spin

The Peshitta spells Nazareth with the tsade as one would expect, eg Mt 21:11, NCRT, just as it was found in the Caesarea Maritima synagogue. Nothing strange in the Hebrew. The gospels had to hit on Nazareth from somewhere and that was a cross between the backformed Nazara (Mt 4:13, Lk 4:16 Synaiticus) from nazarhnos and the Hebrew NCRT. If this is correct, then Nasaret already existed before the completion of the gospels.


spin

andrewcriddle

Fragment 1 is

Line 1 reads MLYX
Line 2 reads NCRT
Line 3 reads )KLH
Line 4 reads GDL

Fragment 2 is

Line 1 reads M
Line 2 reads M$
Line 3 reads M$

Fragment 3 is

Line 1 is ....T XM$ (
Line 2 is MRT $$ ($R
Line 3 is MRT $B

(Note I've transliterated to read left to right the original Hebrew obviously reads right to left.)

Andrew Criddle

Ben C Smith

Thanks, Andrew.

Do I have this right (including the lacunae)?

[...]מליח[...]
[...] �*צרת [...]
[...] אכלה [...]
[...]גדל [...]

מ[...]
מש[...]
מש[...]

[...]ת חמש ע[...]
[...]מרת שש עשר[...]
[...]מרת שב[...]

Hopefully mens_sana (who contacted me) can confirm this also with some page scans.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Actually, it cannot be done absolutely correctly on this forum. I recall now that the nun is impossible, and the bidi separates the brackets from the letters incorrectly. Oh, well.

Except for the nun and the spacing by the brackets, is it correct?

Ben.

Ben C Smith

(You may have to copy and paste to Word or something, then enlarge the font to see it well enough.)

Antipope Innocent II

Actually no - I was mistaken.. I was confusing Feig's paper with Vitto's (same journal, different year). But your question did get me to dig out my photocopy of Feig's article to compare it to what our piano teacher, Rene Salm, had to say about it. Salm's conclusion in the post you linked to was that:

"There is no pre-Jesus evidence for habitation or funerary use at the
Nazareth site."

He concludes this after summarising the evidence Feig presents about "the 17 oil lamps and pottery" in the caves she excavated.

But here's what Feig actually says about the other pottery:

"Pottery (Figs. 9,10) was found scattered in the caves as a result of ancient looting. One lamp from Cave B dates to the Hellenistic Period (Fig. 10:9). The Early Roman Period is represented by finds from Cave M which include juglets (Fig. 9:1-3) of a type common in the Galilee and a variety of lamp types (Fig. 94-10) dated between the late First and the late Second Centuries CE"
(Atiqot, 10, 1990, pp. 67-79; English summary, p. 17)

Strangely, Salm's summary of Feig's article makes no mention of any lamp from the Hellenistic Period or the three Early Roman Period jugs. Perhaps he thought no-one would bother checking his conveniently incomplete summary of Feig's article against what Feig actually said. Whatever the reason for these odd omissions, they make a nonsense of his conclusion that she found "no pre-Jesus evidence .... at the Nazareth site".

Even by Salm's admission there is evidence of late First Century habitation at the site, from around 50 AD onwards. But it's only by omitting Feig's reference to Hellenistic and Early Roman Era finds that he's able to maintain his fiction that the site wasn't inhabited before this. The evidence clearly shows it was, though that would scupper his personal theory about Jesus being a Buddhist from India.

That may be a good argument that the description of Nazareth in Luke isn't accurate, but it's a bad argument for Nazareth not existing.

The phrase "Mary called Magdalene" might make her attribution to that Galilean town "questionable" if Luke was written in modern English. Unfortunately for you, it was written in Greek.

I thought I did, but when I went looking I only found a copy of the Feig article. THe University of Sydney's library only has copies of Atiqot up to the mid-90s. Dr Freund recommended the Vitto article to me along with the Feig article as recent evidence that Nazareth was inhabited in these periods. And the Feig article does (despite Salm's claim to the contrary) support his assessment.

Why the hell would I just make up a lie? Zvi Gal summarises the significance of the site and references Bagatti. Despite Bagatti not being good enough for the biologist and the piano teacher, it was fine as far as this professional Jewish archaeologist was concerned. So who do I place more faith in - the unbiased professional Jewish archaeologist or two amateur internet loons with personal agendas?

Dr Richard Freund is an American Jew and the Director of the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford. I guess my inability to see how he could also be a Christian evangelical is another one of those "failures of imagination" that I suffer from on this board so regularly. I'm clearly not as "imaginative" as some here.

You'll probably find that I use much the same "tone" with Holocaust Deniers, people who claim the pyramids were built by aliens, people who think The Da Vinci Code is a history textbook, Christians who claim there was an earlier census so as to reconcile the infancy narratives of Luke and Matthew and anyone else who distorts history for reasons of some kind of ideology.

Atheists should know better, of course, but threads like this one and the recent one on the myth that the Medieval Church taught the Earth was flat show that even some atheists can cling to whacko ideas simply because they find them convenient.

His alleged what? Alleged by who - Dan Brown? Oh, let me guess - you're mistranslating the word koinonos from the Gospel of Philip, right?

The fact that an eminent institution like Department of Archaeology of the Hebrew University was associated with a theological seminary is a "red flag", yet a few lines later we get this:
"Apparently" according to who? Well, according to a Buddhist piano teacher with no archaeological qualifications his own private little theory to self-publish. :banghead:

PhilosopherJay

Hi Spin,

Was the document found at the Cairo Genizah, the Peshitta? Are we talking about two separate documents here, or one.

Thanks.

Philosopher Jay

andrewcriddle

Hi Ben

The text seems fine (apart from the nun) the lacunae in one sense are OK too but in the original article fragment 2 is spaced to have the Mems immediately above each other and fragment 3 to have the Tavs immediately above each other.

Andrew Criddle

Ben C Smith

Thanks. The first problem is solved by the proper display of Hebrew lists in HTML, which this forum does not have. The second problem is one I have thought about on other inscriptions I am trying to render in HTML, but such spacing is not always easy to accomplish without complicated tables, due to the variability of font sizes. If all fonts were monospace, or if everybody used monospace fonts, it would be easy, but few do.

Ben.

judge

Two different things. The peshitta is the bible used by the Aramaic speaking Church of the East.