Juststeve

Spam:

I would say Mark for sure, Q if it existed and oral tradition. Is that what you think as well?

Steve

Toto

No to the precise question that was asked, which was not whether Zinder is correct.

spamandham

Yes. The point being, Matthew did not use *exclusively* the Septuagint. Since we both seem to agree to that Matthew did indeed use at least a couple of sources other than just the Septuagint, when Matthew tells us that Jesus is from Nazareth in order to fulfill prophecy, why should we not take him at his word that such a prophecy actually existed among the sources he used - oral tradition if nothing else.

Such a prophecy would not only explain Matthew's direct quote of it, but it would also explain why the Nazareth connection is repeated over and over rather than simply being incidental.

If Jesus really was from Nazareth, and the gospel authors simply felt the need to rationalize this, they could have quoted Isaiah 9:1-2, which provides perfect justification for the messiah coming from Galilee, and that would have been the end of it. They bring it up over and over, as if it is particularly important and not merely incidental. That in itself would have suggested a preconceived notion regarding Nazareth, even if Matthew had not explicitly told us the connection.

Juststeve

Spam:

You have gone to a lot of effort to win a concession that I would have made at the outset if you had just asked. For the record:

It is possible that Matthew got the Nazarene prophesy from an unknown source other than the Hebrew Bible or the Septuagint.

Similarly its possible that Matthew got his information from now lost birth and tax records that reflect baby boy Jesus being born to Joseph and Mary and later moving to Nazareth to become a tax payer.

Neither of us should base our arguments on hypothetical sources no matter how helpful they would be to our respective cases. Instead we should stick to sources that actually exist and can be examined. On that basis there is no Nazarene prophesy. In the world of imagination there is anything you can imagine.

Steve

spamandham

If you feel these are of equal plausibility, then further discussion is probably pointless.

The idea that Matthew got the prophecy from an unknown source, after we both agree he used unknown sources (for example oral tradition), is hypothetical, but the idea that he just made up and quoted a nonexistent prophecy is not hypothetical!?

Juststeve

Spam:

I don't think either is very likely, neither your hypothetical source nor mine. When we start to deal in hypothetical sources either of us can make up anything we like. That is as you say pointless.

Steve

gurugeorge

The problem is, why was "Matthew" piddling about with Scripture at all, if he had access to any facts about the putative human-being-Jesus?

There are two options, the stress on Scripture in the earliest Christian writings exists because either:-

1) They were trying to prove that the particular Messiah candidate they were talking about (and whom they, or people they knew, had personally known) had been foretold in Scripture; or
2) They were showing that Scripture held the key to a hidden history/mystery/secret, that the Messiah (whom none of them had met, or knew someone who had met) had already come in the past.

(Two different uses of Scripture to prove something: in the one case Scripture has foretold X, in the other case Scripture proves X. In the one case, there is no doubt about the existence of the Messiah in question - he is after all the very thing that Scripture is supposed to have forteold; in the other case, there is doubt about the existence of Messiah - is he coming? perhaps he's been and we missed it! - and Scripture resolves that doubt - yes the Messiah did come, in the past, look it says so here if you squint at it right, so the "victory" is done and dusted.)

In either case, andy in any case, there is an absence of any of the type of "James told me that Jesus had said to him ..." evidence in the earliest materials, that would satisfactorily distinguish between myth all the way down and man mythified. That, plus the seeming evidence of any sayings that might be original with a man, and not just cribbed from Scripture, plus the absence of external corroborating evidence of the existence of such a man, is the problem.

Juststeve

gugugeorge:

I can’t read the mind of Matthew and tell with certainty why he piddled with scripture as you put it, but it sure looks to me that he was trying to make an apologetic case for the proposition that this Jesus was more than a dead preacher and a failed Messiah. He method was to try to show that this Jesus was the one spoken of in scripture. To accomplish this he twisted scripture, misapplied scripture, took scripture out of context and sometimes made scripture up in support of his case.

Apologists for Jesus today do the same thing. They mine scripture looking for Jesus somewhere in the Hebrew Bible. They don’t find him there because the Hebrew Bible does not speak of Jesus or anyone like Jesus. That doesn’t stop them from trying though.

Steve.

spin

Juststeve,

I'm still waiting for your response to my questions posted in #30 of this thread. I also asked you in #76 to point to which of your list actually were exemplars of Ναζαρετ, a question which also goes unanswered.

Here is post #30 in full again, to help you respond:

1. Can you explain why the name Nazareth is spelled wrongly every single time it appears in the gospels?
   
   The name in Hebrew is נצרת, which should be transliterated into Greek as νασαρετ (or νασαρεθ), but it never has a sigma (σ), not in the christian bible or in the Greek and Latin writing fathers. The obvious conclusion was that the name "Nazareth" isn't derived from the town at all, but from a different Hebrew source (נזר, the source for ναζιρ, ie Nazirite, meaning "dedicated", "holy", and "crown").
   
   
2. Can you explain why the earliest gospel records indicate that the town was called Nazara? If you check ordinary scholarly new testament texts they give Mt 4:13 and Lk 4:16, you'll find ναζαρα, which is also the earliest form of Mt 2:23 (being Papyrus 70).
   
   This means that if you accept that the birth narrative was additive to Luke, "Nazareth" doesn't occur anywhere in the main text, only several times in the birth narrative. At the same time, Matt only has "nazareth" in non-synoptic materials, ie secondary materials. Although it follows more closely its source, Mark, Matt doesn't feature the one exemplar of Nazareth in our current Mark (Mk 1:9), though, had it been in Mark, there would be no logical reason to suppress it in favor of Galilee.
   
   
3. Can you explain why the gospel of Mark is under the impression that Jesus had his home at Capernaum? A decent translation of Mk 2:1 reflects the correct idiomatic meaning of εν οικων, ie "at home". Can you explain why Matt using Mark is obliged to move Jesus from Nazareth to Capernaum (Mt 4:13)? Can you explain why Marcion seemed to think that Capernaum was where Jesus started his earthly activities rather than Nazareth?

What we see in the christian literature is a movement towards the standardization of "Nazareth" as the name of the home town for Jesus. It wasn't there in the first place.

So Juststeve, are you ducking these questions?


spin

Juststeve

Spin:

As I indicated earlier on this thread I don't read Greek. Do you? In any event I have no explanation for what you describe, if in fact it is the case.

Why don't you favor us with your explanation?

Steve