Ted Hoffman

Do you have any evidence that a city called Nazareth existed in the first century Vinnie?

Evidence being:

a) Contemporary Extra-Biblical evidence
b) Archaeological Evidence demonstrating that the area called Nazareth was occupied by at least 700 people (this figure is lower than Josephus' 15,000, higher than Horsley's 400, lower than Golomb and Kedar's 1700, close to Reed's and equal to Arnal's figure)

I am just testing whether the yawn is a knee-jerk yawn or one that is fully familiarized with the Nazareth question.

FYI, I have been researching the Nazareth question for the past three months. Zindler and Humphreys are polemical in their website material and only scratch the surface but my paper, which will be out in a couple of weeks, ties up the work of scholars in the last 100 years and will, hopefully, be definitive.

Vorkosigan

I've read some of the advance material of Ted's paper. It's going to be good.

Ted Hoffman

I intend to make it good. But first, I want to see whether Vinnie has something I have left out. I want to present the arguments made by those arguing for the existence of Nazareth very faithfully before driving a truck through them.

Etymologically/ linguistically, its an open and shut case.

Archaeologically, we have Reed and the Franciscan fathers - and Crossan's contributions in Excavating Jesus - which he co-authored with Reed. Again, when you bring in the population issue, you flatten the archaeological dribs because the evidence cannot account for the textual claims - even after toning down exaggerations from Josephus (who, we treat like a lackey even though he was a govenor in Galilee and must have been the best source for the info since he must have overseen collection of taxes).

Geographically, with scenes like Jesus being thrown off a cliff in Luke, again, the actuality of the existence of the city (given that its from the gospels alone) is questionable.

Apologetic arguments like the ones made by Crossan, Reed, Meier, M. Goguel, Wellhausen etc - that Nazareth was excluded by the Talmud and the OT and Josephus because it was a "tiny village" are at best arbitrary conjectures meant to dodge the data and preserve sectarian interests. "Tiny village" is not consistent with the Lukan and Matthean "city" (polis).

E. Schaeder made a decree over the matter when he could not solve the linguistic problem.

Early mythologists like T.K. Cheyne and Arthur Drews didnt have the archaeology and critical tools available today so they were smothered out by popular opinion. Current one like Zindler and Kenneth Humphreys have failed to employ the textual evidence, linguistic arguments and Archaeological evidence effectively to make a strong case.

Half-done jobs have made it possible for the rest of scholarship to walk in lock step over the matter. One wonders what happened to multiple attestation and archaeological evidence.

andrewcriddle

(I'm wondering if this should be split off into something about Nazareth)

Nazareth was clearly not a POLIS (city) in the classical Greek sense, however the Septuagint uses POLIS as a standard equivalent of the Hebrew EYR which means something broader than a Greek city.

(EYR MB(TZ)R or B(TZ)WRH 'fortified town' may be closer in meaning to the classical usage of POLIS)

Whether Nazareth was too small to even be an EYR is of course another matter.

Andrew Criddle

Ted Hoffman

So, its your argument that Luke and Matthew were not aware of this?

How do you know that Nazareth was not a city - and why would Luke and Matthew think otherwise?

andrewcriddle

If the traditional identification of the site of Nazareth is correct it appears too have been too small and undeveloped place in the 1st century CE to count as a POLIS by classical Greek standards.

As to usage by Matthew and Luke my suggestion is that the references to Nazareth as a POLIS occur in two contexts.

a/ In the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke where it appeears to always be part of what is in effect an address eg 'from Galilee from the city of Nazareth to Judea to the city of David which is called Bethlehem' 'he withdrew to the district of Galilee and he went and dwelt in a city called Nazareth'. In this usage I think POLIS is being used in the vague Septuagint sense as equivalent to EYR ie to describe a specific settlement within a district and there is no implication about the size or status of the settlement.

b/ In Luke 4:29 'and they rose up and put him out of the city and led him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built'. This does give the impression that Nazareth (the city in question) is a proper fortified settlement on top of a hill. However, this passage is found only in Luke and has other historical difficulties (eg the traditional site of Nazareth is not on a hill).

Hence I would suggest that there is a pre-Lukan original usage of POLIS to describe Nazareth as a settlement in the district of Galilee with no implication of size or status and that Luke understood this usage as implying that Nazareth was a proper fortified town.

Andrew Criddle

Ted Hoffman

This offers two possibilities:
a) The traditional identification of the site is wrong.
b) Nazareth was mythical as Origen stated and it was therefore wrong of the early Christians to give it a physical location.
Mythical places have been used in folk lore - like Avalon, Camelot, Athens
Atlantis, Delphi, Mount Olympus, Rhodes, Thebes, TroyBroceliande, Lemuria, Lyonesse, and I dare throw in Arimathea etc.

You make two points:
a) The word "city" when used in address could be used to identify a place, any place - not necessarily a city.
b) Polis is used in Mark in the same Septuagint sense as EYR.

Regarding a), Mark uses the word 'village' in 6:7, 8:23, 8:26 and 11:2. and he employs "city" in a similar manner in Mark 11:19, 14:13 and 14:16 etc. From these, it appears he used "village" wrt places he considered small or rural.

The word city has also been used with respect to Jerusalem, Tyre, Capernaum, Sidon etc. You can only make a valid case if you could explain why and how its usage with respect to Nazareth is peculiar, against the rest.

The septuagint example is not relevant since we are examining Mark, not the Septuagint. Thus far, we have no reason to believe that Mark is employing the word "city" in the same manner as EYR is used in the septuagint.

The whole city and its narration as we find from the only people that wrote about it in three centuries, has difficulties.
At this point, its empty speculation.

When you say pre-Lukan, do you mean Mark? (because Q is definitely out) - or oral traditions? Or Marcion's Luke?

There is no Nazareth (Nazarethnos/Nazaretnos) in the Synoptic tradition (from the Alex texts) - only Nazarhnos (NazarhnoV) and Nazwraios (NazwraioV)
.

JoeWallack

JW:
Great idea. We need to treat the assertions of the Christian Bible like any other Discipline and try to determine probability rather than stopping at "possible", "plausible", versimitootibull". I would assume you are going to do a word study of the relevant Greek words in the Christian Bible from Greek literature of the time and estimate the probability of likely population ranges used for "city" explicitly and implicitly. My guess is Christian Bible scholarship has already done exactly that but has not sufficiently publicized because it will demonstrate that it's likely the Greek word for "city" had an accepted minmum population range for the time period providing evidence that "Nazareth" was fictional. The use by "Mark" of a fictional city somewhere in Galilee is consistent with the Jesus Myth position because it would prevent subsequent Christians from going to the real hometown of Jesus and being told that no one there ever knew the Jesus of the Christian Bible.



Joe Walsh

HISTORIAN, n.
A broad-gauge gossip.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Errors...yguid=68161660

http://hometown.aol.com/abdulreis/myhomepage/index.html

Ted Hoffman

There is a certain Mount Olympus in Nothern Greece. Yet Greeks have always known that the mythical Mt. Olympus, home of the Greek pantheon, is not the same as the actual one.

Early Christians became Greedy.

Ted Hoffman

I wrote:
This should have been Matthew or luke but the point remains.