Sheshonq

1. It remains to be seen if that is the case;

2. I doubt you even understand what my position *is* in the first place, so you might take a little more caution before declaring it has been refuted;

2. And finally, before I bother responding to Jeffrey's post, he has a few loose strings to wrap up - whether you personally like that reality or not.

Toto

This is "teacher" used as a noun, not as a title or as a form of address.

Jeffrey brushed off my question as to the dates of the other example from the Talmud which might have indicated that the term was used as an address, but I think that the Talmud is too late and may also incorporate anachronistic elements.

Jeffrey Gibson

See this.

Jeffrey

Gamera

None of this is responsive to the issue.

The claim was that rabbi is used anachronistically in the NT as a title. After examination, this reduced to the claim that arguably Matthew 23:7 used it as a title. I showed that if you kept reading, this is not true, and Jesus is not depicted as using it as a title.

You need to address these issues rather than beating your breast.

Gamera

Is this really a distinction, Toto? I think rabbi is used as a noun in all the cases we are talking about. Clearly, if the reference is correct, rabbi meant "teacher" prior to the Gospels. It appears that the Gospels use the Greek transliteration in just that way.

So what exactly is the anachronism?

Gamera

Not according to this reference, showing the use in this sense 100 years earlier.

That's why I said you need to deal with this reference or your claim is rebutted.

I think your reluctance to do so is somewhat telling.

No Robots

Okay, I understand, but the text indicates that it was not a title. You yourself mention how it seems to be used in a broad way in general society. Gamera and Riesner point out the clear equivalence with "teacher." For myself, it seems clear that in Matthew we have not rabbis, but scribes and Pharisees who love to be called Rabbi. This is just what we would expect at this period, where there is the beginning of a push to transform the respectful address into a title. The Pharisees grabbed their chance to give themselves the coveted title in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple. This is why Christ is outraged: the very idea of titles is utterly repugnant to him, but he sees it coming. We have here in fact a snapshot of the very moment of transition from respectful address to title, with Christ fighting for the old way and protesting against the innovation desired but not yet acquired by the learned.

spin

One of the things that tick me off is how people peddle undigested materials as a means of responding to problems. It seems to absolve them from needing to know what they are talking about.
This stuff is irrelevant to the issue of "rabbi". It is sufficient for one to see that RB indicated someone in a position of power for it should help understand one of the problems in the second part.

This is a not a literal translation: "Get a teacher". A more literal translation would be "Get a master." The situation is analogous to Mt 1:16 where aner is often translated as "husband", though it literally means "man". The context may justify the translation in that instance.

The word for teacher is normally MWRH, as in "the righteous teacher" in Qumran texts and it is found in the Hebrew bible.

It would be nice to have footnote 18 because there isn't enough totrack down the claim here.

I was able to track this down. It's from b.Makkot 23b, ie it's not in the Mishnah at all, but in the Babylonian Talmud.

The interesting issue with it is that it was included in the discussion at all. We have a Talmud tradition about Jehoshaphat in which clearly RBY isn't equivalent to rabbi, but is simply a grammatically constructed form meaning "my master", just as )BY means "my father". This hasn't got us any closer to rabbi than the first section, other than in appearance. When one talked of rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, it should be clear that rabbi doesn't mean "my master", just as it doesn't in the gospels.

Yup here we are. Back with a loose description of what we already knew, though the looseness is apparently tendentious when it says "the middle of the 1st cent. a.d.". That helps to cover say 30CE, when all the evidence points to after the war.

This doesn't help us with dating at all. So what useful information has this TDNT entry provided for dealing with the issue of the use of rabbi it was meant to elucidate? Little, if anything.


spin

Gamera

Since the NT isn't written in Hebrew, the references are highly relevant.

If a prior use of rabbi existed 100 years before the gospels, and if the meaning was more or less, teacher or master, the language community during the first century quite likely had the word rabbi, meaning more or less, teacher or master, and the transliteration of the word into Greek for use by the authors to mean more or less teacher or master, is hardly evidence of an anachronism.

spin

Wishing doesn't make it so. Read what is said in the entry. Once we get past all the smoke, we come down to the same conclusion we had already come to, except that it states it a little loosely. Here it is again:

The one problem is that the entry didn't establish the use with pronominal suffix.

This is obviously false <edit>. The cited text refers specifically to RB, not rabbi, and provides no point of reference to assume the title rabbi in operation during Jehoshua ben Perachiah's time. This is plainly evident in that the first people to be recorded having the title were all after the Jewish War. The saying by Jehoshua ben Perachiah is a red herring here.


spin