stephan huller

I looked at Acts of Judas (Thomas). It has "he took of God" in place of that Coptic word.

stephan huller

The term seems to have something to do with ks = bone

http://books.google.com/books?ei=Ka7...#search_anchor

Remember the use of the term in the Coptic translation of the Acts of Judas the twin is to translate the word 'bone.'

Robert Tulip

Ridiculous. There is some very simple joining of dots here that spin fails to see. The Egyptian karast, whether as "burial" or more properly as Champollion's "embalmment", requires no ‘twisting’ to associate it directly with the anointing of a king, and therefore with the Greek term Christ. The pharaoh was transformed from Horus into Osiris at death through the karast embalmment. The parallels between Osiris and Christ as dying and rising saviours and fertility gods, and the range of linguistic contacts between Greece and Egypt described by Bernal, especially in the religious field, should be considered together with the fact that the 'embalmment' meaning of karast is direct enough to appear in both Birch and Champollion's hieroglyphic dictionaries.

Despite spin's surprising level of skepticism, Massey's comments on the anointing of Osiris as a source for the idea of Christ make perfect sense. As Massey points out, the anointing of Christ by the lady with the alabaster jar is equated to embalmment. There is some weird cultural taboo going on here with the denial of this obvious Egyptian connection. I don’t get the psychology for the fatwa against Massey – it looks to be based on emotional dislike for his research rather than anything logical.

My point here was to illustrate that the majesty of Christ, which mountainman attributed to Constantine, is in fact a central religious concept with extremely ancient roots. Osiris, the anointed king, reigns in majesty in the hall of the dead. Coffin Texts refer to Osiris as Your Majesty. The Christ archetype is intrinsically majestic. The continuity of Christ with previous messianic majestic myths rests on the kingly anointing as the bestowal of divine favour.

But spin says ignore all that, and instead focus on a blinkered definition of karast as burial, despite the abundant links between burial and anointing in Egyptian religion. And who is presupposing what here, spin? It looks to me that you are presupposing an absence of Egyptian cultural linkages for early Christianity, despite Egypt's scale and age as a dominant religious centre for the region for thousands of years before Christ. Bernal discusses this pathology, whereby Greek statements of their debt to the old eastern cultures are routinely ignored by modern scholars for strange and inexplicable reasons.I meant Christ as a verb. Sorry not to make that clearer. Here we see an inability on spin’s part to see the forest for the trees, trying to blind us with pedantic irrelevance and distract from the point of the discussion, the meaning of majesty. The false logic amounts to little more than the tortuous argument that anointing does not mean anointed therefore study of the theological meaning of majesty can ignore the Egyptian archetypal antecedents of the Christ myth. A nice knock down argument, as Humpty Dumpty said.

Robert Tulip

I'm going back to respond to these very interesting opening questions to explain why I raised the topic of Egypt.

Jesus Christ is imaginary. The origin of the idea is that there could be a perfect man. The ancients thought the heavens were perfect but earth was imperfect. Jesus Christ represented the idea of the beyond in the midst of the world, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's christological formulation. The presence of the perfect in the midst of the sinful is the source of the majesty of Christ, and is well expressed in the Epistle to the Philippians Chapter 2:5-11

Here we find the Taoist idea that the greatest king is unknown - that by becoming nothing, Jesus became majestic, or glorious. It is an ideal presentation of a conceptual majesty, an imaginary kinghood, in cultural continuity with earlier concepts of divine royalty, expressed in Christianity as the messianic idea that the last is first.

The point of the Egyptian comparison is that the Egyptians held that the Pharaoh connected earth to heaven, and this was the source of his majesty, his divine right as king. This connecting function is expressed in the very idea of Christ, as seen in various Gospel episodes, the baptism and anointing already mentioned, but also the conversation with Peter at Matthew 16 when Jesus asks 'who do you say that I am?' and Peter replies 'You are the Christ.' Next,
This passage is revealing about how the author conceptualised majesty. For a start, majesty is cosmic, revealed from heaven. The understanding that Christ imaginatively connects heaven and earth is presented as the source of universal power.

A further dimension enters with eschatology, but I will wait before writing further about that.

spin

Champillion was writing at the dawn of Egyptology. Why do you persist in clinging to outdated sources and hiding from modern scholarly efforts? You would have so much better hope of communicating a serious message if you used contemporary scholarly sources. There is a reason why you don't.

I don't have a fatwa against Massey. I have a reaction to people who don't know anything about the subjects they are dealing with, who don't go to modern experts (the obvious choice for up to date information), but use outdated sources.

That all just means that he hasn't taken on board the fact that I have only dealt with one issue, his maniacal insistence that the title of Christ "apparently" has its "origins in the Egyptian anointing (karast) of the mummy of the king". he simply has no way of knowing this. Epistemology-free ontologies are good that way. Who needs to have a way of knowing?

