stephan huller

My working hypothesis is that yeshu was not a personal name but was the identity of his role in relation to the Father god. Jesus was 'his substance.' As I have noted here many times, in Biblical Hebrew the masculine third person of yesh (being) remains consistent in Middle Hebrew = yeshno. But the related term eineno becomes eino (i.e. dropping the 'superfluous' nun as Ibn Ezra calls it). It is puzzling enough why the nun appears there in Biblical Hebrew but it is even more unusual that yeshno stays the same while eino becomes 'normal' again in Middle Hebrew. I think the nun was kept to distinguish the term from the name of Jesus. But that's not a great argument.

The fact that the LXX preserves the name of God in the burning bush narrative as ho on is probably a better line of argument.

In any event, as I have said before the only difficulty with the mythicist position is what to do with the name Jesus. Divine beings never take on human names and vice versa (until recently = Michael, Gabriel etc). It's still a work in progress.

Sheshbazzar

Yeah I get it, and see jeebus being fully as fictional as the fish tale.

stephan huller

On the editing of the name yeshu out of Jewish manuscripts:

outhouse

alot of trouble creating a attribute to Yahweh when they had a god not lacking or needing a change, this is where most mythers fail in a epic way.

Yahweh was not in need of a renovation, nor any hint of it. And we have a clear picture of the fight in the church to make the claim questioning the divinity. even by 325 ad they were still not in agreement on this divinity.

what we see is a new movement struggling with what to do over this newly worshipped man hundreds of years after his death.

outhouse

thanks for the info. and for a civil discusion

my lack of interest in Yeshua stops around 400 AD after the trinity is firmly established

stephan huller

This kind of logic is fallacious because Jews take the word yesh to point to a divine being already present in the Pentateuch. It goes back as far as the earliest sources in medieval texts - Ibn Ezra, Abulafia, Gikatilla. The only question is whether the specific form yeshu which is only a theoretical possibility was also connected to this hidden power (i.e. yesh = there is/being/substance, yeshno = his being/substance, yesho = a theoretical equivalent of yeshno in Middle Hebrew). The argument is only strengthened slightly by:

a) the fact that its companion eino exists in Middle Hebrew
b) the fact that it is so weird to speak of 'his being' in the first place. Even yeshno is rarely used in the Pentateuch so it is difficult to uncover witnesses in manuscripts of Middle Hebrew when we have so few documents in this language anyway.

Adam

I have presented this for you guys a number of times as my "Gospel According to the Atheists", in which I work with your presuppositions that we work only with texts with no intrinsic supernaturalism. It turns out to be basically Proto-Luke plus the Passion Narrative (as in the source in gJohn). Go to my Post #555 in my thread Gospel Eyewitnesses:
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread....306983&page=23

Then where towards the end "So the proposed Gospel According to the Atheists...." appears, substitute this corrected text (in which brackets and Bold indicate the substitutions:

So the proposed Gospel According to the Atheists has a snag on the final section. Back to the list from Church WOW Proto-Luke including Q passages: 3:1-4:30; 5:1-11; 6:20-8:3; 9:51-18:14; 19:1-28, 37-44, 47-48; 22:14-24:53
from http://wowchurch.blogspot.com/2009/0...l-of-luke.html
But delete the last section from Luke and substitute [John 11:54, 12:2-8, John 11:54, 12:2-8, 12-14a, 13:18 or 21, and 13:38], Luke 22:1-38 and then the Synoptic parallels in John 18 and 19:
One can read just chapters 18 and 19 here in Fortna’s Signs:
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/signs.html
Or here’s my list I’ve provided a number of times:’ John 18:1b, 1d, 3, 10b, 12, 13b, 15-19, 22, 25b, 27-31, 33-35, (36-40); 19:1-5a, 9-19, 21-23, 28-30, 38b, 40-42.
[To agree with my Post #230, from all the above subtract Q2 material from Q (identified by too much identity between Matthew and Luke). A separate later Q2 in Greek makes better sense to explain about a dozen sequences. These include Lk. 3:7-9, 16-17; 6:36-42, 7:18-23; 9:57-10:24; 11:1-4, 9-32; 12:2-7; 12:22-31,39-46; 13:34-35; 17:1-2. These passages are disproportionately about John the Baptist and apocalypticism.]

I have prescreened the above to find it free of incredible supernatural happenings. Healings and such that can be explained away may be found, but even these are few. This gives us Proto-Luke pretty much as written. It combines the very early eyewitness accounts of whoever wrote Q, L and the first Passion Narrative (respectively in my opinion Matthew, Simon, and John Mark). They simply wrote what they heard and saw. The final version of gLuke does add supernatural features that Proto-Luke avoids, mostly because it adds in so very much from gMark. The other eyewitness, Nicodemus, limited himself to sayings of Jesus (the Johannine Discourses) that in the earlier stages misrepresented what Jesus said. Nevertheless, I contend that the above Proto-Luke is a complete gospel as it was in 62 CE, restyled here as The Gospel According to the Atheists.
[The raw text from Nicodemus, my modification of Teeple’s G, runs as follows:
3 (in the main); 4:20-24; most of 5:17-47; 6:26-51, 58-65; most of 7:5-52; 8:12-57; most of 9 & 10, but not 9:1-2, 6-7, 13-17, 24-28; 11:1, 9-10, 16; 12:23-50 13:16, 20; Ch. 14-17. [corrected]
This can be read in parallel or as supplement with respect to the above. This insert repeats my #38 in Gospel eyewitnesses.]

outhouse

with it being such a common name, I dont see it.


I do see, as today. people have had issues with it. i do. He's not a deity, never was.

outhouse

they made up a special name with meaning from within judaism in creating MJ.

or

it was a common name and they had to figure out what to do with it.




its 50/50 is it not?

stephan huller

You also have to remember that yeshu is only THEORETICALLY connected with yeshuah because this is already a short form of Yehoshuah. Yes, the term shows up as the Syriac name of Jesus. Yes, the Church Fathers seem to connect the three letter form with Jesus. But is yeshu a short form of an already shortened form of Joshua? There's no proof of that. It's just assumed because it is applied to the God of the Christians whom we 'know' was really named Jesus.