tanya

Not quite right.

The idea that started the thread := was the notion expressed by the followers of Arius of Alexandria that there must been a distinct point in time when the Son, Jesus, did not exist, for he had not yet been created by the Father, having been of different substance from YHWH.

No, it is an interesting thread, but, it is disjointed, and would profit from your stepping back after a good rest, to provide a succinct summary, and clarification of the relationship between "mysticism at the heart of Nicea", and the mythical nature of Jesus.

One problem, small one, big for me, for I understand nothing of Hebrew, is how to explain the idea that this Yesh business is related to a convocation of Greeks at Nicea. Do you imagine that they were all fluent in Hebrew?

I doubt, very much, that the participants at Nicea in 325CE, had the slightest interest, in assessing Yesh, its origin, its application, or its hidden meaning, if any.

Jesus' name: relationship to Egyptian Isis, relationship to nomina sacra, relationship to Aramaic abbreviations: it is all good stuff, but, how does it relate to Nicea, i.e. Arius' insistence that YHWH preceded Jesus, as creator of the universe, hence, the two could not have been of the same substance?

At least in my view, Arius' argument does not depend on the name one assigns to Jesus. The scholars meeting in Nicea could have called him Yesh, or Yeti, for that matter. What they called him, was more or less irrelevant. The issue, which they sought to resolve, for all time, was the relationship between father and son, specifically, how to ensure that Arius' claim did not lead to belief in polytheism, the logical consequence of Arius' position. There was nothing mystical, or hidden, or opaque about this idea. It was concrete, logical, and believable. It was much easier to comprehend, than the trinitarian dogma, concocted in opposition to Arius.

So, what is needed is not 95 more emails from Hebrew scholars, explaining grammatical details of yesh, but a single email from one of the Greek scholars who had attended the gathering at Nicea, summarizing what had been discussed in 325 CE, and why. Does not Athanasius provide such a message? Did he not write in Greek? Was Greek not his native language? Does he comment on "yesh", or "Isis", or the original designation of Jesus, IC?

stephan huller

An email from one of the most respected Semitic linguists alive today:

And then I respond by asking him "is there any surviving evidence for the form yesho?'

stephan huller

tanya (vid)

Truth can be approached from many different angles. I really try to approach the same problem from as many different ways as possible. That way I get a sense of its being or substance (= that the concept actually has reality).

In this case, I started out by wondering what Arius was really saying about the Son not being of the same nature as the Father. I came to the conclusion that rather than merely stressing that the Son and Father were 'different' the Arians likely held the view that the 'substance of the Father' was a separate hypostasis from the Son. Jesus was likely argued to embody the divine substance (= ousia, yesh) that was used in some form to created the world by the Creator.

I am really tired but the various investigations which followed this were seeking to clear out a path to see what this other being who was not the Father, not the Son who Jesus might have been identified with would look like. The obvious answer was the Hellenistic Jewish figure of Wisdom (which in turn was identified with Isis by at least one scholar) .

The current research I am involved with is to see whether yesh might be directly responsible for the name yeshu. I wonder whether the Dositheans (who maintained the original beliefs of Israel including the original calendar of months = 30 days) were responsible for preserving the original form of yeshnu (= yeshu)

Where this would all lead is the idea that is expressed in Colossians:

This is not the Son because Wisdom was created first. I would suppose that before the Valentinian innovation, yeshu was the first created thing and all things came from him but he was still not the Creator. There was the Father way off in the dimension of non-being. Substance is created to initiate Creation. This is described in Jewish literature as (if we accept the expected form of yeshno):

Do you get where I am going with this? When the gnostics have the Creator arrogantly thinking he is the only God, he is not disproved by the Father but by Jesus, who is the 'being' (= yeshu) or substance which formed the very building blocks of this world.

Notice Heracleon's version of the opening lines of John:

The underlying idea here is that the Logos shaped creation (the exact meaning of bara in Genesis) but the 'substance' of the world was pre-existent. This is not to diminish the significance of Jesus (= the yesh) but the Creator (= the Logos) who I suspect was originally conceived as a separate figure from him.

The concept then I am proposing:

The Father (= ayin, nothingness)
Jesus, ישו (= Wisdom)
the Son (= the Logos).

For those interested here is Peter Head's attempt to reconstruct the Marcionite version of this passage:

Chili

So it is a man's world after all maybe? and was 'he' not the illusion they crucifed to annihilate the dreamer in us because he 'thinks he knows better" and calls himself God? and so now you are telling us how wrong the Jews were to even convict him to die?).

stephan huller

Anyway, ignoring the using nonsensical posting of a certain member, we have to remember to separate any cynicism we might have about the existing gospel and the certainty of what must have existed at the beginning of Christianity. The gospel HAD TO HAVE BEEN written in Hebrew originally. It would have had no authority in profane languages (= Aramaic, Greek). The fact that most NT scholars don't know their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to Hebrew (save for Craig Evans and a handful of others) leads the battle over the authenticity of the gospel to take place with respect to the existing Greek text.

Now, how do we explain why the Church Fathers all posit the existence of a 'Hebrew' original? We are told that they mean 'Aramaic' but say 'Hebrew' for various reasons. Yet if the same Patristic witnesses adulterated 'the gospel' and somehow imposed the sanctity of their corrupt text on the world, why leave the door open that a now lost or ignored source text was written in 'Hebrew'?

