spin

Hope springs eternal. Whatever, it doesn't suddenly suffer voicing.

Come on, Ben C. This one's even worse than connecting nazarhnos with NCRT. You've got to argue the hopeless cases, choosing the most difficult developments each time. That should tell you you're backing a loser. Evidence? --

1. the initial G (this is bad),
2. the "s"-ual infix (this is worse), and
3. the -et ending which doesn't occur in the Aramaic forms, but only found in the christian literature -- not suspicious yet?

Just find a Semitic example...

Are you too advocating that the gentilic of Nazareth only occurred in Greek?

(Whatever the case, the Peshitta faithfully gives us NCRY for nazarhnos and nazwraios.)

What are you arguing? -- that Greek translators can get the Hebrew word wrong by leaving off the ending? Well, yeah, look at Mariam -> Maria. Does that mean that Mariam stops being Mariam in Hebrew? So, if it's NCRT in Hebrew we'd expect NCRTY, which would lead to nazarethnos or similar.


spin

Ben C Smith

Hi, spin.

I do not think I am going to have to find any pure Semitic examples. I think I am going to be basing my possible reconstruction on the Greek forms only. This is why I am looking for how Greek translators handle Semitic endings.

Also, I plan to argue in such a way that the difficulty of the transition from Nasareth to Nazarene and beyond becomes an asset rather than a liability.

Ben.

spin

I don't really care now what you plan to argue. You are merely signaling an a priori approach to the matter. Thanks for the discussion.


spin

Ben C Smith

Hi, spin.

First, I wanted to say that I think you have made some splendid arguments against Nasareth smoothly and naturally morphing into Nazara. I do hope you publish something along those lines sometime soon so that the scholarly community can interact with your arguments.

Second, I had intended to make this post more drawn out and official, but decided against it. I will instead summarize my way of thinking, and if there are any lurking problems they can be drawn out in more detail, if you wish.

Let us assume for the sake of argument that Nasareth was indeed NCRT in century I (since the direct evidence for this in the Peshitta and in the Caesarea inscription is rather late, I would like to see this area explored in more depth, but I am inclined to agree at this point that NCRT was probably the original form). Your argument, I think, strikes against a natural linguistic progression from NCRT to Nazara and beyond, but I do not think it has much to do with whether Jesus was from Nazareth (or whether the entire line of naz- speculation originated from the belief that he was from Nazareth).

Your argument is that Nazara was a back-formation from Nazarene, and that Nazara eventually became Nasareth (but always written Nazareth in the gospels). This process, far from a natural linguistic development, signals an intentional effort on the part of the tradents to explain or expand on the meanings of certain words. In this case, tradents explained Nazarene by back-forming Nazara, and then explained Nazara by equating it with an obscure village in Galilee called Nasareth.

But I do not think that this is the only option that avoids a natural progression from NCRT to Nazara and Nazarene. What if that was indeed the progression, but it was unnatural?

Step 1: It was known or believed that Jesus hailed from an obscure Galilean village named Nasareth.
Step 2: Speculation on the geographical origin of the messiah (refer to John 1.46; 7.41), combined with the fact that Jesus was not really from a more likely candidate such as Bethlehem, led tradents to speculate on possible connections between Nasareth and Hebrew prophecies. Someone settles on the nazir- connection as a possibility (compare Matthew 2.23).
Step 3: When it comes time to write something about Jesus down in Greek, the transliteration Nazareth is chosen, against the usual custom (but see Genesis 13.10), precisely in order to make these scriptural connections more feasible, or perhaps even to make a connection between Jesus and the sect of the Nazoraeans. (This is what I mean by an unnatural linguistic progression; the tradents chose an unlikely transliteration in order to make a point.) At the same time, some tradents prefer Nazara as a perfectly acceptable Graecized form of Nazareth (recall Chinnereth and Chenara, Gennesaret and Genesara).
Step 4: Mark knows both Nazara and Nazareth. He prefers the former when it comes to forming the gentilic (hence his use of Nazarene, much smoother in Greek than its alternative), but the latter when it comes to the place name itself. Mark does not confuse Nazarene with Nazoraean. I know you think that Mark places Jesus in Capernaum only, but I regard it as virtually untenable that Mark has Capernaum in mind as the location of 6.1-6a, and as quite probable that he intends his readers to link Nazareth with Nazarene.
Step 5: Matthew knows both Nazara and Nazareth. I do not know which he used in 2.23, but he certainly uses the former in 4.13 and would have read the latter in Mark 1.9. He also knows the term Nazoraean, which is certainly the name of a sect whose origins are unclear. Matthew (along with later authors) makes Jesus a Nazoraean. He eschews the term Nazarene (which he would certainly have known as a gentilic for Nazara, based on the analogy of Gadara and Gadarene) in favor of Nazoraean in order to openly enlist Jesus as the founder (?) of the (Jewish-Christian) Nazoraeans mentioned in Acts 24.5 and many of the later fathers. Matthew, not at all atypically, makes the scriptural connection (Judges 13.5) more explicit in 2.23 than Mark does (compare Matthew 8.17 and Mark 1.34, for example).
Step 6: Luke knows both Nazareth and Nazara. He conflates Nazarene and Nazoraean (almost as a byproduct of conflating Mark and Matthew).

