stephan huller

Let me start by saying that I can accept the idea that Chrestos was a mistake for Christos in at least some of the ancient manuscripts. Yet at the same time it has to be recognized that the Deir Ali inscription makes clear that the Marcionites were associated with identifying Jesus as 'Chrestos' an phenomenon which is witnessed in other Patristic writers (albeit never explicitly connected with the Marcionites).

I have proposed the connection with yashar. My teacher I R M Boid of Monash University argued for development from Shilo arguing that Chrêstos, although superlative in form, often only means appropriate or right, not the most appropriate.

Boid argued that the connotation of the common use of the superlative form is to signify the right person or the right thing, when only one can be the right one. The right one is therefore the one most right. The right one is therefore superior even to Moses.. This is to be the king that will be a king in the full sense, unlike David or Solomon, who were far inferior to Moses. He will be greater even than Moses.

It was Boid's contention that we should translate Shiloh as “the right one”. He developed this argument by looking at the surviving translations from antiquity. Aquila, the translation authorised by Rabbinic Judaism, is the most explicit. The Peshitta agrees. I don’t mean this is the literal etymological meaning, because that is obscure, but this is what the word was universally taken to mean in the context. Neither does the LXX disagree in translating the word as ΑΠΟΚΕΙΜΕΝΟΣ meaning “the one stored away”. See Deuteronomy 32:34. (The next verse gives you Menachem, the comforter and avenger, both being literal meanings of the word). Boid argued that this could have been interpreted theologically. Whose body lay uncorrupted in an unfindable cave, waiting for the time of Manifestation?

Neither does the Rabbinic connection with descent from Judah ultimately differ. Neither does the translation of Targum Onkelos differ when it translate both ways, as the Anointed to whom belongs the kingship. The Palestinian Targum has the Anointed one, the last of his descendants, meaning the last descendant of Judah to hold kingship, because holding complete and everlasting kingship. In this context, the anointing is the anointing of the High Priest, but the High Priest of the Heavenly Tabernacle, like Moses.

It was his contention that it could be argued that these concepts were been obscured by the church’s fixation on descent from David and ordinary kingship for Jesus. Boid thought to have been deliberately set up to take attention away from Moses, and to obscure the nature of Christianity. Look what has been done to obscure the meaning of the title Christos, and to pretend the alternative Chrêstos was never used by Christians.

Boid argued that the only real importance to Jesus being descended from David was that that made him a descendant of Judah and eligible to be Judah, the second Moses. He contended that if you looked at the genealogies without presuppositions, they are concerned with descent from Judah more than from David.

I have started by putting forward someone else's interpretation of the title Chrestos associated with the Marcionites. When everyone is put to bed I will follow up with my own ideas. The most important thing to take away from all of this is that the Jewish concept of 'the messiah' just doesn't work with Samaritan Christian heresies. These sects certainly did exist. They were very influential on Marcionitism. To simply use the Catholic scriptures and their assumptions regarding 'Jesus Christ' and plug them into the beliefs of their enemies only serves to reinforce our inherited prejudices.

J-D

HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA! WOO-HOO-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA! AH-HA, AH-HA, AH-HA! Hee-hee-ha-ha-hee-hee-ha! Hee-hee-hee! Ha-ha!

That was a good one. Thanks, I needed that.

mountainman

Codex Sinaiticus dated to the late 4th century is hardly what I would term the beginning. Was your response designed to address the OP and the presence of "Chrestians" at Codex Sinaiticus; Acts 11:26 (with no marks in the margin), and if so, you didn't seem to address this directly above.

stephan huller

I have about 15 minutes to explain myself as tomorrow is my son's birthday and I have all sorts of loose ends to tie up. The reason I was dissatisfied with Boid's explanation is that assumes that Jesus was a human being. I don't have an opinion on the subject either way. The point is that in order to understand the Marcionite tradition and those of the other Samaritan heresies it is impossible to begin with Jesus the man. Jesus is for the Marcionites the divine being who appeared in Jerusalem before the Jubilee (hence the name of the text = the gospel).

Once you start to think about the title Jesus Chrestos under this light the yashar root looks more and more like correct one. Yashar is always taken by early commentators to be the root behind the name Israel and the name of the nation was established through an angel.

The fact that yesharim is also the name of the group at Qumran also opens a number of other possibilities with the Marcionites. For the Community Rule develops a strong parallel with the Marcionite gospel narrative:

This is clearly also the context of the Marcionite gospel. God has come down from heaven to Jerusalem before the 'year of favor.' The difficulty has always been that the Patristic writers are careless or less than interested in providing us with a clear understanding of the Marcionite religion.

