mountainman

Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 3035



Image: P. Oxy. XLII 3035 (© Copyright the Egypt Exploration Society).




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avi

Hi Pete,

Thanks for introducing this papyrus, in the context of re-examining the chrestiani.

It does look, at least to me, as though the text displays eta, rather than iota.

There have been some interesting posts in earlier threads, if I am not mistaken, on this topic. Seems to me, maybe in error, that Sheshbazzar had a very useful post on Chrestiani, a while back, maybe two years ago, or so.....

?
Is it possible that, back then, just as there were certain conventions (nomina sacra, etc), and certain methods of penmanship that seem a bit awkward today, that the scribe wrote an eta, thinking of iota?

Is it possible that eta is a variant reading, often substituted for iota, in other words, as well?

I am thinking, as I write this, of my forthcoming message to Ben regarding papyrus POxy 3.405, because the first letter, Beta, looks, to my untrained eye, like Kappa, instead. Maybe there were wide variations in penmanship?

Is it possible that this bit was tossed onto the rubbish heap because of the spelling error?

Maybe the scribe, working for the police, issuing this warrant, was a native Copt speaker, whose understanding of Greek would have been less than perfect: look at the letter rho, following the chi, for example, not really well done, right?

Or, alternatively, maybe in Coptic, a Hamitic language, the vowels are somewhat less important than they are in the IndoEuropean languages, like Greek, so, for that scribe, there was no distinction between eta and iota, in terms of the sound of the word, so he/she simply transcribed a verbal instruction according to what he/she heard from his/her superior.

avi

stephan huller

An inscription at Deir Ali, Syria written five years after the edict of toleration (318 CE) references 'Jesus Chrestos.' The title Chrestos IMO comes from the identification of Jesus among the heretics as the angel of the presence who wrestled with Jacob at Peniel and from which the nation of Israel derived its name (chrestos = yashar in the LXX and yashar is usually identified by early sources as the source of the name Israel).

Toto

By the third century, eta and iota would have been pronounced the same in Koine Greek, as they are in modern Greek.

You will find many previous threads in this forum on Christos vs. Chrestus and Christian vs. Chrestian. It's hard to draw any particular conclusion from this papyrus. The anomaly that sticks out for me is that this Christian or Chrestian is called "Petosarapin of Horus" invoking two different Egyptian pagan gods (the prefix pete- refers to "given by" Sarapis being the Greek spelling of Serapis.)

avi

Here's a rather

interesting blog on the topic:

So, "good", versus "annointed".

Yup, learn something new, every day. Thanks again Pete.

avi

mountainman

Anything is possible of course, but the presence of the word "Chrestian" on a number of both manuscripts and inscriptions mitigates towards the option that the word "Chrestian" is not a simple scribal spelling mistake brought on by the trauma of ennunciating "Christians".

Earlier Useage

350 BCE
Plato (in Phaed. 264 B) has [chrestos ei hoti hegei] --
"you are an excellent fellow to think . . ."

333 BCE
Demosthenes saying [o Chreste] (330, 27),
means by it simply "you nice fellow";

So perhaps "chrestian" is some form of title like "The Good Person" or "The Excellent One" or even just "The Good" or something like that. I think it must have been reasonably common. Some reports identify it to be associated with as the bowl found following excavation of the underwater ruins of Alexandria's ancient great harbor. (No wonder Alexandria's the place to go)




POxy 3.405

Curiously I was looking around for data on this when I became sidetracked with 3035. I dont seem to be able to find much data on POxy 3.405, which I presume is the one that is being passed off as a third century copy of one of Irenaeus's texts. It seems strange to find at the one place fragments of the orthodox heresiologist Irenaeus beside fragments of the books of the heretics. Who could possibly be preserving both of these at once at Oxyrhynchus in the 3rd century?

mountainman

Thanks for this reference. I did a search on "Jesus Chrestos" and found that acccording to Manichaean texts from the Roman Empire By Iain Gardner, Samuel N. C. Lieu (2004), there are multiple references in some of Mani's Epistles, not to "Jesus Christos" but to "Jesus Chrestos".

mountainman

Thanks, yes there are multiple pagan gods here - Serapis and Horus.



I too think its hard to draw any particular conclusion from POxy 3035.

stephan huller

mountainman,

The way I see it if you thought Jesus was a man you called him Christos, if you thought he was some supernatural being or God you called him Chrestos. The thing that complicates that neat packaging is that the name Shilo can be argued to be translated by the Gk chrestos (Shilo = 'the right' one). In that case Chrestos could apply to a human being within the Jewish tradition. Nevertheless the types of sects that identified Jesus with Chrestos all seem to emphasize his divine nature. As such I take the LXX's translation of chrestos for yashar as being more important (see the early interest in Jeshurun as related to the name Israel, or Jacob taking his name from an angel named Sariel or Israel, Suriel or the like).

avi

Here are some links, from Philosopher Jay's thread currently active, on the force required to implement the canon:
Matthew 3:16-17 in Codex Sinaiticus, revealing the same writing style, as found in P.Oxy 3.405--i.e. writing "kappa" to represent "beta".
link kindly provided by Toto, in which the four fragments of P.Oxy 3.405 are stated as belonging to a roll, but clarified earlier today, by Andrew as likely having once been part of a scroll.
Ben's excellent web site, which displays, character by character, a precise transliteration of the main section of text (delimited by the three labels, a, b, f) on the largest of the four fragments. Nota bene, that more than 90% of this fragment, a,b,f, is devoted to quoting a passage from Matthew 3: 16-17, and, so far as I can tell, the assessment, that these four fragments belong to AH by "Irenaeus" is based upon fewer than ten Greek symbols:

μη ζητουσιν

according to Ben,
but, in my post earlier today, at Jay's thread, I have asked for clarification on this point, because I do not see a few of these symbols on the fragment.

I wonder if those fewer than ten alphabetical characters are all that we have, as evidence of a "second century" date of authorship?

avi