I see this progression as avoiding the strange circumstance whereby a well-known connection with the sect of the Nazoraeans, who remained well-known for centuries thereafter, somehow gets suppressed in favor of a connection with a virtually unknown town in Galilee. We have lots of evidence in favor of the early tradents taking Nazareth and turning it into something Nazirite, or Nazoraean, or nazir- related. Your scenario of some wandering Greek looking up a source for the term Nazarene and lighting upon Nazareth is cute, but I think entirely unnecessary.

I think this progression also explains the oddity of Matthew 2.23. In most cases when OT scripture is invoked, the suspicion is that the event has been invented or severely strained to fit the prophecy. In this case, it appears that the prophecy itself has been severely strained to fit the event. This makes perfect sense if the event, in this case Jesus hailing from the otherwise nonmessianic town of Nasareth, was well-known and had to find justification somewhere. The prophecy, if that is even the right word for it, in Judges 13.5 (with possible influence from other quarters) had to be twisted quite a bit to fit this awkward circumstance.

Hack away, if you wish.

Ben.

spin

I'll wait for something that deals substantially with the problems.


spin

Ben C Smith

Are you saying that anything is okay just so long it is recognized that Nazareth is probably not a clean transliteration of a Semitic NCRT? If so, then point recognized, of course, and good job.

Ben.

spin

I'm saying you are starting with an ideological commitment. I started with wondering how does one reconcile all the data. If you started with the data rather than your conclusion it would be better.

What makes you able to generalize as to what the natural linguistic development would be? Where did you suddenly get the linguistic expertise to make such a pronouncement?

I would have thought that each step I outlined was either a natural linguistic step or a simple redactional act. If you really disagreed I would have thought you'd have shown your disagreement, rather than making such a sweeping generalization with nothing apparently behind it to give it any credence.

(And Nazara did not become Nasareth.)



spin

Ben C Smith

I beg to differ. I have no special commitment to Nazareth as hometown; Capernaum would suit me fine. If I have a weakness in that area it is my reluctance to rule against our sources in a way that requires unattested layers of text and what appear to me to be unlikely sets of circumstances.

I resist your division of Matthew into M1 and M2, and your insistence that Nazareth was not an original element of the synoptic core (whatever that is), because those are simply the kinds of arguments that I tend to resist. It is of a piece with my skepticism about Q, for example.

From you.

I think you are reading too much into my term unnatural. I merely meant what I think you meant, that Nasareth is not related to Nazara in a natural, linguistic sort of way, that it took some finagling to equate them.

I am arguing that for an early tradent to go looking for the obscure Nasareth as a source for the term Nazarene is unlikely.

I really thought I was disagreeing with you when I wrote that the early tradents probably did not go looking for Galilean villages to explain the term Nazarene.

I misworded that. I meant that, on your view, Nazara came about as a back-formation from an originally nongentilic Nazarene, and then Nazara became associated or equated with the actual village of Nasareth.

If I have misrepresented you on that, I apologize.

Ben.

spin

So you think it was the same person in Matthew who removed nazarhnos from his Marcan source and inserted nazwraios in different parts of the text at the same time? who removed Nazareth and then inserted Nazara twice and Nareth once??

Do you think it was the same person who redacted Luke so that he moved the Marcan hometown before the reference to Capernaum yet included a second reference to Capernaum before the first??

All one needs is a philological reason for doing so.

But it is natural. How did we get the word "edit" in English if not from a back-formation? How did they get Ebion if not from a back-formation? There are lots of examples, if you need them. Even "bots". For me they are natural. It's what we do. Just as having forms like Ceylon or Peking, one prefers to get them right and Sri Lanka and Beijing enter the parlance. What it is no is that it is not straightforward to you.

