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Contributor
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Falls Creek, Oz.
Posts: 11,192
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Quote:
Originally Posted by avi
Were nomina sacra employed exclusively by Christians, or is there evidence that Nazarenes, and later, Arians, also used the same terminology?
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Dear avi,
Here is a very interesting article about the nomina sacra from the coptic Nag Hammadi texts: sourced from here:
Quote:
Fabulating Jesus, the Coptic Nomina Sacra, and intriguing questions
Fabulating Jesus:
Why Gnostic "Codes" Do Not Name the Historical Jesus
"Jesus," considered as the proper name
of an assumed-to-be historical person,
does not appear in the Gnostic Coptic writings.
The same applies for the term "Christ"
understood as the Incarnation or Son of God
celebrated in the theology of Saint Paul and Saint John.
In my book "Not in His Image" I wrote:
In the Coptic Gnostic material
the names Jesus and Christ
are never written in full,
but indicated by code such as
the letters IS with a bar over them.
Scholars routinely fill in the blanks,
JESUS from IS making IS into I(eseo)S,
the Greek form of the Hebrew name Yeshua.
They do so with considerable poetic license,
for there is no textual evidence to support
the assumption that in Gnostic usage
IS indicated a historical person
named Ieseos, Jesus.
IS could as well be translated in another way:
I(asiu)S, giving the name Iasius, “the healer,”
a title rather than a common name.
But translators assume that IS
indicates Jesus of the New Testament.
In short, scholars do not allow us
the chance to consider that IS might indicate
anything else but a literal person
whose identity is predetermined.
Christ from XS (or XRS)
The same applies for Christ.
The code for Christ is XS or sometimes XRS,
which could as well indicate Christos,
or even Chrestos.
In Coptic it looks like this:
XC, with a bar over the letters.
X is the Greek letter chi
and C is the Coptic S.
Scholars fill in XC so that
it reads “Christ,” never “Christos,”
even though “Christos” is more
consistent with the final S.
Where XC appears in the Apocryphon of John, for instance,
scholars put the Greek Christos in parenthesis
but translate the coded word as “Christ.”
Doing so, they immediately equate XC
with the well-known entity of Pauline and Johannine theology.
Again, this is poetic license.
Considering all the Gnostic material
that argues against the Pauline-Johannine redeemer,
this equation is extremely dubious.
I claim that scribes were instructed to use the codes by whoever directed them and oversaw the transcriptions that come down to us in the NHC materials. Who commissioned these transcriptions from (presumed) lost Greek original texts into Coptic? No one knows. Why were the Greek-language writings translated into Coptic at all? No one knows. Did those who commanded the translations do so to preserve Gnostic ideas, or to refute them? No one knows.
We do know, however, that Coptic was a language invented (around 100 CE) to transcribe hieroglyphs at a time when few people remained in Egypt who could read them, and that subsequently Coptic became the official language of the Egyptian Christian monastic movement. Presumably, by the middle of the 4th century CE when the Nag Hammadi books were buried, Coptic was used mainly by Egyptian monks who had been converted to an early form of Christianity—the desert monastic movement. It is known that the leaders of these cenobite boot camps, such as Shenoute of Athribis, were rabid ideologues who openly advocated violent means to suppress and eradicate all that remained of non-Christian culture. From Not in His Image:
Just across the river from Dendera are the ruins of an early Coptic monastery, Tabennisi. At the time the codices were hidden in a cave around 345 C.E., the founder of the monastery, the cenobitic monk Pachomius, had just died. A generation later, the monastery came under the control of Shenoute of Athribis (348–466), the leading figure in the Coptic Christian church and a close ally of Cyril of Alexandria, the man who probably orchestrated the murder of Hypatia. To his dismay, Shenoute discovered that a small remnant of persecuted Gnostics had taken refuge in the Temple of Hathor. He wrote to Cyril that the heretics possessed “books full of abominations” that must surely be destroyed. Shenoute commanded the Gnostics to renounce their perverted beliefs and accept Cyril as their spiritual master. When the heretics resisted, Shenoute warned them in no uncertain terms: “I shall make you acknowledge the archbishop Cyril, or else the sword will wipe out most of you, and moreover those of you who are spared will go into exile.”
Yet it was men such as Shenoute who oversaw the transcription of Greek-language Gnostic writings into Coptic. Or was it? Could the scribes who copied—NOT authored—these lost documents have been closet heretics, friends or students of Gnostic holdouts like those who took refuge at Dendera, or native Egyptians faithful in some manner to the sacred pre-Christian traditions of their land? We simply don't know if the scribes of the NHC were Christian monks robotically following orders, or if they were a straggling remnant of students of the Egyptian Mysteries who, for some odd reason, chose to preserve jumbled notes from their instruction in the language of the Christianized conquerers.
