spin

As I pointed out, no. Mt 4:13 requires an earlier reference to Nazara, not to Nazareth. There is support in the earliest tradition for Nazara.

Do you think Eusebius was the first to h ave used Song of Solomon 4:7?

If you read my earlier comments you would understand how that progress came about in my eyes. A christian community is a Mediterranean community not a Palestinian community, so their knowledge of Galilee would have been non-existent, and if someone told them that nazwraios came from Nazareth, why should they disagree?

Seeing that we have only one early Hebrew instance of Nazareth, I don't think there's much hope for survival of any gentilic from early on. The expected Hebrew I think is notsriti, but early on there had been a rift between Jews and christians, so communications would not be expected, allowing any cross-fertilization. One does find ha-notsri in Hebrew literature (which supports the independent form Nazarene), but unrelated to Jesus until rather late.

Both nazarhnos and nazwraios have a historical priority over Nazareth (and Nazara). They were around first and were thus established in form, so why should anyone consider them wrong? Once Nazara was formed from nazarhnos and led to Nazareth, the connection between nazarhnos + nazwraios and Nazareth were made through theology. not linguistics.


spin

jjramsey

If one follows your train of thought, they should disagree because the Greek grammar says that it should be nazaretaios, and these Mediterranean speakers spoke Greek, no?

For all the grammatical reasons that you mentioned.

Which would hardly stop scribes from making the correction back to nazaretaios, since the purported theological source of nazarhnos and nazwraios had been forgotten and it was understood that those terms referred to someone from Nazareth.

Let's see now. We start with a group of Nazarenes that had nothing to do with Nazareth. Our source for this possibility, Epiphanius, is late and unreliable. Supposedly, the name "Nazarene" came from "Nazirite," though there is no evidence that Jesus was supposedly a nazirite and no evidence that Nazarenes in general took the nazirite vow. So in the early records that we have, the original significance of "Nazarene" is somehow forgotten and it becomes a reference to a fictional place whose name looks awfully close to the name of a real village from where no one would want a Messiah to come. This is a heap of speculation to hang on a grammatical irregularity.

spin

We are talking about where terms come from, not post hoc (folk) etymologies. You are trying to deal with the latter.

Still confusing how things arise with how they are later viewed. Also confusing descriptive linguistics with prescriptive ideas about language.

The gentilic from Nazareth as I've indicated should be along the lines of nazarethnos if it were the source of a gentilic, but what we have shows that it is an improbable source. Grammar doesn't stop post hoc claims of Nazareth being the source for nazarhnos and nazwraios. How many people today believe that butterscotch gets its name from Scotland? How many people think that the word "crap" was derived from the name Crapper? Post hoc understandings of words have no need to reflect where the words come from.

You assume that scribes whose job was primarily to copy texts, would necessarily be aware of modern linguistics as against accepting of what they have been told.

I wish you would read what I have said on the matter, instead of continuing these half-cocked misrepresentations. Our source for a group called Nazarenes is Acts 24:5 amongst other things. I have given two sources for the terms we are dealing with, both NZR, the first indicates "vow" from which "nazirite" is derived, the other meaning "crown".

As we can see with GMt's omission of the Marcan nazarhnos. Plainly the first writing of Matthew didn't understand this term and like other obscure Marcan content it was left out (gone is the man who ran away, gone is the reference Syrophoenician, etc).

Why did Matthew leave it out if the connection between nazarhnos and Nazareth was part of the tradition? It obviously wasn't. Why did Matthew later get the form of nazwraios if nazarhnos was already part of the tradition? It obviously wasn't. Why did Matthew use Nazara if Nazareth was part of the tradition? It obviously wasn't. Why doesn't Matthew include Nazareth in its parallel to Mk 1:9 which now has Nazareth? It obviously didn't then.

I cannot help it if you won't contemplate the implications of these terms. All I can see is unthoughtout apologetics for a complex problem. The textual evidence is clear. Mark gives no evidence for a connection between nazarhnos and Nazareth. In fact, Mark thinks Capernaum is the home of Jesus, which one writer of Matthew understood as well because he moves Jesus from Nazara to Capernaum because of his Marcan source. Why does Matthew leave out nazarhnos? Why does it get the different form nazwraios? This bumbling defence based on "grammatical irregularity" needs to be rethought to deal with the evidence. You just don't seem to be aware of the material, of the past discussion on the subject or the linguistics necessary.


spin

jjramsey

Only if you resort to ad hocs to explain away Mark 1:9.

No, I'm dealing with what looks like special pleading. The grammatical irregularity is supposed to be enough of a hurdle for derivation of nazarhnos and nazwraios from Nazareth, but not enough for there to be no temptation to correct the irregularity once it's present, even though scribes were tempted to smooth over other irregularities?

No, I am noting that scribes are often not slavish copyists and do often try to fix perceived mistakes. If it truly was improbable for nazarhnos and nazwraios to be derived from Nazareth, then the irregular grammar of nazwraios should have looked obviously wrong to some scribes.

Back to an earlier point you made:

Adding the feminine ending back to a word in order to inflect it further is a grammar rule in Hebrew. Adding "-hnos" or "-aios" is a Greek grammar rule. Why would a Greek working from "Nazara" as a defective variant of "Nazareth" necessarily respect the Hebrew rule of tacking back on the Hebrew feminine ending?