Wrong idea. The toponym Nazara is what I hypothesized as what our tradent went looking for and failed to find until he came up with NCRT. I give this hypothesis as an explanation for a step in the data that has no explanation: we have Nazara in the text, which is a lectio difficilor and should have precedence over Nazareth... how does one explain it?

And what's with this gooey "obscure" stuff? Why do you keep using it? A pair of legs on the ground wouldn't have found it obscure. "The foreigner's confused. He must have meant NCRT."

Disagreement is usually based on some evidence, something to make you think to the contrary. Given -- for the sake of discussion -- the evidence as I presented it, ie that Nazara came before Nazareth in the tradition, what hypothesis might you propose to explain the move from Nazara to Nazareth? I am open to suggestions.


spin

ynquirer

The Septuagint in Ge 10:14 yields Kafqoriim (f=phi, q=theta) for KPTRYM, the gentilic from KPTR, the latter being the Hebraic name for Cappadocia, as one learns from De 2:23.

Also Chinnereth/Chinneroth, in Hebrew KNRT, is once transliterated into Xanareq (De 3:17), twice into Xenereq (Jo 12:3, 13:17) and twice into Kenereq/Keneroq (Jo 11:3, 19:35).

These instances show that, more frequent though chi is as a transliteration for KAF, kappa is far from being an oddity.

Will RMT, turned into LXX Rama in 1 Sa 30:27, do?

I must agree with Ben. Not always are morphologic transitions dependent on etymology, but sometimes they so do on a mix of semantics plus phonetics. This seems to be the case.

Chinnereth/Chinneroth is KJV name for MT KNRT. It in the Tanakh frequently appears together with MYM (=“waters”) to make up the compound word MY-KNRT, as meaning “the sea of Chinnereth/Chinneroth.” That the waters so-named “the sea of Chinnereth/Chinneroth” are the same as the lake of Gennesar(eth) - which never occurs in the Tanakh/Septuagint - is well attested by Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 5.1.22, by calling Genhsaridos a landmark in the division of Canaan among the tribes of Israel as drawn by Joshua and Eleazar.

The meaning of KNR - singular for KNRT - is quite a mysterious one: “harp.” With such a meaning the word appears no fewer than forty-two times in Genesis, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Job, Nehemiah, Psalms, Isaiah, and Ezekiel. Most of the times, the LXX yields kitara for the Hebrew. It, however, disappears in Daniel, which mentions a number of musical instruments, yet never KNR/KNRT. The Septuagint uses kitara also for what seems to be an old Aramaic word, QYTRS (Da 3:5-15).

In any event, the Hebraic word KNR disappeared from everyday life. As Aramaic ranked first language of the Jews, the name MY-KNRT became meaningless. It was still clear that it meant a “sea,” or a “lake,” and that KNRT was feminine plural; but the thing itself was in the darkest obscurity. Fantasy of common people always strives to explain the unknown by means of the known. Phonetic associations was the main tool of such an endeavor.

The word GN (=“a garden”) displays in the MT of the Tanakh different pronunciations. Most of the times, the vowel is a short /a/, yet a few times - notably, in So 6:11 and Es 1:5, 7:7-8 - the spelling is GNT and the MT pronunciation is something like /ginnath/. The Septuagint (and KJV and other Christian bibles after the LXX) always translates GNT exactly the same as GN, that is, as singular, though I think the former is plural. (The Hebraic word for garden sometimes is masculine, sometimes is feminine - like, for instance, in Nu 24:6.)

Perhaps the landscape of the zone inspired a further step, that the gardens were narrow - Hebrew CRT (C=TSADE). In a compound word the ending TAF of GNT would be dropped, likewise the final MEM is dropped from MY-KNRT. Thus, MY-GNCRT would mean “the sea (or lake) of the narrow gardens” in a language accessible to ordinary Jews of the Second Temple. GNCRT would transliterate into Greek Gennhsareq.

As regard the -eth ending, which spin says is “Christian.” I can’t agree to such a suggestion. Actually, the -eth ending is not so infrequent in the Septuagint. As I said above, KNRT is only once transliterated into Kenerwq against once into Xanareq, once into Kenereq, and twice into Xenereq. Therefore, the -eth ending wins by an ample majority.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t say it happened this way. I say that the transition from KNRT to Gennhsareq did happen, one way or another. I just offer an explanation of how it could possibly happen. I am open to better explanations.

The point, nevertheless, is that a TSADE appeared where it was not before. By the same token, a TSADE could possibly disappear from where it was before, or a ZAYIN substitute for a TSADE, like in NCRT to produce Nazareth a new word. Semantic reasons plus phonetic similitude, like in Genesaret, might induce the transition.