S.C.Carlson

The asterix before the word looks like the linguists' symbol for "unattested."

Stephen

spin

A few comments:
The strange symbol "µ" after the o and after the e in the two Na- words seems to be used a vowel length marker, as the originals had omega (long /o/) and eta (long /e/).

And the fact that Mark uses nazarhnos puts the term as part of the earliest layers of the synoptic tradition, which not preserved in Matt., is at least reflected by Luke, which changes a few of them to nazwraios.

One should mention in passing that Eisenman is one of those heavily into such speculation.

We've seen that this is far from a clear-cut claim, but I'd say that it is ultimately irrelevant whether there was a settlement there or not. Albeit late, it is part of the gospel tradition and the archaeological evidence is not going to be more than a rough guide as to the sort of dating people would like.

This is an understatement. These parallels are quite rare and I think rare enough to make etymologies based on NCR [C = tsade] are only secondary, given the total lack of support for the normal transliteration of the tsade.

The rabbinical references are just so late that they should be considered influenced from later christian nomenclature rather than surviving from early times through tradition.

This "at least two cases" seems an undercount to me. None of the four uses in Mark can be claimed to mean “from Nazareth”, though Luke has nazwraios substituted twice, once omitted and the fourth preserved as found in Mark, so which of the synoptics has it meaning “from Nazareth”?

This link appealed to me some time back, especially in consideration of Mk 13:34-37 and its urging the faithful to "be vigilant" or "watch", though this is a secondary meaning of the Hebrew verb.

The almost total use of the zeta in all the Naz- terms makes NZR, from which Nazirite is derived, the most likely source for the Greek.

One just needs to consider the LXX of Jdg 13:7 which has agios ("holy") for the Hebrew NZYR.

Interestingly, Lk 2:23, "every male that opens the womb [mhtra] shall be designated as holy [agios] to the lord", seems to be a conflation of Ex 13:12 and Jdg 13:7, "the child shall be holy [agios] to god from the womb [mhtra]", so both Matt and Luke seem to have Jdg 13 as a reference for the birth of Jesus.

It does more than that, for it is clearly a reference to the birth of Samson, who was, according to the angel, to save Israel, just as Jesus would "save his people". Just as Samson would be (called) a Nazirite (nazeiraios), so Jesus would be called a Nazorean (nazwraios).

As a last comment it should be pointed out that airesis probably shouldn't be translated as “heresy” here. It only took on its negative splinter connotation under the church fathers (eg Irenaeus), but when Josephus was talking about the various forms of Judaism, Essene, Pharisee, Sadducee and the fourth way (the sicarii), he used this word to describe them without any negative connotation.


spin

spin

(I don't think you missed much.)

Yup.

No. The appellative Nazarene had a life of its own which Mark inherited: the sect of the Nazarenes in Acts 24:5 suggests it had been around by itself. As can be seen by the fact that Matt. totally omitted it from what the writer got from Mark, the term caused difficulty probably because of its obscurity (Matt tended to omit or change what was obscure in Mark), so an attempt to get a handle on it was to analyse it as being a gentilic, obviously for something like Nazara. However, if one wanted to locate that place, they'd have found it didn't exist, but obviously the searcher thinks, finding NCRT to fill the gap, that Nazara wasn't quite correct.

The term lingered on in the fathers, in the fragments of Julius Africanus and a few others, which hinted to me that the Nazareth tradition didn't really stick for a while.


spin

Ben C Smith

Acts 24.5 has Nazoraean, not Nazarene, right? (My question specifically had to do with Nazarene, not Nazoraean.)

Agreed. He eliminated Nazarene from Mark, but added Nazoraean twice (IIRC).

Is it possible, in your judgment, that Nasareth/Nazareth could have been referred to without its archaic feminine ending, becoming Nazara for some speakers or writers?

Could this also be interpreted as a hint that Nazareth and Nazara were simply variants for the same town?

Also, if it could be shown that Nazara was a legitimate variant of Nazareth (and not just a back-formation), would Nazarene in your judgment be a legitimate gentilic name based on the name Nazara?

Thanks.

Ben.

spin

Right. Nazarene had suffered a near death experience by that stage.

Yup, 2:23 and 26:71.

