dizzy

Okay, so Heracleon seems to have denied that anything happened in Capernaum, much to Origen's displeasure. Origen then marshals the synoptics and crushes his opponent. (How wonderfully Christian.) But I think I'm confused. Heracleon says "[Jesus] is not reported either to have done anything or said anything in [Capernaum]." Which gospel was he reading? An early version of John with different text? Origen refutes Heracleon by quoting Matthew, Mark and Luke, but not John. But in our John, the healing of the official's son happens in Capernaum :huh:

P.S. I must have a dirty mind. I find this hilarious:

aa5874

Even the author of gJohn appears to be confused about Jesus of Nazareth. It seems that the author realizes that there was NO prophecy for Jesus to be from Nazareth.

Jesus was supposed to be born in Bethlehem form the seed of David.


John 18.40- And this is the supposed prophecy that was to be fulfilled according to the scriptures.

Micah 5:2 - It is NOW internally confirmed Jesus of Nazareth was UTTER FICTION.

Not even the PROPHETS made any so-called predictions about Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus of NAZARETH in the NT was a FABLE of a FAKE MESSIAH based on NOTHING but FICTION.

Examine the Fiction.

Matthew 2.23 Jesus of Nazareth was a COMPLETE fake Messiah, a fiction character. No wonder Philo,, Suetonius, Tacitus and Pliny the younger Josephus wrote NOTHING, ZERO, about the FAKE Messiah called Jesus.

Kapyong

Gday,

There's your problem - you are attacking a straw-man. It would be better if you addressed the real argument.

A "fiction made up of whole cloth" (i.e. anything goes) is NOT my argument, nor is it the mainstream JM argument at all.

The story was NOT made "of whole cloth" at all. It was clearly made up from PRIOR themes and ideas, including the OT and pagan literature.

The stories of Jesus clearly ARE based on something - the OT. Not history. The Jesus stories ARE constrained by prior knowledge - of religious literature, not historical event.


Or they could have had him come from Nazareth because of some confused belief in a Nazarite.

There are many possible reasons why Jesus is believed to came from Nazareth. Reasons OTHER than it being history.

You fail to address this point.

Any story about Luke Skywalker must have him born on Tatooine - because everyone already 'knows' that. Any new story that had Luke born somewhere else would be ridiculed.

That does NOT mean Luke really was born in Tatooine.

Same thing with Jesus - for some unclear reason (perhaps related to religious beliefs about a Nazarite or Nazorean) Jesus was later said to have come from Nazareth. This claim could have many sources APART from history. You never address that.

You simply assert that this claim must be true.



Who?
Who knew Jesus as child in Nazareth?
We have no evidence of that at all - you just assumed your conclusion.

Anyway - the Gospel stories did not circulate till mid-2nd century at best - well over a CENTURY after the events, after Rome had trashed Jerusalem twice.

There was NO-ONE left to argue.


But the first hypothesis is just your strawman - it bears no relation to the JM argument.

The JM argument does NOT say Jesus was made up from whole cloth.


K.

Ferryman to the Dead

Myths can contain historical elements and some facts or information such as places were real places in time but the fact remains that this city named Nazareth was a concocted city and never existed.

spin

So, when the town name appears in a fragment of a priestly roster found at Caesarea (M. Avi-Yonah, "A List of Priestly Courses from Caesarea." Israel Exploration Journal 12 (1962):137-139.), it referred to a town that didn't exist? I guess that seems likely to you.

The only reason why this Nazareth didn't exist argument continues is because of the silence of the written record, ie texts don't refer to Nazareth. However, arguments from silence only work when there is a reason to suspect that the silence is extraordinary. There is no reason to think that a shitbox of a town needs to be mentioned somewhere in some ancient text for the convenience of later readers. If the town of Nazareth was invented by christians, why couldn't they have got the spelling right? The very fact that the town name is spelled differently from its appearance in christian Greek underlines the fact that it came from a different source from the christians who accepted Nazareth as the home town of Jesus.


spin

show_no_mercy

Matt 2:23 says that Jesus would be called a ΝΑΖΡΩΡΑΙΟΝ "according to the prophets". This word is found nowhere in "the prophets", or anywhere for that matter. It's probably not a far stretch to say that Matt's gospel is the first time this word pops up in the historical record.