Clivedurdle

How common was it to name someone after a town? When and where did that habit start? How was it used in relation to other naming conventions, like son of?

jjramsey

Hmm, why would even a Greek-speaking Hebrew working from "Nazara" necessarily respect the Hebrew rule of tacking back on the Hebrew feminine ending when inflecting "Nazara" in Greek? Indeed, if "Nazara" was, for some reason, thought of as the Greek form of "Nazareth," why not inflect the Greek form of the word rather that the Hebrew form when writing in Greek?

spin

Rubbish. Mk 2:1 indicates that Capernaum was the place of the home of Jesus.

You are guilty of it, yes.

You assume such a derivation, but it doesn't exist in the earliest gospel. What on earth makes you think Nazarene is derived from Nazareth based on Mark??

People tend to smooth over irregularities rather than deal with them. Just look at what you've been doing in this discussion.

You're confusing scribes with writers.

You are still confusing source with post hoc connection.

It certainly is what is manifested in Hebrew, so if someone is a NCRTY, you know they come from Nazareth.

However, it is normal to add Greek suffixes onto the Hebrew gentilic, as in the case of someone from (Beth-)Arabah, [(RBH feminine noun, "desert"], is called an Arabathite in 2 Sam 23:31, [(RBTY], which is arabwQitos in Greek, maintaining the Hebrew feminine "-T". In 2 Sam 23:34 a person from Maacah is called a Maacathite, the Greek maacati supplying a simple transliteration. In v27 someone from Hushah is a Hushathite, Greek aswQitos. In these cases which feature the feminine "-T", the Greek working from the Hebrew maintain the underlying Hebrew. That tells the story. Forms like narazhnos and nazwraios don't follow any underlying Hebrew. This indicates that they came from somewhere else.

Get a load of this now. You're claiming that nazarhnos, nazwraios and nazara are all basically defective in their form. This is your cock and bull approach to dealing with the problems involved. Umm, they're defective! Deep analysis there, jjramsey.

You won't be surprised then to learn that there are other such otherwise unexplainable for you "defective variants": besides nazareQ, there're also nazaret and in a few manuscripts nazaraQ and nazarat. The good thing about nazareQ and nazaret is that they mostly split between Alexandrian and Byzantine manuscript families, so they are a change after the fact.

Both nazaraQ and nazarat are clearly scribal interventions. nazaraQ can be seen in places other than where Nazara can be found in some traditions, but while elsewhere it is only in a single manuscript, where Nazara is in the tradition, nazaraQ is in more manuscripts, indicating a simple stitch up to make Nazara look more in line. That's also the most reasonable explanation of nazarat, but reflects scribal intervention from the family. So Nazara support is not constrained solely to the places where it was originally located in the earliest manuscript tradition, but also to these variants placed where Nazareth and Nazaret are generally understood to be original.

It's all nice and explainable starting with a Hebrew Vorlage for nazarhnos, but not from Nazareth. You can trace developments in the gospel tradition tracing these terms and they help you understand what has happened.

Don't just defend your dogma.


spin

spin

Very common. Nicolaos of Damascus. Joseph of Arimathea. Lucian of Samosata. Eusebius of Caesarea. William of Occam. Robin of Locksley. Etc., etc, etc.

Magdlyn

Was it a CE thing then?

B/c in the OT, guys are called "son of." And I believe the Jews (non-Hellenistic) continued that tradition for centuries CE.

Jesus, BTW, was not called "of Nazareth." He was called the Nazoreaen (sp), correct? A religious sect, not a place name.

jjramsey

It does not indicate that it was his original home, and indeed Mk 1:9 would indicate that it was not his original home.

Mark says Jesus is from Nazareth and also refers to Jesus as a Nazarene, and there is no indication in the text that would stop a reader from making the obvious Nazareth-Nazarene connection.

Yet you write:

and this (!):

I'm not confusing scribes with writers at all. I'm noting that when scribes make copies of manuscripts, they will sometimes try to make their copies not have the perceived errors in the manuscripts. This is a basic part of textual criticism.

Fact: nazarhnos and nazwraios came to be regarded as meaning "someone from Nazareth." This is true regardless of whether the terms meant "someone from Nazareth" from the get-go or whether the terms only came to mean that after the post hoc rationalization that you claim happened.

Fact: According to you, nazarethnos and nazaretaios would have been the normal, regular way to refer to someone from Nazareth.

The obvious conclusion is that, by your reasoning, nazarhnos and nazwraios are grammatically irregular ways to refer to someone from Nazareth, period. They do not stop being grammatically irregular simply because their connection with Nazareth was, according to you, made by post hoc theological rationalization.

So, you want me to believe that nazarhnos and nazwraios are grammatically irregular, but that scribes wouldn't react to this irregularity the way they've reacted to other irregularities--by smoothing them out. That you expect the scribes to make this exception looks like special pleading to me.

Actually, that is what you are claiming for nazarhnos and nazwraios. You are the one claiming that grammatically, nazarhnos and nazwraios shouldn't be the terms used to refer to someone from Nazareth. Yet there they are. Since they are there and playing a role that they are not supposed to play, they are, by your reasoning, defective. The only question is why those supposedly defective terms are there in place of the purportedly correct ones. You argue that the reason is that these terms originally had a different meaning, and that via circuitous post hoc theological reflection, they became an irregular way to refer to people from Nazareth. I argue that this is an overly complicated and speculative way to account for their supposed defectiveness.