If they were monks of the Coptic Christian Church, their assigned purpose in transcribing these materials would have been to Christianize or refute them. That is, I think, an obvious and reasonable hypothesis. If they were Gnostic diehards or sympathetic to such, they would have tried to preserve as much genuine Gnostic content as possible while shackled with the daunting task of hiding their intentions; thus resulting in the terrible mish-mash we find. This is also, I submit, a reasonable hypothesis. The incoherence of these materials, and the maddening mix of Christian and non-Christian elements, suggests to me that Coptic-speaking monks transcribed a hodge-podge of received materials that they could barely understand. The huge range of scribal errors and inconsistencies lend support to this view
Questioning the nomina sacra "christian" connection
Someone will argue and flatly state: In the entire span of these works the abbreviations XS, XRS, and IS all refer to the character understood by the authors as a historical person referred to as Jesus-the-Christ. Okay, let's take a step or two back and look at this claim. What it says is that scholars today agree on what the codes mean, but this is no assurance of what the codes meant to the people who originated them. I ask, Where in the writings of that time and setting do we find anything that explains who set up the nomina sacra and why? I would like to see that information in the textual sources of the 4th century CE, or earlier.
I don't know who established the scribal conventions found in the NHC. I presume it was not the scribes themselves, but whoever oversaw them. Would this have been the head honchos in the hierarchy of the Christian Coptic Church, men like Shenoute? Probably. In that case, are we to assume that the overseers insisted on the codes to specify allusion to Jesus Christ of the New Teatament? But if they were so adamant about that identification, why use codes? Why not be literal and totally straightforward in naming the intended person? Wouldn't such literalness be consistent with the attitude of the early Church Fathers regarding the historical value of their sacred narrative? If we assume that the overseers imposed the code, we are left wondering why they, who advocated the literal Jesus and elevated that human figure to a divine status, would have encoded His Name?
Bear in mind that examples of the nomina sacra other than IC and XRS occur in the Nag Hammadi books. The Apocalypse of Adam (V, 5) shows these nams in code or full spelling with the superlinear mark: Seth, Adam, Eve (Euha), Deucalion (a figure from Greek myth), Ham, Japeth and Shem (sons of Noah), Sakla (a name for the Demiurge), Abrasax, Sablo, Gamaliel (Gnostic magical deities), the word Pneuma (spirit in Greek), Phersalo and Sauel, the word Aeon, Michou, Michar and Mnesinous (Gnostic angelic spirits), and Yesseus Mazareus Yessedekeus (invocatory name for the "Spirit of the Living Waters"). The name Noah, by contrast, is not coded, and Adam is inconsistently coded.
Now, I don't think that any scholar would argue that these nomina sacra refer to historical persons known actually to have lived in the early Christian era. So why should XC and XRC by any different? If the scribal convention was such, where is the textual proof in the words of those who introduced that convention? Lacking such proof, the accepted view of modern scholars about the XC and XRC is mere speculation. And my speculation is as good as theirs.
I argue that the Coptic IC, Greek IS,
can indicate I(asiu)S rather than
I(eseo)S, the Greek spelling of Jesus.
The whole issue hinges on sacramentalism,
actual or symbolic enntheogenic ingestion.
Many Gnostics practiced actual entheogenic ingestion,
and came to identify the entheogen with Iasius,
"the Healer," Jesus.
The canonical fascists, bent on
political conquest of the Empire,
insisted on symbolic entheogenic ingestion,
murdered both the original Nazarenes
and their early Gnostic followers,
and burned their writings.
- Dan Russell: Shamanism,
Patriarchy, and the Drug War
I for one do not accept the direct identification of Jesus/Iasius with an entheogenic sacrament, but many people now do. A growing number, so it appears. I argue rather that the codes XC and XRC, along with the other coded examples cited above, were applied to mythological source material from Pagan traditions. For the "canonical fascists" who had to treat heretical writings in order to oppose them, this material was highly ambiguous and had to be defused. Its original allusions had to be subverted. Adam, for instance, could be understood in the Gnostic sense as the "first human" or Anthropos, not a literal male ancestor; but thought police like Shenoute would have insisted on the single, literal interpretation. It would have been to their advantage to put this tricky material in question by encoding it, thereby, in a sense, asserting their sovereign right to declare what the code meant. A clever say of saying, "We have made this name into an object of our privileged knowledge, and you must ask us what it means."