I have always contented that there can be only one Son and one Father. The Father was unknown and 'strange' = the other. Jesus must have been the repentant Creator who was changed from coming into the realization that there was a superior being above him. But that's another story.

The point here is that at the most basic level the Marcionites at least theoretically have some basic principles in common with the Qumran sect. The orthodox tradition while embracing the Jewish God really lacks any specific 'Jewish roots' per se.

One can create a theoretical model where Christianity developed in Alexandria through Philo's sect of healers (who happen to bear some striking similarities with the Qumran community). Maybe there is something to Eusebius's claim that St Mark founded the monasteries of the Therapeutae. Who knows. Got to go.

mountainman

Thanks for these references. Can you advise which Greek form related to χρηστοι occurs in Plato, who is reported to have used the term "The Good" in his texts by Plotinus?

mountainman

When you get out of the hairdresser with your family ....

My motivation is to discover the historical truth of christian origins, and before this can be done we need to carefully disambiguate these persistent appearances of "Chrestian origins" and "Christian origins" in the historical record. So what do you make of Codex Sinaiticus; Acts 11:26 ?

stephan huller

Ignoring this annoyance of these fourth century conspiracy theorists for a moment (as I settle down to watch Midnight in Paris again), it isn't just that 1QS III makes reference to a visitation of God to mankind over and over again:

And it isn't just that many of the accompanying ideas sound Christian the Marcionite connection is again reinforced by the intimation of something approaching Persian dualism in the writings.

IMO scholars who study the DSS have a very limited knowledge of the Marcionites. They read a few books on the subject (mostly uncritical regurgitation of accusations developed by Tertullian and Irenaeus) and then continue to deal with 'Jesus the man' and the gospels on the one hand and the eschatological expectations of the Qumran sect on the other. Those two lines will never meet.

Yet if you start to think in terms of the Marcionite interest in Chrestos and more important Clement's reference to the terminology (and this in spite of repeated evidence that 'chrestos' was systematically changed to 'Christos' (cf. Clement's use of 1 Peter 2:3). I think there is the beginning of a line of argument which can finally connect the Jesus cult to the Qumran community.

I also remember reading somewhere (I don't know how reliable the source) that a nomen sacrum meaning 'chrestos' was used in antiquity as a means of checking the quality of the works of scribes (i.e. that the writing was 'good' or 'checked' by someone with what became the Christ symbol). I have in vain searched for this reference so I could verify the evidence.

Maklelan

I was just getting to the root of the question, mountainman. Christ and Christian are unquestionably original. They're fundamental to the entire Christian identity from their beginnings in Jewish eschatological tradition. Chrestos is a play on words that was quite easy to adopt because it was complimentary, it was pretty generic, and it already had currency in Greco-Roman and Hellenistic Jewish circles. It helped to obscure the Christian identity in a time when it was dangerous to be associated with that name, and it was an ironic nickname that antagonists and the uninformed quickly picked up. Abercius' epitaph, which puts his Christianity rather transparently between the lines and winks at the understanding reader, directly substantiates that obscuring practice.

Any number of scenarios accounts for the presence of ΧΡΗΣΤΙΑΝΟΥ in Sinaiticus, but the one scenario that is absolutely precluded is the idea that Christ/Christian is secondary, and that Chrestos is original. That's your whole point. If you'd like to acknowledge the failure of that theory and move on the question of identifying the reason for the appearance of the secondary ΧΡΗΣΤΙΑΝΟΥ in Sinaiticus then that's fine, but that argument is not a home base you can run to to avoid the arguments against your fundamental claim. Your theory is exclusively and entirely dependent upon the notion that Chrestos is original. That notion is demonstrably false.

Maklelan

χρηστοι in the nominative appears in Cratylus (386 b.5; d.5), Hipparchus (227 d.3; 232 c.5), Euthydemus (307 b.7), and Leges (950 b.7). It appears in other cases a few dozen times in these and other works. In each case it is used to refer generically to good people, usually as a contrast to wicked people. It does not have a special appellative use. Plotinus was a third century philosopher, and there are only eight total occurrences of any form of word beginning with χρηστ- in his writings. Here are all of them with a few lines of context for each:

The usage here is pretty similar.

J-D

I wish you luck, but I estimate your chances of success as small.