Amaleq13

It still seems to me that you are trying to establish probabilities for nicknames with statistics about baby names. If you aren't, then you have abandoned any pretense of being able to estimate the combined odds of a rare-named guy and a guy given that rare name as a nickname being prominent in the same developing sect. Good!

You're giving me a headache again, Ted. In the same post you deny and confirm that you are treating nicknames the same as baby names by applying the data for the latter to the former. This is simply invalid. And tiresome.

This is the assumption I deny because you have no basis for it.

We only know what we are told in Mt 16:16 so I don't see how you can pretend to have enough information to make any sort of judgment, let alone derive anything approaching a reliable probability estimate.

So you are treating them the same? And you wonder why I am confused? If this is your actual position, then I continue to consider it flawed. The frequency distribution of child-names tells us nothing about nicknames and it is entirely invalid to pretend otherwise.

You just did and continued to do so in the rest of the paragraph that followed this statement.

You are misusing the "data" (You haven't even confirmed that Cephas/Peter was actually a rare name) and pretending it tells you something it cannot. Again.

The frequency distribution of baby names tells us nothing about the likelihood that a given name would be chosen as a nickname and until you stop pretending otherwise, your conclusion will be fatally flawed.

TedM

I"m sorry. I will try again because your responses don't indicate that you understand what I'm saying yet. I will try to make it more clear:

Assumptions
1. There was a Cephas who was prominent in the early Church. I call him Paul's Cephas.
2. There was a Cephas who received the name as a nickname from Jesus who was prominent in the early Church. I'll call him Gospel Cephas.
3. The name Cephas was uncommon as a birth name.

Possibilities:
1. Paul's Cephas and the Gospel Cephas were two different people
2. Paul's Cephas and the Gospel Cephas were the same person.


Assertions:
1. If Possibility #1 is true, then something unlikely happened: Paul's Cephas was named Cephas at birth.
2. If Possibility #2 is true then something unlikely didn't happen.

Conclusion:
The most probable possibility is #2, since it doesn't require something unlikely to have happened.

Notice, that none of the above requires making any kind of calculation at all for the likelihood of Jesus naming someone Peter.

Does this help explain what I'm saying?

thanks for your patience,

ted

Amaleq13

Yes.

Any confirmation available for this?

Ben C Smith

Dale Allison writes in Peter and Cephas: One and the Same:

Furthermore, in pre-Christian sources Kêpā' as a proper name is attested only once, and ∏ετρος as a proper name not at all.

In a footnote he mitigates this a bit by noting that ∏ετρος is attested in (but not before) the first century amongst pagans.

He does not give his source for this data; perhaps Fitzmyer, cited in the previous footnote?

Ben.

Solo

Ted, sorry pal, but this looks pretty lame if it is supposed to be propositional logic.

First, you create a false dichotomy between "Cephas" as a nickname given to him by flesh-and-blood Jesus, and a first name given to him by his parents. Then you run a tautological test which asserts one of the premises as true (Jesus gave him the name) by pointing to the unlikelihood of the obverse (the name was given to him by his parents). In reality, the logical issues are as follows:

1) Whether Cephas/Kepha/Petros was or was not a common name in Palestine at the time is strictly a Q.E.D. proposition

2) That Cephas could have obtained his name or nickname from someone else than (the man) Jesus or his own parents, is plainly a possibility. Perhaps you should know that the adoption of a new name often suggest itself to people experiencing an outset of temporal lobe disorders, as a way to express the shift in their identity markers and the uncanny sense of "new life" which the para- or ab-normal brain functions sponsor.

3) Whether Cephas of Paul's epistles was or was not Peter of the Gospels, cannot be established by pointing either to the commonality or rareness of the name, or its presumptive origin.

Jiri

spin

Just so that you lot are playing with a full deck, the name Caiaphas in Aramaic is either QYP) or QP). Now while one transliteration of the name into Greek is Caiaphas, there is no reason why it shouldn't be transliterated as khfas (h = eta), ie Cephas.

Remember that YOD can be transliterated as an eta (as in the name Isaiah YSYHW is Hsaias in Greek and GYHWN, the river Gihon in Gen 2:13, is Ghon) and that QOF in Hebrew is usually transliterated as a kappa in Greek.

Multiple transliterations if the one name are known from Hebrew to Greek, eg Gihon in 1 Kgs 1:33 is Giwn.

Paul's Cephas need not be Rocky at all. It could be Caiaphas.


spin

TedM

WHile you may be right, your explanation is so unclear that I can't make anything of it. I don't even know what 'eta' is, for example.

ted

spin

Aren't you embarrassed with such an admission -- not even knowing what 'eta' is?? How do you spell Jesus or Cephas in Greek??


spin

TedM

It is based on what we have. We have Cephas from Paul whose name origin is unknown. And we have a Cephas from the Gospels whose name origin is given. Since the question I'm trying to answer is whether the Gospel Cephas is the same person as Paul's Gospel or there were two different actual such people this is a valid and complete starting point.

That's one use of statistics, Solo.

This is a paramount to the issue.

Sure, this is possible, but unless you want to argue that this is common I don't see that it has much relevance. If you add this to the mix then we still have only one reasonable conclusion: The Gospel Cephas and the Paul Cephas are not two different actual individuals.


Well, that's what I did. Once you conclude that they weren't two people, THEN you can argue about whether the Gospel Peter really existed or really did some of the things purported.

IF you'd like to present your own list of assumptions, possibilities, assertions and conclusions that include an assumption about the name being uncommon and then show that a likely conclusion includes the existence of two Cephas' who were prominent in the early Christian community, I challenge you to do so.

Stated another way: Assuming the name was uncommon, give me a scenario in which it would not have been unlikely for there to have been 2 prominent Cephas's in the early Christian movement, and explain why: Hint, one cannot have been named Cephas at birth because of the assumption.

ted

TedM

How arrogant of you, spin. If anyone should be ashamed of themselves, it should be you. Why should I be embarrassed? I've never taken Greek, Aramaic or Hebrew. Your explanation was probably not understood by 90% of the people who read it. Who are you writing for?

ted