Luke's evidence is interesting because the writer preserves two instances of Mark's Nazarene, omitting the other two, one was nazarhnos like Mark, but the other was nazwraios and I think the former was a small dose of fatigue, for there is also another example of the latter in purely Lucan material on the road to Emmaus, 24:19.

Let's assume it was possible at the moment to ask, how would it have ended up Nazara? We would assume that we are still dealing with the Hebrew/Aramaic, wouldn't we?

(To answer your question as directly as I can, I don't think there's enough data to answer. Albright has to fudge the difficulty by referring to modern Arabic forms (having lost the -t) of some ancient names.)

The phonological problem seems a big one. We are quite a way from NCRT by the time we get to Nazara, so I can't see how it could have been a local phenomenon, especially if the Syriac form reflects the original in only two syllables, nacrat.


spin

Clivedurdle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazarite

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson

I am sorry, a direct link to Nazarite seems far more likely than what looks co-incidental - Nazareth.

Ben C Smith

I noticed Albright doing that, but there is a concrete example of the -t being lost from the place name Gennesaret, which could be referred to as Gennesar (1 Maccabees 11.67).

The road from NCRT to Nazara seems to require two things to have happened:

1. The tsade got transliterated as a zeta instead of as a sigma.
2. The -t ending got removed.

On the one hand, neither of these things seems very common. On the other, there is precedence for both. Also, the evidence for the form NCRT itself seems rather late, linguistically speaking.

Your hypothesis seems possible, but I think I can think of other hypotheses that would explain the data just as well, ones that avoid the incongruity of the synoptic or presynoptic authors combing dinky irrelevant Galilean towns for a suitable back-reference for the term Nazoraean, when those same synoptic writers appear to be quite aware that this term referred to a sect.

Ben.

andrewcriddle

One possibility is that Nazara is a back-formation from Nazarene but not one invented by the Gospel writers.

If we assume for the sake of argument that the commonly used gentilic for Nazareth was the unusual form Nazarene rather than say Nazaretene then this would IIUC quite plausibly generate by back-formation Nazara as a variant form of the place name.

I don't have access to the relevant references but IMS back-formation from an unusual gentilic is one of the standard ways in which place names change.

Andrew Criddle

(I probably won't be able to get back to this forum till the new year so have a good Christmas everyone.)

spin

I had this in my dim memory, but couldn't find it.

Three things:
3. The preservation of the final vowel preceding the -t. That's why your lone example is a little less helpful.

This seems counter-intuitive. Why do you think that Nazara* would suddenly develop a final -t after it was called Nazara*? The linguistic norm is to move from more complex to less. Besides, there are other place-names which already feature the final -t so why would you think that Nazareth would come about after the development of such a phenomenon had manifested itself? You'd think that if a group of names developed according to some pattern, they would happen around the same time with the inauguration of the names, not after a name had been established.

I certainly doubt that based on the liguistic evidence.

It's only natural for one to want to find the place if the name existed, so you can picture a Greek coming to Galilee and asking for Nazara and the local looking dumbly for a while and then with enthusiatic lateral thinking: "ahh, you mean NCRT!" [natsrat] and the Greek says, "oh, Nazareth, is it?"

The evidence is that the first writer of Matt plainly didn't know what nazarhnos meant. Otherwise why would he omit it?

The thing is though it didn't go away. The next step is the development of the back-formation as can be seen in the main parts of Matt and Luke, 4:13 and 4:16, respectively. The both feature Nazara.

(The Lucan passage containing 4:16 is interesting because it shows the redactor at work, as the passage itself is a heavily reworked Marcan hometown passage, which should appear before Lk 9, but has been moved forward as supplying the hometown in a more initial position, thus negating the Capernaum claim found in Mark.)

At the same time developing interests in Jesus's origins brought forward various births from the Hebrew bible, such as the birth of Samuel which featured in the Lucan nativity and the birth of Samson in Jdg 13, the latter providing, via nazeiraios, the form nazwraios, seen in Mt 2:23 where it is linked with, as I have argued, Nazara. Here's where our wandering Greek returns with Nazareth.


spin

spin

I didn't really have a strong notion of who came up with the form.

Why make that assumption? Is there anything that would make you do that other than a desire for a comfortable way out of the maze?

It's the same sort of process that gave us Ebion.

Given that place-names prove to be rather enduring, I'd be interested in those relevant references when you get back.


spin