But insistence on a literal identity for XC and XRC by the Church fathers did not, and does not, obviate the rich alternative allusions that long predate the patristic ruse—if such it was. I challenge any scholar today to tell me that Deucalion, the mythological name found in encoded form in the NHC, was an historical person, and nothing but that.
Did pagans perform the NHC translations, and inserted the codes?
[It is generally accepted that] ... Christian Coptic scribes, not pagans, transcribed the Nag Hammadi texts—although I must emphasize, once again, that the people who wrote down the codices did not author them, and probably did not in many places understand what they were translating. Others insists that the nomina sacra refer to "the character understood by the authors as a historical person referred to as Jesus-the-Christ." But, oops, we don't know who the authors of the NHC were, do we? And besides, it was not the authors of the lost originals who applied the codes, it was the translators. Wasn't it?
If this was the case, either the transcribing monks invented the nomina sacra themselves, or they were instructed to use them by their overseers. I go for the latter explanation, which leaves us baffled as to who so instructed them, and why, as I have already noted. We just don't know, period. Houston, we have a problem. But here it's more appropriate to say: Jerusalem, we have a problem. We are delving here into an operation run by "mission control" in Jerusalem, either symbolically or literally speaking.
Wrongly assuming that I claim that pagan conspirators inserted the codes, others have said, "there is no external attestation to this being the case anywhere at any time." True enough. And it is equally true, as far as I know, that there is "no external attestation" to support the opinion of modern scholars that XC and XRC refer expressly to the "historical person referred to as Jesus-the-Christ." If there is external attestation of this kind, let's see it. Then we would know who introduced the codes and why!
Gnostic Dissent
So, what's it all about, after all? This is not just a nit-picking argument about Coptic scribal conventions, it is a battle over narrative control. To insist that XC and XRC name the historical person Jesus, also regarded as the Son of God and divine savior of humanity, is to insist that such a person existed to be named: this is the real core of the argument. But I maintain that such an alleged historical person, attributed with a divine status or not, never did exist, and so the codes could not have named him. The codes could have been introduced by the Church Fathers to enforce the fabulation of that person, but not to prove his existence. The nomina sacra prove nothing, and are better read as ambivalent mythological allusions. The scholarly consensus that the codes name Jesus assumes there was a Jesus to name, but the overwhelming weight of textual and historical evidence and disinterested opinion on the history of Christinaity shows, first, the complete lack of any reliable contemporary report of Jesus's existence, and second, the ambiguous use of Christ, Christos, Chrestos and Chrestus in canonical writings well into the 5th century. Even Saint Paul, the indisputable founder of Christian salvationist ideology (which he hijacked from the Zaddikim and distorted to his own ends, or to the agenda of his Roman paylords), totally disregards the historical existence of the Savior.
To insist that the Coptic codes name an historical person is to affirm the existence of that person. For all I know, others may not even believe that Jesus existed historically, but may adopt the scholarly consensus that the codes were intended to name the key figure of Christianity whose fictional persona was still under construction in the 4th Century CE.
It is eminently clear to some of us that since the time of Renan and Schweitzer, the historical Jesus has been shown to be a fiction, an obvious fabulation and, even more so, a confabulation that arises from the blind collusion of many confused and often hateful people. It's up to each one of us to make up our own mind and decide where we stand in that collusion, or if we stand against it. There is no compromise on Jesus. Gnostic dissent is a radical option, not a reconciliatory stance.
In protesting the attribution of XS and XRC, I rely on my scholarship, such as it is, and I am also demonstrating Gnostic dissent. As a scholar, I refuse to support the confabulation of Jesus and collude in inventing the Savior. I take no part in the ongoing fabrication of the delusional image of Jesus. I reject all messiahs, but first and foremost that one. I am quite willing, on occasion, to take a lesson in scribal conventions from a serious person, but these matters go far deeper than such quibbles. I leave you with this question:
What is the point of getting involved with Gnostic writings,
if we ignore the power of dissent from the savior program
inherent to the Pagan Gnostic message, and merely use
scholarship as a pretext to continue fabulating Jesus,
the divine victim whose exalted doom so contaminates
the world he came to save?
---- jll: 4 Sept 2007 Andalucia
Fabulating Jesus:
Why Gnostic "Codes" Do Not Name the Historical Jesus
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11-07-2008, 12:08 AM
