Richard Carrier

Intriguing. But the parallel is not perfect, since technically there are three named men and three named women with two named men (so one male triad then one female triad, inside which is a third triad of one woman and two men).



Except the three women follow and minister, not the men, but one man carries the cross. Again, this doesn't look very pat to me. The only thing that definitely looks curious is the repetition of a parental triad. I can explain the triad in the woman's case (the "lesser" Jacob represents the Jacob, now being compared to the greater Jacob on the cross, who is founding a new Israel with his own twelve tribes; and Joses represents Joseph the Patriarch, Joses being a sort of "nickname" in Greek for Joseph).



Not quite--only by implication. They were "in" Galilee, but Simon came "from" the field (not even the same category of things). What I think would more likely be the intended parallel here is that Simon is from Cyrene and the women from Galilee. Cyrene is a symbol of what lies beyond the land of death. So Galilee must be a symbol of the earthly preaching of the Gospel. It is these two that are being opposed symbolically (if that is what Mark is doing).

The problem I mentioned, however, is not at all solved here. Why Alexander? Why Rufus? What do those names represent? Who do they represent? If we go by fame, Alexander would be Alexander the Great (the most famous man by that name when Mark wrote) and Rufus would be Musonius Rufus (a contemporary of Mark who was famed as the second greatest wise man since Socrates), but I can't fathom what symbolic importance their names hold here. Remember, to make any theory credible, whatever these names mean must unlock meaning in the whole passage and context that allows otherwise strange features to become intelligible. In other words, once you see it, it has to be obvious, not just something you can squeeze in to fit.

Richard Carrier

To Ted Hoffman:

On the Nazareth archaeology and mystical meaning, I'll look into it further and make a full report after my library trip this Wednesday. But it is not true that Mark's Jesus did not come from Nazareth: "And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in the Jordan" (Mark 1:9).

Note that I find also intriguing Laupot's thesis for the origin of the appellation Nazarene and thus the "inferred" (or symbolic) attribution of a hometown at Nazareth, i.e. Nazarene comes from netzer, "branch," from Isaiah 11:1: "A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit." That I admit is possible, but is not a slam dunk argument. It faces minor problems similar to your Nazirite theory, which could also be at work, though again it is not an exact fit, especially since Mark and Matthew would surely know what a Nazirite was, being that it is a fixed category in Jewish Law, and so Matthew surely would not confuse such an appellation as a reference to town of origin--moreover, they would more likely transliterate the word correctly.



You said cliff. I corrected that misstatement. As to Nazareth being in a basin, that is also incorrect ("The small town of Nazareth is situated on a hill, surrounded by higher hills," Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land, and logically, too: towns are not built where they will get washed out by floods; photos confirm this: the town was built down the slope of a hill, cf. http://p.vtourist.com/1346330-Travel...e-Nazareth.jpg and http://www.christusrex.org/www1/terras/TSnzbatt.jpg). But you are correct that they are talking about a brow built or located on the city's hill, and not "merely" a gallows as I incorrectly stated.

Richard Carrier

I am referring to Crossan's purported "archaeological facts," which are not sufficient to establish his claim, and to the facts below.



Jewish law mandated that all bodies be buried, even enemies and criminals, and in fact this law was binding even on Priests, who, if they found an unclaimed body, were required by law to bury it. If there was no Joseph, there would without doubt have been someone assigned to the task by the Sanhedrin themselves. Moreover, the law required criminals to be buried in a public grave yard owned by the Sanhedrin, and the law also allowed them to be reburied in their family graves later. Therefore, to fulfill the law every body had to be kept separate, possibly even marked, and hence available for reburial. And in Jerusalem, archaeology confirms only tombs, not "graves" in our sense, were used, due to the nature of the land. Crossan ignores every single one of these facts.




Invalid reasoning. We are lucky to recover any bodies at all, much less complete bodies. So no judgment about ratios or even causes of death can be made. Moreover, we only know the one case was crucified because of an accident: the nail went through the bone and fused there so it could not be removed. Most crucified victims would be nailed through the flesh--to rest between the bones of the ankle for leverage; otherwise, a nail into the bone could break the bone and thus destroy the support and hence the very purpose of nailing. And even when nailing through the bones of the ankle, this would usually shatter or beak the bone and thus would not leave a nail and thus we would not know the cause of the damage. So in most cases nailing would leave no visible trace on the bones, or nothing likely to be noticed or identifiable--even presuming we can actually recover every bone from each burial recovered, which has not been the case. So in actual fact, we may have recovered hundreds of crucifixion victims and not know it. Join that to the fact that every single source we have from the time says they would be buried, and were required to be buried by law, and no source says otherwise, nor does any source say anything about mass pits being used there, nor is there any archaeological evidence of such a thing.

In addition, maybe it was not Crossan who tried to appeal to the finding of lie pits in Jerusalem as evidence of grave pits. But the historian who appealed to that evidence is quite ignorant of the use of lie pits: to manufacture concrete. There is no evidence, archaeological or literary, of lie pits ever being used to inter corpses at all, much less en masse.

