TedM

Thanks for that post Anat. Lots of info. It seems like "gift from God" or "God has given" or "Judah" would all be candidates.. I'm less sure about "God is salvation", since it is pointing back to God, and not the person.


I just saw that Matthew 1:18 actually relates the meaning of Jesus' name with his role as Savior. I hadn't seen that before. Interesting. Luke, Mark, and John say nothing of it. The question is whether the author of Matthew was just looking for a connection or whether that reflects the belief of people at the time Jesus was born. If only the former, then "God is salvation" is not particularly appropriate IMO.

ted

Iasion

Greetings all,

One minor issue that has always interested me is the connection between Iesous and
* Iaso (daughter of Asclepius)
and/or
* Iasius

Iaso
was a healing deity, some sources give Ieso as an Ionian variant (the root meaning "to heal", correct?)

Iasius
was a minor god - born of virgin Elektra, son of God, founder of the mysteries, killed and later rose to heaven.

Iasius thus pre-figures some of the Iesous story, and has a similar name that means "healer" (one of Jesus' strengths.)

The Iaso/Iasius connection is much vaunted in New Age circles - not so well regarded among scholars it seems.

I've mentioned it before - GakuseiDon pointed out the connection is not very close, little response otherwise.

But,
I wonder has this possible connection been studied?

Do any experts here think it merits a closer look?


Iasion

Roland

If I'm not mistaken, I do believe that Barabbas means "Son of the Father," which makes perfect symbolic sense since Pilate has to choose between releasing a "son of the father" or THE "Son of the Father."

Vorkosigan

Slaughterhouse 5 is the Gospel of Mark. Vonnegut drew on his experiences, and so the novel contains historical truth....

Vorkosigan

....but then Abba was a name in Palestine.... LOL

Chris Weimer

Was it really?

Steven Avery

Not sure about Abba, but afaik Palestine wasn't a name of any land or country at the time.

Roland

Well, technically, most names have a "meaning," even though most of us don't know what they are. But when a person in a story has a name that just so happens to fit the details of that story perfectly, one can easily suspect that the story, or at least the character or the character's name, have been artfully made up.

I'm also thinking of OT examples such as Sodom meaning "scorched" and Ai meaning "ruin."

Amaleq13

Unless you can explain how these numbers can inform us of the "likelihoods" regarding the imagination of an author or the preferences of parents in naming their child, you are not establishing anything even remotely resembling a reliable probability statement.

How is this relevant to a DELIBERATE CHOICE on the part of an author? How could it possibly suggest that the name is more likely the result of a DELIBERATE CHOICE on the part of the child's parents? It clearly cannot and I have no idea why you think otherwise.

Hell, you don't even know what all the variables ARE, let alone their relative values.

Pretending that a collection of numbers can tell us something they simply cannot is ALWAYS a misuse of statistics.

Statistics can inform you of probabilities when all the relevant factors are known, measureable, and relevant to the conclusion. That is clearly NOT the case here so you are doing nothing but creating an illusion with smoke and mirrors.

If you can show me how the frequency counts are relevant to differentiating between the imagination of an author and the preferences of parents, I would be more than willing to agree that your efforts have some hope of reaching a useful conclusion. AFAIC, you are going to produce nothing but a marginally interesting bit of trivia that can tell us absolutely nothing about whether the name "Jesus" was a deliberate choice on the part of an author writing fiction or historical limitation that the author was compelled to incorporate. You might be able to say whether it is likely that an author would have drawn the name "Jesus" out of a hat but how that is relevant is yet to be explained. To all appearances, it is not.

I said it could simply be a coincidence of a common name and the relevance of that fact is that it denies any attempt to make something more of it. But I agree that both situations involve a similar misconception about what can be reliably obtained from statistics.

And THAT is the problem with your frequency count. The question of whether the author deliberately chose the name "Jesus" or if he was writing about a real man who was deliberately given that name by his parents HAS ABSO-FREAKING-LUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH CHANCE!!!!! In both instances, we are dealing with deliberate choices. Parents don't tend to choose the names of their children at random. Authors don't tend to choose the names of their main characters at random.

Therefore, any effort to measure the "chance likelihood" of the name "Jesus" appearing in the story is completely irrelevant to differentiating between the above two possibilities!

No, I'm looking at the statistics you intend to use and recognizing that they are totally irrelevant to the conclusion you wish to obtain from them.

TedM

Calling all math teachers.....need some help here..

Amaleq, this is complicated stuff for me, and maybe I just don't get it but it seems to me that you are hung up on this idea of deliberate choices being the opposite of chance. Ironically, that's EXACTLY why I think probability is of value: IF you can use it to determine that something most likely DIDN'T happen by chance, then you can conclude that it most likely happened through a deliberate choice!

Back to my example:

Assumption: 1 in 10 people in a typical sample had a messianic name 2000 years ago.

If the person considered to be the messiah had a messianic name, then the chances are 90% that a given person would NOT have a messianic name.


Claim #1: Author deliberately fabricated the name of a mythical person to have a messianic meaning

Since the odds are only 10% that an author would randomly choose a messianic name for his messianic character, we can conclude that the chances were 90% that he deliberately chose the name for its meaning as opposed to randomly, assuming he made up the name.


Claim #2: Given a historical messianic figure existed, his name would have been messianic.

The odds are only 10% of this if one assumes that a person's name doesn't influence his behavior. I"ve granted that it well could. So, the question ISN'T whether his parents deliberately named him Jesus. It is whether his name influenced his behavior to behave as a messiah. It depends on how influential a name was on average. ON AVERAGE IS IMPORTANT! On average, if we assume that people with a messianic name were TWICE as likely to behave like a messiah, then we have not a 10% chance, but a 20% chance that a person chosen out of a hat would behave like a messiah.

SO, the odds would greatly an author deliberately choosing a name having a messianic meaning (90%) as compared to a person deliberately behaving like a messiah AND also having a messianic name (20%).


What you apparantly are saying is that since we don't know what all the factors are for a particular person to behave a certain way, the probabilities that apply to an AVERAGE person are of no value..meaningless. I say that the underlying assumption of probability calculations is exactly to determine what odds are on AVERAGE in the absence of the missing information. This helps us calculate the odds of random chance vs deliberate behavior by the average person.


To deny the value of that simply doesn't recognize the fact that one can ALWAYS point to not having enough information whenever the desired knowledge is missing. That's why statistics are used. Whether you know it or not, that's what you are doing whenever you conclude something about these kinds of issues---IF a work says "humble servant" it doesn't prove that that is exactly what it means. Rather, you do a mental calculation that the ODDS are that people say what they mean, whereas sometimes they really don't. If three secular sources say the exact same thing, it doesn't prove that it happened either. Rather, we do a mental calculation to conclude that the odds are high that it happened. Probability is ALWAYS used whether you know it or not.

ted