Grog

Speculative as it is, I think it is as a good as any I have seen. You should write a book.

gurugeorge

My thought on that would be that it's an "everyman" name that has something to do with "he saves" or "the Lord saves". (I actually quite like the Golden Dawn (Edwardian occult order) derivation which has Shin "the letter of spirit" descending into the Tetragrammaton, Iod He Shin Vau Heh, but I don't know how far that would fly with proper scholarship and linguistics of the time )

Yes, I think you're right, it seems likely that it's an attempt at cultural re-definition. A re-definition by way of re-defining, or re-valuing, the culturally important concept of the Messiah.

Of course it all might have been triggered by some real person, but seeing as evidence for a real person is thin, it's interesting to see how it might have come about without such - how it might be simply a re-valuation of the (mythical) Messiah and a placing of him in the recent past instead of the future.

The two aspects of my thinking on this are: the tenor of a lot of the early stuff seems to be a) positive that there's a sense of a victory won, of good news, and b) that something about the advent of the Messiah was secret or hidden. If one looks for a period in Jewish history around that time when the Jews might have felt positive, the death of Caligula seems a good candidate (IIRC both Philo and Josephus mention that there was a resurgence of Jewish spirit at that time).

So it's like, "wow guys, look, something good happened for a change, that bastard Caligula died at the hand of the Lord - MAYBE THE MESSIAH HAS ALREADY BEEN IN SECRET and we didn't know it. Maybe this is the beginning of the end for Rome. And maybe there was something in Scripture prophesying the advent of the Messiah in secret, but we were too blind to see!"

DCHindley

There is a modern analogue in the Jehovah's Witnesses. Charles Russell had concluded on the basis of his calculations that the Kingdom of God would be established on earth in 1914. When that didn't occur as expected, they reconsidered, and Russell (until his death in 1916) and his successor Rutherford, started to say that the kingdom had indeed been established in 1914, only it was in Heaven and not here on earth.

Who knew?

DCH

outhouse

there was no cultural redefinition

its cross culture mythology when jewish romans stole the movement and took it to romans.


You had a movement that was like a shooting star within judaism, it was short lived and failed but popular while it happened.



Its really not complicated at all. Jesus in the temple had stood up against the roman infection in the temple/bank and for the first time, violent against the roman taxation he tried to fight peaceably before by preaching to tax collectors to quit raping the people.

Gluke backs this.

you also had 400,000 ticked of jews in the temple watching all this go down to start the oral tradition, jesus fought for the hard working common poor oppressed peasants and he was remembered. AND like many other mortal men, was claimed to be the "son of god" this was later added while the movement was within roman/gentiles, I doubt jews ever used this hellenistic term.


jesus died for money not theology





all we are left with is roman gospels, to what amounts to the enemies version of what happened which softened the real legend and then deified a hellenistic version of a jew. cross cultural mythology.

mountainman

The apocryphal ("hidden") gnostic authors "knew".

Who were these (non canonical) dissidents?

There is sufficient evidence to hypothecize that the gnostic authors knew the full story of the appearance and life and times and "resurrection" of the highly docetic Jesus from the walking talking cross. i.e. It never happened the way it said it did in the book.

The problem with these early mythers is that they would refuse to confess that Jesus had actually suddenly "appeared in the flesh". This presented a real philosophical problem for the apostles and other heresiologists, who were there and then arguing that Jesus was no myth, but certain and secure and miraculous and providential ancient history.