Amaleq13

From the thread I linked above:

Richard Carrier

I do not argue for any Essene connection in that article--I speak only generically of alternative Jewish solutions to the same problem.

The Essene connection is identified by Hippolytus who relies on a source for the six factions of Essenes that bears sufficient resemblance to Josephus (yet gives more detail) that it is probable they were both using the same earlier source. Hippolytus thus identifies the Zealots as Essenes in Refutation of All Heresies 9.26.2. And though Josephus does not outright say it, he implies this by always describing the Zealots either immediately before or immediately after a lengthy description of the Essenes, and attributes similar beliefs to them (compare BJ 2.154-55 with 7.343-48). Less relevantly, there may have been a Zealot among the Disciples: Luke 6:15, Acts 1:13; and the Galileean peasant rebel movement that Crossan speaks of was the Zealot movement (begun by Judas the Galileean, as Josephus explains in detail--hence the Zealots were also a Galileean sect, just like the Christians, and arose at almost the very same time), while Dead Sea Scroll experts find both Essene and Zealot elements in the Scrolls, and some have thus suggested a connection.

Richard Carrier

Amaleq13, you are not following any accepted method I know of from textual analysis to arrive at your conclusion that Mark 1:9 was not original to the text. As far as I can see, there is no valid evidence even pointing to that conclusion.

You claim that "the version in Mt...doesn't support Mk." That's backwards, since Matthew wrote after Mark and thus altered Mark (in far more ways than just this). Even the passage 3:13 omits several words and changes several others, while Mt. had already established the town earlier in 2:23 and thus did not have to repeat himself here, whereas in Mark it is the first reference. In contrast, Luke even omits Galilee in his version of the same passage (3:21), thus by your reasoning even the Galilee reference was interpolated in Mark and not original. That is simply invalid reasoning not accepted by any expert in textual analysis I know.

You also claim that Matthew uses a different form of the word. Incorrect. Matthew uses the exact same form, nazaret, in 2:23. He also uses nazara in 4:13, then nazareth in 21:11, thus he was not committed to any one form. Luke uses two forms--the latter two, but not the first. John uses only the first, nazaret.

Then you claim "nazarhnos...is not derived from it at all--how can a gentilic nazarhnos come from nazaret? You should expect nazarethnos." I have no idea where you get the latter construction. Where would the theta come from, and why would it be consonantally paired with the nu? That seems a strange expectation to me, hardly what would be normal on the Greek nor is it explicable in Aramaic as far as I know. Mark says nazaret, not nazareth, and neither word is a proper gentilic. This is simply not a Greek word. It is a translitteration of a foreign word (probably Aramaic). Therefore, how the adjective would be formed is open to the free license of the author, since it cannot follow ordinary procedures. But the most obvious construction would be nazarhnos after the closest available model in actual Greek: hellhnos from hellas.

In other words, ending in a consonant from a minor declension, hellas (as a model typical of all alpha-sigma terminators) is the closest equivalent to hellat (or hellet), especially given the phonic association between the sigma and tau (tau is an abruptly stopped sigma). Otherwise, no words end in tau in Greek, so therefore there is no model closer to ending in an alpha-tau or epsilon-tau than ending with an alpha-sigma. And the rule for nouns terminating in alpha-sigma is to drop the noun terminator and terminate the adjective with hnos, due to the standard rule that you add the adjectival ending -anos to the root, and when the root ends in an alpha you get aanos and double alpha collapses to eta.

That isn't the only way to do it (Nazaraianos, for example, would also be valid), but Nazarenos is acceptable and ordinary Greek. In contrast, Nazarethnos is definitely not correct--you haven't even removed the noun terminator to expose the root before adding the adjective terminator, and even then the adjective terminator is typically -anos or -inos (or even an outright -hnos or -ianos), not just -nos.

S.C.Carlson

Not that it affects your conclusion all that much, but I think that the th in the transliteration of *nazarethnos is supposed to mean tau-eta not a theta.

Stephen

Amaleq13

It isn't my argument. I just quoted it from the linked thread. I have to rely on others with regard to any linguistic analysis of Greek so I'll PM spin so he can respond and/or offer further explanation if he wishes.

Amaleq13

I have since found another thread in which spin discusses the subject so I can offer some clarification on the following point:

I think spin was summarizing/paraphrasing but he finds this singular reference to "Nazareth" in Mark to be a likely interpolation.

1) For every other appearance of that word in English translations of Mark's Gospel, the original is actually "Nazarene" which is totally unrelated to the town of Nazareth.

2) The author of Mark describes Capernaum and not Nazareth as the home of Jesus (2:1).

3) Matthew's parallel of this passage does not have "Nazareth".

4) Luke is understood to be relying on a different source for his parallel passage.

Vorkosigan

I don't know why those names were chosen (What do the Mary-s represent?) but I think the overall parallelism is clear. In any case the relationship is dictated by the fact that the two passages are the A and A' brackets for the structure of the Crucifixion scene.

Thanks for the info on Nazareth/Nazarene. I'll have to do a lot of re-writing.

Vorkosigan