To argue against the existence of the 'Hebrew' gospel is to engage in a watered down variant of mountainman's arguments. With that said then, the question isn't whether Jesus was originally named yeshu but whether yeshu (or yesh in the actually manuscripts) originally meant 'Ἰησοῦς,' some otherwise unattested shortening of יְהוֹשֻׁעַ or exactly what appears natural in 'Hebrew' (i.e. what I am suggesting here in this thread).

Iskander

This is a very interesting finding which should be made widely known. Good luck

tanya

I do not dispute the interest in this question, and I certainly do not challenge the idea that the original text was written in Hebrew, not Greek. My point about the central need for someone to send you an email in Greek, was related to my opinion, not fact, opinion, that the participants at Nicea had, among them, almost zero knowledge of Hebrew. Maybe they were all trilingual, and I am completely wrong, here, but, I am only expressing a prejudice.

I do dispute the idea that the NAME of Jesus, whether Iesous, or yesh, or Isis, or IC, or whatever, represented the CENTRAL theme of Nicea. I don't think even two bishops at Nicea devoted fifteen milliseconds arguing about his name. What they DID argue about, in my opinion, was Arius' contention, in dispute with orthodoxy, that Jesus and God the father were not of the same substance. That argument could be held, without reference to the person's name, at all. Some could have called him yesh, others IC, others Iesous, : it was irrelevant. The life threatening issue was not his name, but rather his origin. Was Jesus described ("yesh", for example) in the old testament (i.e. the original, Hebrew text, not LXX)? You have cited Genesis "yesh yahweh", as evidence in support of this idea.

I am not buying it. I deny that the Jews or Samaritans were so stupid and backward as to require their omnipotent deity to create offspring....Such silliness harkens back to Greek mythology, not Judaism, in my opinion.

Further, I am unconvinced that "yesh" corresponds to anything other than "there is", or "Surely", or some such ordinary filler, not a secret way of writing Jesus' name. In many languages, (Korean comes to mind), there are only a few sounds, consequently there exist many homophones. I suppose "yesh" could have many meanings, including some meanings that have changed in the past two millenia, however, the concept of "son of god", strikes me, at least, as something quite distinct from Judaism....maybe only because I am so ignorant of the religion. My prejudice is to regard Judaism as the most pure of the Semitic group, with insistence on monotheism, while the Christians, and to a lesser extent, the Muslims, openly espouse polytheistic traits (which they deny, of course). I can imagine that some third or fourth century scholar could have claimed that Jesus is described in some particular old testament verse, but there would have been, in that circumstance, no need to conceal this apparent fact....In short, I remain unconvinced that there was a mystical controversy at Nicea.

stephan huller

Yesh is a fascinating word. It is both verb and noun. It has no known linguistic origin. It spread from Hebrew to Syriac and is connected with a hidden power (partly because of Hab 3:4). This is not up for debate. The argument that the evidence is only from the Medieval period doesn't stand up either as it isn't a single author. The sources which take an interest in yesh as a hidden power aren't limited to twelfth century mystics (Gikatillah). Ibn Ezra cites from the Sepher Yetzirah which references yesh as firstborn of the highest God (= substance). Gikatillah's ideas comes from the Sepher Bahir.

Let's start with the Sepher Bahir. Scholem was the first to bring forward the tradition that the text "came from Palestine to the old sages and hasidim, the kabbalists in Germany, and from there it reached Provence." Scholem believes that one Aaron of Baghdad was responsible for bringing a number of Gnostic and Merkabah texts, perhaps including elements of the Bahir, from the East to Italy during the Gaonic period whence the Kalonymide family took them to Germany in the ninth century. He discovered the missing link to support this theory in a thirteenth-century German commentary on the Shiur Komah which quoted a work named Sod ha-Gadol (Great Mystery), passages of which correspond to the Bahir. Scholem identified this unknown work with a mystery-magical text named Raza Rabba (Aramaic for "great mystery") mentioned by the ninth-century Karaite Al Kunisi." The Raza Rabba must accordingly have been the source for the Bahir, and its ninth-century terminus proves the antiquity of the Bahir's traditions

With respect to the Sepher Yetzirah - "according to modern historians, the origin of the text is unknown, and hotly debated. Some scholars believe it might have an early Medieval origin, while others emphasize earlier traditions appearing in the book.[4] The division of the letters into the three classes of vowels, mutes, and sonants also appears in Hellenic texts[citation needed].
The historical origin of the Sefer Yetzirah was placed by Reitzenstein in the 2nd century BCE. According to Christopher P. Benton, the Hebrew grammatical form places its origin closer to the period of the Mishna around the 2nd century CE.[3] Jewish Lore attributes it to Adam,[5] and that "[f]rom Adam it passed over to Noah, and then to Abraham, the friend of God.""http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sefer_Yetzirah

The point then is that we are not looking at traditions which were just 'invented' in the Medieval period. These ideas and these manuscripts are as old as any which perpetuate texts and traditions from earlier periods. The parallels with Philo and early Christianity clearly - in many people's minds - make the case that at least some of the ideas are as old as the Second Commonwealth period.

mountainman

What type of certainty are you talking about Stephan Heisenberg?




Do you happen to have any EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT this "conjecture"?

stephan huller

Origen and other contemporaries accept the holiness of the Hebrew language (cf. Contra Celsum). This is the starting point of Jewish veneration of the Pentateuch (and is copied essentially by Islamic identification of Arabic as a holy language). Hebrew isn't just another language. It's not the Jewish people's language. It is understood to be the heavenly language of God and the angels. How could God have spoken through the evangelists in Greek? Impossible and I doubt that all or any of the early Fathers believed this either. That's why they accept in some form or other the existence of a 'Hebrew gospel.'