StarryNight

Can you please point me to a reliable secular timeline of when the new testament books were written, table form would be best.

Also, in Jesus' time (assuming he existed) would he have been called Christ or Kristos (Greek) of Messiah (Hebrew) or something else (Aramaic?). Was there a mixture of languages in use in Israel at the time or did certain appelations come into usage only as the faith travelled the world, all stemming from a single root language. What abut "Jesus" (which is old english)? Would he have been known in the Hebrew (Yeshua), Aramaic (Jeshua) or Greek (Iesous) rendering of the name.

I ask the latter question because I have a friend who thinks that Jesus and Christ are 2 seperate people, the former being a Jew and the latter being Greek.

ApostateAbe

There seems to be a pretty good table of New Testament events, including the authorship of the canon (color-coded green) right here: http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQ...on_xian_nt.htm

Jesus and his society spoke Aramaic. Greek was the language known among the educated and international traders, much like English is today. Jesus and his disciples probably did not know it. They came from a poor rural background. Hebrew was the language of the Jewish canon, known among the rabbis and religious leaders, but Jesus probably did not know too much of it, either.

I don't know the Aramaic word for "Christ," though it is rumored to be "M'shee-kha" or "m'sheekhah." It is questionable whether of not Jesus would have used that word often, since it seems unlikely that Jesus claimed to be the messiah, but his disciples certainly did.

StarryNight

awesome reply ty!

Toto

This is actually a good question without a clear answer (except that Kristos is not a possibility.) If Jesus resembled the figure in the gospels, he probably spoke Aramaic, and he is recorded there as speaking a few words in Aramaic. If the gospel stories were actually based on someone of higher economic stature or religious background, he might have spoken Greek and Hebrew as well.

The difficulty is that internal linguistic evidence shows that the gospels were originally written in Koine Greek. There are some fairly strenuous attempts by a few scholars to show that there is an Aramaic substratum to the gospels.

"Israel" at the time was part of the Roman Empire, which used Koine Greek as a lingua franca. It is not clear exactly where the gospels were written, but they probably originated outside of Israel among Greek speaking converts. As far as we know, all of the early church documents were written in Koine Greek.

Jesus is just the transliteration of the Greek Iesous. If you think that Jesus was an Aramaic speaking Galilean, he would have been known as Yeshua, and there are Messianic Jews today who have adopted that name for him - but there is no historical record of that name ever being used in the church. The Hebrew equivalent would be transliterated as Joshua. Joshua and Jesus are the same name - when the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Koine Greek, Joshua was translated as Iesous

It is interesting what people can come up with. There were some early Christians who thought that the Christ was a spirit that descended on the human Jesus.

spin

"Messiah" is Anglicized Latinized Greekized Hebrew. Jn 4:25 has "messias" in Greek - the final "s" being a grammatical indicator as is the final "s" of Ihsous. The Aramaic is somewhat similar to the Hebrew.

It's very hard to tell from a text which is in Greek what the original name of Jesus (Grk: Ihsous) was. The pronunciation is quite similar to the Hebrew with the major difference that Greek had no "sh" sound, so Aramaic "Yeshu" is almost the same as the Greek Ihsou-s. It's just different writing systems that confuse the issue.

Some people will argue that because there are a few snippets of Aramaic in the gospel of Mark and in a few other places, we can assume that Jesus spoke Aramaic. However, the the gospel witness is certainly untrustworthy: consider Mk 5:41, which provides some Aramaic, "talitha kumi", which the gospel translates as "maiden, I say to you, arise", which is partially wrong. "talitha" = "maiden" and "kumi" = "arise", but there is no equivalent to "I say to you". The gospel writer didn't know anything about the Aramaic.


spin

StarryNight

Please, what were this group called?

I think that if there is any truth in it then then Kristos/Christ is a luminous spiritual force which can anoint or bless people through an encounter cf transfiguration of Jesus, and Theosophy's "astral light".

Huon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docetism

Dave31

Christ or Kristos?

Others will discuss several points of view on that during Jesus supposed time but, I'd recommend tracing it much further back in time. So, I'll share the fact that ancient Egypt had a common term "KRST."

People tend to get confused on its meaning because the meaning changes slightly depending on the determinative. It can mean several things relating to funeral preparations for the deceased such as “embalmment,” “mummy,” meaning “to wrap up in bandages,” among other things. But, one pertinent point to make here is that mummification also includes anointing the body with oils and spices as well as frankincense and myrrh.

"KRST is quite possibly the derivation of Christ. Osiris was an anointed figure called KRST long before Jesus"

"In Hebrew and Syrian messiah, meshihha, in Arabic masih, signify anointed"

"In the Pyramid Texts (e.g., PT 576:1511a/P 518), the Osiris is anointed with oil, essentially making him a “messiah” or “Christ,” as those two words both mean “anointed one.” We have also seen that in BD 145 it is Horus who is anointed, thus rendering him likewise a Christ."

This subject is highly detailed in Christ in Egypt, 313 to 321

Toto

In the ancient world, kings and corpses were all annointed. I don't think this parallel is worth much.

show_no_mercy

Adoptionism