If John used Matt's invented word ΝΑΖΩΡΑΙΟΣ then John was reading from or was aware of Matt or some other synoptic that used Matt (there are propbably more "synoptics" than Mark and Luke... like Markion's gospel, the gospel of the Hebrews, etc.).

John uses ΝΑΖΩΡΑΙΟΣ at 19:19, so John is not an independent source.

Well just to completely contradict my first response, Matt is probably the one to reference the word "nazirite" in relation to Jesus. Matt 2:23 again says that Jesus would be called a ΝΑΖΩΡΑΙΟΝ according to the prophets.

If you search the books of the prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi) in the Greek LXX, you'll come across a word that sounds similar to Matt's invented ΝΑΖΩΡΑΙΟΣ. That's at Judges 13:5 where Samson is predicted to be a ΝΑΖΙΡΑΙΟΣ, but in English it's written as Nazirite.

Taking into consideration Matt's habit of taking phrases out of context to make "prophecies" about Jesus' messiah-hood, this fits his modus operandi of reading the "he will be called a Nazirite" out of context and inserting it into his gospel to make it a prediction about Jesus.

To corroborate this (albeit it is about 100 years later), Tertullian in "Against Marcion" writes:

The Christ of the Creator had to be called a Nazarene according to prophecy; whence the Jews also designate us, on that very account, Nazerenes after Him. For we are they of whom it is written, "Her Nazarites were whiter than snow"

Tertullian is citing Lamentations 4:7, which has the plural of Nazirites in Greek: ΝΑΖΙΡΑΙΟΙ.

Luke and John also use Matt's derived word ΝΑΖΩΡΑΙΟΣ. Mark consistently uses Nazarene (ΝΑΖΑΡΗΝΟΣ) except for the outlier at 1:9 which Toto and spin already addressed.

+or-1

Simple. Each author took the Jesus story from the same myth and the myth says Nazareth.

motorhead

I have no problem believing that Jesus of Nazareth existed. And if he came from a village in Israel in Nazareth, good for him. And if he didn't, who cares.

The more important issues are are around who he was exactly, what he thought of himself, what he preached exactly, etc. There's a myriad of different answers, all based on the canonical gospels (and some even use non-canonical gospels). So, who's right? How do you know? And even if you believe the canonical gospels contain actual teachings of Jesus (and there's a whole other subject, i.e. synoptic gospels, gospel of John), they're apparently open to interpretation, as Christians cannot agree on interpretation of various verses.

So, okay, have your historical Jesus. What's more important is everything else around the canonical gospels.

dizzy

It appears the fragment is dated to the 3rd or 4th century. Is this a smoking gun for a 1st century Nazareth? I don't know. Do you?

bacht

In Mark, Jesus appears at the Jordan and receives the Spirit of God. Later in the text his family is mentioned and his "home" (possibly Capernaum as spin pointed out), but the whole story can be interpreted as being about two characters, Jesus of Galilee and the divine spirit that entered him at the start of his career (and left him on the cross).

Matthew and Luke weren't comfortable with this so they included stories about Jesus' birth to counter the docetist arguments. Of course these were convenient hooks to hang more prophecy on (Egypt, Bethlehem, slaughter of the children). Luke gives us the charming stories about Mary & Elizabeth and young Jesus disputing with religious teachers.

John doesn't care about these things so he ignores the birth narratives of the others. He even has a character say "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?", possibly a dig at the synoptic writers.

This stuff is plastic and fluid. These writers felt free to invent their own versions of the gospel story, as long as it included Jesus the Galilean challenging the Judean authorities.