-goddess.

Now, it is true the historicists claims are vacuous. They have no source of antiquity to support their claims.

spin

I believe that Nazara is a back-formation of the Greek adjective nazarhnos, working back from a gentilic to its source, as one might from gadarhnos, "Gadarene", to Gadara, however, upon research, there proved to be no Nazara -- but there was a Nazareth.

Tertullian refers to a "prophecy" regarding the christ in Contra Marcion 4.8.1: "Her Nazarites were whiter than snow;" (Lam 4:7). Actually the original Hebrew should be translated as "Nazirite", though the Latin tradition followed by Tertullian and the later Vulgate have "nazarei". Eusebius offers another Greek Jewish source for Nazarene in the Dem. Ev., so that there is a relatively strong alternative etymology known by church fathers about the term nazarenos. It all ultimately derives from the Hebrew word NZR, the source for "Nazirite", "consacration" and "crown", all terms relevant to the messiah. Even Matt 2:23 points back to Jdg 13:5, 7 and the birth of the most famous Nazirite, Samson. So Nazarene might refer back to the Nazirite persuasion, or it might be a later recycling of biblical ideas in a newer religious group, whose name apparently eventually goes back to the Hebrew NZR. Jesus Nazarene would then be a reference to a specific member and from the indications he was messianic in stature.


spin

spamandham

The absence of Nazareth in other textual references is not a slam dunk. It's just part of the case. If it *had* been mentioned outside the gospels, there would be no discussion about it's existence as a Jewish city ca. 30 CE.

Richard Horsley is a professor of religious studies, not an archaeologist.

gdeering

Yes exactly. But even for agnostics on the issue (or fence sitters which maybe the best place to be) "common sense" is not a counter for research, suppose'n is fun, but I'd hate to end up with an HJ of the gaps.


Gregg

show_no_mercy

ΙΗΣΟΥ ΤΟΥ ΝΑΖΩΡΑΙΟΥ (Ihsou tou nazwraiou) is only used in Matthew 26:7. A similar phrase is used in John 19:19 (ihsou o nazwraiou) and Luke 24:19 (ihsou tou nazarhnou).

If Mark 1:9 is an interpolation or copy error (his only use of the word "Nazareth") then Jesus being "from" Nazareth is a post Markan. Later in Mark, the author makes it seem as though Jesus is from Capernaum.

If you read Judges 13:5,7 out of context like how Matthew read Isaiah 7:14 out of context, it looks like a messainic prophecy with a similar sounding word. It seems as though prophetic verses were recalled from memory, not by reading them while writing new text. Thus the nazirite of Judges might sound a lot like the nazarene of Mark. The ΝΑΖΙΡΑΙΟΣ (naziraios) of Judges 13:5,7 sounds an awful lot like the ΝΑΖΩΡΑΙΟΣ (nazoraios) of Matthew 2:23.

The canonical gospels and Acts uses "Nazarene" six times, while "Nazorean" is used 13 times; with "Nazorean" never occuring in Mark.

The gospel of Phillip says that the root "nazara" means "truth". This gives the place where Jesus is from Gnostic significance. Jesus the Nazarene might mean Jesus the Truth (John 14:6).

ApostateAbe

I can see how the similar terms would lead to confusion for non-native speakers. For me, the doubt about what "Jesus of Nazareth" or whatever really refers to should be resolved by there being a Nazareth in Galilee dating back to 300 CE at the latest, when it was a sizable city, and I think the biggest hurdle would be to establish the probability that the town could have founded ad hoc, to compete with the theory that Nazareth was small at the time and the Greek writers got the size of the town wrong, which still seems more likely, since I know they got plenty of things wrong and some things right.