Ben C Smith

Good spot. Does your version (and which is it?) have the omicron? I think Perseus has a double omega.

Also, there was a typo in my last post. It is Judges 8.5, not Genesis 8.5.

And the name of the Midianite king should have a nun, not a tet (but this was not a typo on my part; it is a quirk of this forum that it turns the Unicode nun into a Unicode tet).

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Okay, but was a mention of Nazara one of the things in Q, in your humble opinion? I do not think your post addressed my question.

Ben.

JoeWallack

JW:
I do have Faith that Q is X-tian-entially a better source for the Historical Jesus than "Mark". Sounds like Q is starting to have some appeal to you. Would you be so kind as to summarize the reasons why "Nazara" might be in Q and what that means? Thanks.



Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

Ben C Smith

No. In fact, I am further away from Q or anything like Q right now than I have ever been.

Keeping in mind that these reasons presuppose the existence of Q as an explanation of what Matthew and Luke share against Mark, and that therefore these reasons are not my own (since I think that Luke knew Matthew), here they are.

The ministry of Jesus starts as follows in the synoptics:

Baptism: Matthew 3.1-17 = Mark 1.2-11 = Luke 3.1-22.
[Genealogy: Luke 3.23-38.]
Temptation: Matthew 4.1-11 = Mark 1.12-13 = Luke 4.1-13.
Galilee: Matthew 4.12 = Mark 1.14 = Luke 4.14-15.
Nazara: Matthew 4.13a = Luke 4.16-30.
Capernaum: Matthew 4.13b-16.
Preaching: Matthew 4.17 = Mark 1.15.
Call of 4: Matthew 4.18-22 = Mark 1.16-20.
Capernaum: Mark 1.21-28 = Luke 4.31-37.

All three synoptics show Jesus going to Galilee after the temptation. So far so good. But now Matthew has Jesus leaving Nazara (implying that when he went to Galilee he went to Nazara) to go to Capernaum. And Luke has Jesus going to Nazara before going to his next stop, again Capernaum.

So, how did Matthew and Luke both know that after the temptation Jesus went to Nazara before going into Capernaum? Mark has nothing about Nazareth at this point in the narrative, and nothing about Nazara (by that spelling) at all.

Q theorists now tend to think, for this reason (namely that Matthew and Luke did not get Nazara at this point from Mark), that Q had something about Nazara after the temptation narrative (or after the baptism stuff, if the temptation was a late intruder into Q).

Those of us who think Luke knew Matthew are more inclined to think that Luke got Nazara from Matthew.

Ben.

spin

Ben C.,

I had a current drop while I was replying to your long post, so I lost the lot.

Your analysis of Matt's rewriting of Peter's denial does not deal with the fact that Galilee was dealt with in the third denial. Matt has rationalised the Galilee bit to be accent. But you for some reason want to have both Galilee and the accent comment. Matt's tendency with the Marcan material is to simplify it, but here all you have him do is rearrange it, which does not reflect the m.o.

Your approach to nazwraios being deliberately used by Matt instead of the -- for you -- more obvious nazarhnos, which your Matt recognizes as a gentilic is a claim that your writer is deliberately falsifying information.

You continually fail to deal with the vast problem with the tsade universally becoming zeta in all the Naz- manifestations in Greek. The pissy few examples of tsade to zeta should convince you that you are simply wrong.

Further with your out on a limb approach, you need the Greek gentilic to be abnormal, though you have no examples of any other such abnormal gentilics. If the gentilic only represents a Greek aberation, are you claiming that the gospel has no underlying Hebrew or Aramaic? If not, why isn't the reference from the Semitic transliterated as one would expect?

Your easy acceptance for two separate forms of Nazara/Nazareth based on ierousalhm/ierosolyma doesn't take into account the mystification of naming of the city. While ierousalhm represents a faithful transliteration, the removal of the upsilon insinuates the Greek notion of ieros (aspirated hieros as found in Latin), ie "sacred", into the name of the city.

Now, toponyms are usually very stable and often survive for thousands of years. Why would you ever contemplate locals using two different forms of the name. It's fine to show slips in transliterations, but that is certainly not reflective of usage.

Your shying away from evolving tradition is unaccountable, when you have enough evidence that there is such an evolving tradition evident with the starting point of Mark and two blatant examples of Matt and Luke, accompanied by the various endings to Mark.

You still don't account for your conjectured change from Nazareth to Capernaum in the narrative offered by the Marcan writer. Fudging about Peter's house is inconsequential. If you think Mark places Jesus original home at Nazareth, why doesn't he explain the move in the narrative? My answer is that Nazareth was unknown to the writer, so there is no narrative problem. Yours, simply, is "narrative problem, what narrative problem?"

The sum total of your argumentation seems to be:

1) Mark doesn't explain the home at Capernaum, though you think he knew that Nazareth was his original home for some reason and that he used an irregular gentilic based on Nazareth, yet other gospels have no problem with Nazara, which would be transparent with nazarhnos though Mark doesn't acknowledge the form at all, despite your claim that nazarhnos must have been a gentilic and based on Nazara.

2) While Matt accepts both Nazareth and Nazara, he rejects nazarhnos while recognizing that it was a gentilic, for the non-gentilic nazwraios which he masquerades as a gentilic to trick his readership.

Your response is to turn your back on the simple notion of an evolving tradition in order to supply stupidity and deception (oh and bumbling in the case of Lucan editing) as means for trying to explain the irregularities in the naming conventions regarding Nazara/Nazareth/Nazarene/Nazorean. You have such a high disregard for the gospel writers. It makes me wonder why you would posit this web of conjecture you propose and think that it is more economical than the simple notion of an evolving tradition.


spin

spin

This stuff about Nazara in Q falls apart with the obvious notion that the passage has been moved from its original position in Luke. The logic of this stuff seems to be that Nazara must be an aberration on the name Nazareth in order to postulate that it is a strange form only shared by the two gospel writers against Mark, but you, Ben C, accept that this is not the case when you accept that nazarhnos is a gentilic formed from Nazara, which is used in Mark. If Nazara is part of the tradition, and it is used by later writers, then this lame notion of aberration is no help. Nazara is simply a part of the tradition and the Lucan move can be put down to the question of where else could the redactor have placed it, given the desire to totally quash the notion that Jesus had a home in Capernaum??


spin

S.C.Carlson

Ur-Lukas, too?

Stephen

ynquirer

This is easy to explain. Mark speaks of Nazaret and Nazarene. Matthew believes that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. “Nazarene” being as it is an inaccurate gentilic for Jesus, Matthew gets rid of it.

spin

I guess you'd prefer to think of the redactor as incompetent as Ben C does. No, wait, it was quite a reasonable error, I mean. He just cut the stuff about the hometown which he wrote up as Nazara including a secondary comment on Capernaum and decided to paste it specifically before the primary comment on Capernaum. Ben C tacitly allows double redaction when he says that Luke must have revised it. Yeah sure. However you look at it, you've got a klutz at work in Luke, haven't you?



spin

spin

So your Matt knows that Jesus "of Nazareth" isn't appropriate at all, yet gives Nazorean as a gentilic. Sorry, you're not dealing with the text. Matt is aware of Nazara as important to the Jesus tradition, specifically moving Jesus to Nazara to preserve the tradition in 2:23.


spin