spamandham

I think it's possible. Reading through all the naz/nas variants in the gospels, it seems to me that either the authors didn't understand all the nuances (which seems unlikely to me) or they were intentionally equivocating.

If they were intentionally equivocating, then anything goes. "Jesus Christ" might have originated as a title for the Nasi - the leader of the Sanhedrin. When Christianity split from Judaism, Christians might have preferred to blot out the origin of their Christ figure, and so turned him into a Nazorean instead. Is this really less plausible than the swoon theory?

Doug Shaver

How about Velikovsky? His notions were in the same ballpark. I have read a few articles by scientists explaining exactly what was scientifically wrong with Velikovsky's theory. I have yet to see a single article, or even a reference to such an article, by a single expert in any relevant discipline explaining exactly why Jesus' nonexistence is improbable.

spamandham

If the author tells us there was a prophecy "he shall be called a Nazorean", why should we not take him at his word under the assumption this was drawn from a noncanonical source?

spin

First, understand that I am talking about an evolution of tradition. Our starting point is the word Ναζαρηνος ("Nazarene"), which both Tertullian and Eusebius find explanations other than that of a gentilic for. We see in Mark the term used four times and we have been trained to take that as a gentilic from Nazareth, though Nazareth only appears in Mark once (1:9) in a passage paralleled in Mt 3:13, though unaccountably without mention of Nazareth. The fact that Matt doesn't have "Nazareth" in 3:13 rather than the less specific Galilee, suggests that its appearance in Mk 1:9 is a later addition, ie there was no reference to Nazareth in Mark at all. This is not too strange for, as I said, the writer seems to think that the home of Jesus was in Capernaum.

We have the term "Nazarene" which both Tertullian and Eusebius feel they need to explain in a manner other than as a reference to the by then accepted Nazareth. "Nazarene" clearly had a life of its own, originally unrelated to what would become the hometown of Jesus. Our two fathers sought for explanations based on the Hebrew word נזר (NZR = "dedicate", "separate", "crown"), which seems like a fair bet, seeing that a Matthean writer also looked there (Mt 2:23 apparently relying on Jdg 13:5).

The significance of "Nazarene" wasn't clear to many and one editor of Matthew removed each of the references to it found in Mark. In fact, Matt no longer contains any reference to "Nazarene". However, at some later stage another related form Ναζωραιος ("Nazorean") is introduced elsewhere in the text, a complication which needs mention, but I won't deal with here.

If "Nazarene" was not understandable for its original sense, it still looked like a gentilic, so it would be easy to assume that it was a gentilic, allowing for the construction of a place called "Nazara", ie one guesses that "Nazarene" is derived from a place name "Nazara".

What happens when a zealous christian looks for this Nazara? Obviously, they don't quite find it, but they do find a town called נצרת (Natsaret). Oh, that must be the place and so the two forms are conflated providing the now familiar Nazareth.


spin

Juststeve

Doug:

I don’t know that we have nearly enough data to account for the fact, and I believe it is a fact, that rather early on people though Jesus had been seen alive after he should have been dead. I worded it as I did because I’m not sure that we have any acceptable evidence that any particular person thought he saw Jesus alive with the exception of Paul. Even Paul I think we can agree did not think he saw the bodily risen Jesus but rather a spiritual version. Apart from Paul’s experience the evidence we have is one guy telling us what some other guy or guys saw. Where the claim is that they saw a dead guy come back to life I need better evidence.

With that clarification I can speculate about how the belief might have arisen, but its only speculation. One theory advanced by Bishop Spong is that the first Easter if you will represented a spiritual conviction that although Jesus was dead and gone something important about him had survived his physical death. Spong suggests that the manner of describing this conviction over time became more and more physical until ultimately there was an empty tomb and a walking corpse having dinner with his friends. He supports this theory by observing that as the descriptions of the resurrected Jesus become further removed from the event the resurrection is described in more physical terms. This is a speculative account but it does account for the fact that people had come to think that Jesus was physically risen without invoking a supernatural cause for their belief.

I would not exclude the possibility that one or more of the early followers of Jesus had an experience similar to that of Paul, a vision or hallucination, that created in them the conviction that they had seen Jesus alive. As I said we don’t have the followers accounts so we can’t know for sure how they would have described the experience. That could also account for the growth of the belief.

Out of curiosity one day I did a Google search for “Elvis Is Alive: or some similar term. I discovered that there are more people who claim to have seen the risen Elvis than are recorded in the Christian Bible as having seen the risen Jesus. I can’t really account for either group, but I think it’s a Fact that such people exist(ed).

Steve

spamandham

According to Paul, Paul's Jesus experience is in the third heaven, not on earth.

Juststeve

Bacht:

Jesus became famous after his execution because he was reputed to have risen from the dead and became on that account the main figure in a new religion. . Isn't that reason enough to become famous?

Steve

spin

When the writer says that it was spoken through the prophets, he was being specific. This was from a recognized work of what was then understood as prophecy. The Hebrew bible is divided into three sections, the Torah, the Nebiim and the Ketubim, hence the name the TaNaKh, the law, the prophets and the books. The prophets are divided into former prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) and latter prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the 12). The Matthean writer names prophets without any problem, so when he talks of "the prophets" he is obviously referring to the former prophets.

The similarity between the Alexandrian form of LXX Jdg 13:5 Ναζειραιος and Mt 2:23 Ναζωραιος is very close. Besides, texts which would yield a verb to be in Greek sometimes end up with the verb "be called": compare for example Isa 49:6 Hebrew has "be my servant" while LXX has "be called my servant". Under the right circumstances "be" is the same as "be called": "from now on you will be Spammikins" which is functionally the same as "from now on you will be called Spammikins".

The significance of the relevant phrase is functionally the same in both sources (Jdg 13:5 & Mt 2:23); the Judges source fits the description "spoken through the prophets"; and both are tied to the notion of the person of the prophecy being a savior of his people.


spin

Toto

Juststeve is responding to this (for clarity)

That raises other questions. The usual claim is that the historic Jesus was a charismatic individual who made a significant impression on his followers, and this inspired them to go on a found the church - but what was their message? The idea of someone rising from the dead or reappearing spiritually as a ghost was not all that unusual in the first century.

The idea that the church started and survived for sociological reasons and then invented its own backstory, fits what we know about religions much better than the Christian narrative that there was an obscure guy who inspired people, who then forgot most of what they knew about him or never wrote it down. . .

spamandham

I can accept this argument, if it is established that 'the prophets' referred exclusively to the books of the Septuagint, excluding the Pantateuch, at the time of Matthew's writing.

Do we know that to be the case? It has been my understanding that 'the prophets' was a more general term that included, for example, the books of Enoch and other noncanonical sources.