One starts to feel sorry for Robert Tulip. Plainly burial and embalmment have a connection in Egyptian funerary praxis, but how does that establish a connection between the word "karast" and χριστος.

(And incidentally, in modern Egyptology the initial consonant of ķrst is understood to be a uvular plosive, represented in IPA as /q/.)

More waffle. I was talking about your dysfunctional claim about the word "karast". I made it clear in my first comment. Please reread it to know what the problem is. I haven't got onto the stuff you have lurking in the background. I'm showing others here that your philology is worthless. And you know it. You can withdraw and bleed about archetypes and cultural linkages as much as you like, but that's just spitting into the wind regarding what I called you on.

This subterfuge is only for your own benefit. You assume you are in the position of Bernal, but as I see it, you are merely projecting hopefully as an excuse. You avoid the nitty gritty which Bernal reveled in and go for the smoke. Bernal knew what he was talking about. You don't.

As one suspected, Robert Tulip has nothing to say for his unfathomable acceptance of the apparent relationship between "karast" and χριστος. Here he is trying to wow with his grammatical prowess, well... the non-existence of any. It still hasn't dawned on him that although there is a clear grammatical trajectory in Greek for the word χριστος he is left in the dark crapping on about the "study of the theological meaning of majesty" and about people ignoring "the Egyptian archetypal antecedents of the Christ myth". Dithering off into a tangent is a typical response of someone who doesn't know what they are talking about. He is certainly sold on this "karast" nonsense, but has no way to show its relevance other than through insistence.

Once he has to deal with other people and their requirements of evidence Robert Tulip needs an epistemology, as is plain, he lacks. Jabbering about Egyptian archetypal antecedents is an ontology in search of an epistemology. While there are many antecedents even in the Hebrew tradition (logos speculation, wisdom mythology, suffering servant mythology, lamb of god, god's champion), he has somehow decided, unstated, that he knows the antecedents, "the Egyptian archetypal antecedents of the Christ myth". Having presented the grammatical evidence in the matter, I know that is all anyone can do. Robert Tulip has made it clear that he isn't interested in evidence at all. Otherwise he would acknowledge the relationship between χριστος and χριω, the same relationship as I stated between other participles and their infinitive verbs, eg πριω "to saw" and its past participle, πριστος "sawn".

The thing is, through happenstance, christos and "karast" have a certain similarity of form and people who know nothing about linguistics tend to go by appearances and wonder why they cannot convince anyone who knows anything about the subject.

In my first post in this thread to Robert Tulip I made it abundantly clear what my issue with him was. I bolded this statement of his, "So the title of Christ (the anointed), with its apparent origins in the Egyptian anointing (karast) of the mummy of the king", and criticized it for its lack of seriousness. His lack of defence of these apparent origins is what he needed to talk about, if he wanted to respond to my criticism. Instead, he has avoided the issue and insisted on his overarching agenda.

I'm sure you are all convinced by his presentation of the connection between "karast" and χριστος.

spin

Stephan, in case you're really interested here is a pdf, 1.7mb, of a fascicle of the Woerterbuch der Aegyptische Sprache (1971) for the consonant /q/, written by Egyptologists with a "k" that has a dot below it. On pp.64-65 is the entry for ķrst, handwritten. As I said, only if you're really interested.

Sheshbazzar

They (and the narrator/writer) seem to have been pointedly aware of the connection between anointing and burial.
Even has the anointed and buried, four days dead, living Lazarus sitting at the same table with them.

The connecting idea between anointing and burial was derived by them from somewhere. Where might that have been?

The OT gives ONE example of embalming חנטים, the embalming of Israel (Jacob) by Joseph in EGYPT. (Gen. 50)

Of course there couldn't be any connection between the Egyptian anointing/burial practices and the anointing for burial in the NT,
.....could there?

Was there some kind of magical restraint in place back then that prevented common people from making the same kinds of misidentification of similar sounding foreign words, as is common today?
Was it impossible that some semi-literate first century Jews might, mistakenly or not, associate the Greek word krist with the Egyptian word karast?

People tend to go with what their ear tells them, particularly when they do not intimately know the exact spelling or meaning of a foreign word, and there are no definitive reference materials available to them by which to be able split such hairs. (which unless they were also proficiently literate in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing and pronunciations, would have been of no help to them anyway.)

spin

The word translated as "anointed" in Jn 12:3 is ηλειψεν from the infinitive αλειψω, not related to χριστος / χριω.

Chili

Christ is a noun: "You are the Christ" and as verb Christ is the slippery imposter that needs oil to appeal to the senses. Christ is the life of the living and not of the dead, and is wherein we have eternal life and never die until the second death do us part.

In Bethany the feet of those who bring good new are anoited to celebrate Lazarus, but what what happens in Bethany does not happen in Jerusalem where eternal life is the home of the living.

Sheshbazzar

Great Greek. But does not address whether there was more at play here that simply the niceties of proper Greek.